Rissolty Rossolty

Program notes

About the Work

By the late 1930s Ruth Crawford Seeger had all but stopped composing. A decade earlier she had been one of the most original of the American ‘ultramodern’ composers, and her String Quartet of 1931 is still counted among the finest American works of its kind. Then came marriage to the musicologist Charles Seeger, children, the Depression and a move to Washington, where the couple threw themselves into collecting and transcribing American folk song. After a concert of her earlier music in New York in 1938, a member of the audience asked her to write something that more people could listen to. She replied that she would.

Rissolty Rossolty was the result, and it is the only piece she wrote in this manner. CBS commissioned it for a radio series on American folk music presented by Alan Lomax, which introduced short orchestral pieces on folk tunes by composers including Copland and Roy Harris. At the first broadcast the Kentucky singer Aunt Molly Jackson sang the title song before the orchestra played. The piece then lay almost unperformed: there were only a couple of concert performances in the composer’s lifetime.

What to Listen For

Three tunes are packed into a few minutes. The chattering repeated-note figure at the start comes from ‘Rissolty, Rossolty’, a comic song about a newly married man and his wife’s housekeeping. A second song, ‘Phoebe’, appears in a flute solo and in plucked strings. The last section is driven by a fiddle tune, ‘The Death of Callahan’, which Crawford Seeger had transcribed from a field recording. She does not present the tunes one after another in neat arrangements. She weaves fragments of them together, and at the climax all three are going at once in different parts of the orchestra, a moment that owes something to Ives.

The ending is the best joke. The music simply stops, and then a scrap of the opening starts up again and breaks off. Folk musicians, she observed, do not round off a tune with a formal close; they pause, ready to begin again.