Charles Seeger

Charles Seeger

** Charles and Ruth Seeger were both established members of the Clarkstown Country Club.

“One day Dr. Bernard and I were talking out on the lawn. There was nobody behind him, but as he was talking he looked carefully and suddenly did a back flip, threw himself right over, a head somersault in the air and landed on his feet, [while he] kept on talking as if nothing had happened. Ihad seen Mei Lan-fang by that time, and remembered a famous duel in one of the operas in which, when the sword was (supposedly) rammed through the villain, the villain did that same thing. He did a complete back flip, landed on his teet, and walked off.”

From…Reminiscences of an American musicologist oral history transcript : Charles Seeger (UCLA Special Collections and the Internet Archive)

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Charles (Louis) Seeger, Jr. (1886 – 1979) was a musicologist, composer, and teacher.

He graduated from Harvard University in 1908, then studied and conducted in Cologne before taking a position as Professor of Music at the University of California at Berkeley, where he taught from 1912 to 1916 before being dismissed for his public opposition to the US entry into World War I. His brother, Alan Seeger was killed in action on July 4, 1916 while serving as a member of the French Foreign Legion . He then took a position at Juilliard before teaching at the Institute of Musical Art in New York from 1921 to 1933 and the New School for Social Research from 1931 to 1935. In 1936, he was in Washington, DC, working as a technical advisor to the Music Unit of the Special Skills Division of the Resettlement Administration (later renamed the Farm Security Administration).[1] From 1957 to 1961, he taught at the University of California Los Angeles. From 1961 to 1971 he was a research professor at the Institute of Ethnomusicology at UCLA. In 1949-50 he was Visiting Professor of the Theory of Music in the School of Music at Yale University. From 1935 to 1953 he held positions in the federal government’s Resettlement Administration, Works Projects Administration (WPA), and Pan American Union, including serving as an administrator for the Works Projects Administration Federal Music Project, for which his wife also worked, from 1938 to 1940.

His first wife was Constance de Clyver Edson a classical violinist and teacher; they divorced in 1927.  His parents divorced when Pete Seeger was seven. They had two other sons, Charles III (1912-2002), who was an astronomer,and John (1914-2010), an educator. His second wife was the composer and musician Ruth Seeger (née Ruth Porter Crawford); by her, he had two children who also achieved musical renown, Peggy Seeger (b. 1935) and Mike Seeger (b. 1933), and another two daughters, Barbara and Penny Seeger.

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