Quatuor Bozzini: Crawford Seeger & Abrams

Canadian string quartet Quatuor Bozzini, known for embracing new and experimental music, bring works by their fellow North Americans to London to fill the Purcell Room with innovative music.

While America adored Crawford Seeger for her folk-leaning songbooks, she was also ‘a pioneer of hard-hitting, distinctly un-sweet American modernism’, writes Kate Molleson. Her ultramodern String Quartet 1931 shows a young composer ahead of her time.

Largely overlooked in contemporary classical and jazz music history, Abrams and the AACM (Association for the Advancement of Creative Musicians), which he formed in the 1960s in Chicago, were at the forefront of avant-garde music.

One of the most striking works to come out of the meshed field that Abrams occupied between these two genres is his only string quartet work. Starting with a simple ‘humming’ to set the scene, the quartet steadily develops into a rhythmically driven cacophony of string sounds.

Complementing these two quartets is a string trio by Beyer, another nearly forgotten composer from the time of Abrams and Crawford. Immigrating to the US from Germany in her early 20s, Beyer studied with Ruth Crawford and Charles Seeger in New York.

Her trio Music of the Spheres was the first known work scored for electronic instruments by a female composer.