Over the past quarter century a cadre of scholars, critics, performers, and arts programmers have worked to stretch the contours of America's cultural canon to include the musical activities of women. Thanks to their focus on an array of practices ranging from the compositions of Amy Beach and Margaret Bonds to the revolutionary vocalizations of Billie Holiday, Mahalia Jackson, and Bessie Smith, to the postmodern performance of Laurie Anderson and Pauline Oliveros, our understanding and appreciation of women's musical creativity has vastly expanded. Ruth Crawford Seeger (1901–1953) occupies a unique position in the pantheon of twentieth-century musical women, for her work as an ultramodernist composer and a folk music transcriber/arranger presents a provocative challenge to conventional notions of “the cultivated” and “the vernacular” that have historically served to divide, rather than connect, America's rich musical heritage. Indeed, her efforts to traverse the male-dominated domain of modern composition and the female-centered worlds of children's folk music and teaching have inspired a new generation of scholars and critics to reexamine the complex dimensions of gender and cultural hierarchy in her work and in our larger society.

Ruth Crawford Seeger's Worlds: Innovation and Tradition in Twentieth-Century American Music presents new perspectives on the life, music, and legacy of Ruth Crawford Seeger by scholars from a range of disciplines including musicology, music theory, music education, folklore, history, American studies, and women's studies. The following explorations of Ruth Crawford Seeger's prescient contributions to American modernism and of her advocacy of traditional music contest the assumption that high modernism and traditional music are diametrically opposed.