Siegmeister, Elie

SIEGMEISTER, ELIE (1909–1991). Called a “composer with a conscience,” Elie Siegmeister labored throughout his career to synthesize a modernist compositional bent with a strong desire to compose American music for the American people. As a student at Columbia College, where he earned a BA in 1927, Siegmeister studied composition with Seth Bingham and counterpoint with Wallingford Riegger. Between 1927 and 1931, he studied in France with Nadia Boulanger, absorbing valuable lessons from her on compositional technique while feeling ever more dissatisfied with her abstract approach to music’s relationship to its audience.

On his return to New York, Siegmeister was a member of the Young Composers Group, which featured meetings and mutual criticism and one performance at the New School for Social Research on 15 January 1933. From 1933 to 1936, Siegmeister was active in the Composers Collective, to which he contributed ideas on the relationship between music and its political and social context as well as several compositions. “Strange Funeral in Braddock” (1933), with a text by Mike Gold, tells the story of Jan Clepak, a Bohemian steelworker who is buried in a vat of liquid metal because of unsafe working conditions. The modernist style of this song conveys the pain and anger of Clepak’s family and co-workers, but it was composed for listening rather than audience participation. In contrast, “The Scottsboro Boys Shall Not Die,” published by the collective in its first Workers Song Book, is easy to sing while also conveying a sharp political message about racial justice and the evils of lynching. Siegmeister also composed workers’ rounds intended for inexperienced performers of the collective’s songbooks.

In 1939 Siegmeister founded the American Ballad Singers, a group that performed folk music at a time when the complex American musical heritage was being discovered in the music of immigrants, African Americans, cowboys, and band workers. He conducted this group until 1946. Many of Siegmeister’s orchestral compositions from the early 1930s until the late 1940s, including “American Holiday” (1933), “Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight” (1937), “Ozark Set” (1943), “Prairie Legend” (1944), and “Sunday in Brooklyn” (1946), reveal an interest in American settings and folk and popular music. In an effort to make folk music more accessible, Siegmeister published A Treasury of American Folk Song in 1940. His Music Lover’s Handbook, first published in 1943, offers many expressions of his philosophy that music and the life of ordinary people must be naturally integrated in order to express an American identity and also be good music. He noted that “Art with a capital A is a menace: music must relate to life.”

Siegmeister continued to write music with politically conscious themes and texts long after other composers who participated in the activities of various groups on the Left and who used folk and popular music in their compositions for the concert hall shifted to other styles and aesthetic principles. His later works that demonstrate this commitment include the cantata “I Have a Dream” (1967) and “Cantata for FDR” (1981). Siegmeister helped to organize the 24 May 1968 concert presented by “Composers and Musicians for Peace.” He taught at Hofstra University from 1949 to 1976, serving as the school’s composer-in-residence during the last ten years of that period.

Cassaro, James P. “Elie Siegmeister.” In The New Grove Dictionary of American Music, edited by Deane Root. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Oja, Carol J. “Composer with a Conscience: Elie Siegmeister in Profile.” American Music 6, no. 2 (summer 1988).

Siegmeister, Elie, ed. The New Music Lover’s Handbook. Irvington-on-Hudson, N.Y.: Harvey House, 1973.