A question of balance

Taylor Aitken Greer

For more than half a century Charles Louis Seeger (1886-1979) led a distinguished career in American music as composer, teacher, author, administrator, and humanist. Seeger's musical life was as eclectic as it was abundant: he not only championed traditions outside the mainstream, including folk and popular music, but also drew on fields outside of music, such as anthropology, linguistics, philosophy, and folklore. In A Question of Balance, Taylor Greer argues that Seeger's central contribution to the field of music was his aesthetic philosophy, which can be described as a marriage of conflicting temperaments: an artistic instinct mediated by a rational intellect. A Question of Balance is the first attempt to explain Seeger's philosophical theory and to trace its influence on his criticism, compositional theory, and musicology. Greer takes an interdisciplinary approach to fill a gap not only of our understanding of Seeger's wide-ranging thought but also of an entire chapter of twentieth-century American intellectual history.