Dr. Charles Louis Seeger, Jr.

Charles Louis Seeger, Jr. (December 14, 1886 – February 7, 1979) was a musicologist, composer, and teacher.

From Charles Seeger by Jim Capaldi. "Folk Scene," April 1979

Charles Louis Seeger was born in Mexico City on December 14, 1886. His ancestors sailed to the shores of America on the Mayflower. Seegers fought in the Revolutionary War and in the Civil War. They have been doctors, lawyers, and school teachers; they have also been abolitionists and radicals. And Charles Seeger reflected this background and passed it on to his descendents.

From Pete Seeger in 2006

As a teen-ager, Charles became an accomplished pianist. He liked to go to symphony concerts, and he could look at complicated scores and know what the music should sound like. "He thought the great symphonies would save the human race," Seeger said. "He thought they had something to teach us that couldn't be expressed in words." He went to Harvard, then he spent a year in Germany, and for a while he was a conductor in Cologne. While he was there, he realized that he could no longer hear the flutes and the piccolos, and that he was going deaf. He decided that he would become a composer instead. He returned to New York, where he met Seeger s mother, Constance de Clyver Edson, a violinist. Her grandfather was the headmaster of a fancy school in New York, and she had been brought up partly in Paris and Tunisia. The two of them performed together at society parties, "a soiree here, a soiree there," Seeger said.

They were married in 1911. Charles was hired to establish the music department at the University of California at Berkeley. A friend took him to the lettuce fields east of San Francisco where, Seeger said, "he saw children the same age as his own being worked to the bone," and he was never the same. When the First World War broke out, he made speeches denouncing it as an imperialist war. His wife asked him not to, but he persisted. Eventually, the university gave him an extended sabbatical, with the understanding that he wouldn't return. ....

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• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Louis_Seeger