Charles Seeger and Ruth Crawford Seeger formed one of the most unusual artistic partnerships in twentieth-century American musical life. In a recent essay Judith Tick portrays the collaboration between them in musical terms:

This chapter will explore two of the fruits born from this partnership: Tradition and Experiment in the New Music, a compendium of criticism, philosophy, and music composition, which Seeger and Crawford Seeger began in 1929 but which was published posthumously in 1994; and The Music of American Folk Song, Crawford Seeger's lengthy appendix originally intended for the second Lomax anthology of folk songs, Our Singing Country (1941), but which was ultimately rejected and published only recently as a freestanding monograph. Tick's metaphor of “counterpoint” serves as a useful starting point for such a comparison since, in all, we can identify three different species: first, “personal” counterpoint, that is, the artistic and intellectual collaboration between two distinct but complementary temperaments that led to the creation of the two treatises; second, “philosophical” counterpoint, which encompasses their similarities as well as their differences; that is, although both works rely on a single philosophical principle, each adopts different assumptions and addresses a unique audience; and finally, “historical” counterpoint, or the relationship between the broader cultural and historical forces that characterized the period during which both documents were written. This chapter, though considering each level of this contrapuntal hierarchy, will focus more on the second species.

There has been some debate in recent years regarding the authorship of works traditionally attributed to Seeger and Crawford Seeger. As regards the treatise, the latter's role in its genesis seems to have been significant. In the summer of 1930 she typed and he dictated the manuscript, and together they integrated the teaching regimen for her private composition lessons with his various theories of philosophy, musicology, and criticism.