Law & Order

How can one best occupy the seemingly endless collection of wasted hours spent serving jury duty? This week I was called upon to make my contribution to the country's judicial system, and as a first-timer, I was not at all impressed. The entire jury selection process seems completely archaic, and they don't even feed you.

Between vertical naps on uncomfortable wooden benches, I passed the time by reading Judith Tick's biography Ruth Crawford Seeger: A Composer's Search for American Music. I'm currently learning Crawford's second set of Preludes for piano, yet I previously knew little about her life, especially prior to her marriage to American music scholar Charles Seeger in 1932. After her modest upbringing as a Methodist minister's daughter in Jacksonville, Florida, Crawford moved to Chicago to attend the American Conservatory. Although she originally intended only to complete a year-long piano teacher's certificate, her emphasis soon shifted from performance to composition and Crawford remained in Chicago throughout the 1920's. Her compositional style was shaped by exposure to the milieu of her teacher Djane Lavoie Herz, a follower of Scriabin's mysticism. Cowell and Rudhyar were frequent visitors to Herz's home. The impressionable Crawford was particularly affected by Herz's interest in the religious practice of theosophy (a term that conjures up images of Audrey Hepburn dancing in a Parisian cafe in Funny Face). Rudhyar in particular seems to have influenced Crawford's use of dissonance in her works; he believed that dissonance was a universal musical language and therefore superior to consonance. During this period, Crawford also taught piano lessons to poet Carl Sandburg's daughters. She viewed him as a paternal figure, and it was through Sandburg that Crawford first developed an interest in American folk songs, arranging several selections for his collection The American Songbag in 1927.

My expectations of jury duty were modeled on the episode of Sex and the City in which the gentleman seated next to Carrie periodically pulls unlikely fruits from his briefcase. I didn't see any pineapples or kiwis, but like Carrie, I managed to find some fantastic deals at the bargain mecca Century 21. It's amazing what Dolce & Gabbana can do to make a trip downtown seem worthwhile.