Ruth Crawford Seeger was born in East Liverpool, Ohio, on July 3, 1901, and died in Chevy Chase, Maryland, on November 18, 1953. Rissolty, Rossolty is scored for flute, oboe, clarinet, horn, trumpet, bass drum, and strings. Approximate performance time is three minutes.

Ruth Crawford Seeger, born Ruth Crawford in East Liverpool, Ohio, on July 3, 1901, studied music in Jacksonville, Florida, Chicago, and finally, New York. There, Ruth Crawford studied with the American composer and musicologist, Charles Seeger. After receiving a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1930, Crawford spent 1930-31 studying in Berlin and Paris. Crawford returned to New York in 1931, and married Seeger the following year.

In the 1920s and early 1930s, Ruth Crawford Seeger earned considerable recognition and acclaim for her modernist compositions. Beginning in the mid-1930s, Seeger devoted her career to collecting, arranging, and publishing American folk music (one of her step-sons was the folk singer Pete Seeger). In 1952, Ruth Crawford Seeger completed her Suite for Wind Quintet, which seemed to herald a return to original compositions (Seeger herself referred to the Quintet as getting back to “my own music”). The following year, Ruth Crawford Seeger died of cancer, at the age of 52.

Ruth Crawford Seeger composed her brief orchestral work, Rissolty, Rossolty, for a CBS radio show hosted by Alan Lomax that was devoted to introducing listeners to American music. Seeger employs three folk tunes in the piece; “Rissolty, Rossolty”, “Old Sister Phoebe”, and “Callahan”. Seeger fragments the melodies throughout the orchestra in whirlwind fashion. The closing measures depict, according to the composer, the folk singer’s “great going-on-ness”. Just as one song ends, it’s time to play another.