In 1917, Ruth began studying with Madame Valborg Collett, a student of Agathe Backer Grøndahl and the most prestigious teacher at Foster's school.

[4] After she graduated from high school in 1918, Crawford began to pursue a career as a concert pianist, continuing her studies with Collett and performing at various musical events in Jacksonville.

In Chicago, she attended symphony and opera performances for the first time, as well as recitals by eminent pianists including Sergei Rachmaninoff and Arthur Rubinstein.

Herz sparked Crawford's interest in Theosophy and the Theosophy-influenced music of Russian composer Alexander Scriabin, and introduced her pupil to an influential community of artists and thinkers including Dane Rudhyar and Henry Cowell.

[10] Crawford moved into the New York City home of music patron Blanche Walton and began studying composition with Charles Seeger that autumn.

"[15] Crawford subsequently travelled to Vienna and Budapest to meet with Alban Berg and Béla Bartók in order to discuss her music and gain support for publication.

At the 1933 International Society for Contemporary Music Festival in Amsterdam, her Three Songs for voice, oboe, percussion and strings, which set poems by Sandburg, represented the United States.

Crawford Seeger returned to her modernist roots in early 1952 with her Suite for Wind Quintet,[18] but died of intestinal cancer in November of the following year.

The compositions that Crawford Seeger wrote in Chicago from 1924 to 1929 reflect the influence of Alexander Scriabin, Dane Rudhyar, and her piano teacher Djane Lavoie-Herz.

Judith Tick calls these years Crawford Seeger's "first distinctive style period" and writes that the composer's music during this time "might be termed 'post-tonal pluralism'".

[21] Crawford Seeger's reputation as a composer rests chiefly on her New York compositions written between 1930 and 1933, which exploit dissonant counterpoint and American serial techniques.

Many of her works from this period also employ dissonant counterpoint, a theoretical compositional system developed by Charles Seeger and also used by Henry Cowell, Johanna Beyer, and other "ultramodernists".

Seeger outlined his methodology for dissonant counterpoint in his treatise, Tradition and Experiment in (the New) Music, which he wrote with the input and assistance of Crawford during the summer of 1930.

At her daughter Barbara’s cooperative nursery school, Crawford initially felt uneasy in her role as a teacher’s aide but quickly adapted.

Its straightforward arrangements allowed parents—particularly mothers—to learn and play with their children, bringing music into homes and fostering a greater appreciation for folk traditions.