Carl Ruggles: Composer, Painter, and Storyteller (Music in American Life) [Hardcover]

Marilyn J. Ziffrin (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1, 1994 | Series: Music in American Life

Carl Ruggles was a multitalented man, determined to write modern music. He also had an important second career as a painter. Ruggles was dependent through much of his life on patrons, friends, and his wife, Charlotte, and devoted to telling raucous, off-color stories. In this biography of the late American composer-artist, Marilyn Ziffrin draws on interviews with those who knew him, on letters and other papers from Ruggles's collection, and on her extensive interviews and developing friendship with him in his final years. She creates a picture of a man who was proud, stubborn, insecure, irascible, prejudiced - and deeply human and lovable. Ziffrin follows Ruggles's career in music from his early childhood in Massachusetts through his 1907 move to Winona, Minnesota, and the founding and abrupt cessation of the Winona Symphony Orchestra. In Winona, Ruggles began a long and influential friendship with the artist Rockwell Kent. Ziffrin also details Ruggles's move in 1917 to New York, where he fell in with Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger, Edgar Varese, Carlos Salzedo, and others in the International Composers Guild. Her book discusses Ruggles's friendships with Charles Ives, Robert Frost, and others, as well as the Florida years when he taught at the University of Miami. One of Ruggles's compositions from the 1920s, The Sun Treader, provided the title of a 1957 portrait of him by his close friend Thomas Hart Benton. Ziffrin scrutinizes this and other musical compositions by Ruggles, along with some of his major paintings. The final chapter of Ziffrin's book is an eloquent portrait of Ruggles in his later years, living in a nursing home and in failing health but still outspoken, unpredictable,and planning his next works.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: University of Illinois Press (March 1, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0252020421
• ISBN-13: 978-0252020421
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,939,934 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Wonderful details on an American pioneer, May 2, 2000

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scarecrow "scarecrow" (Chicago, Illinois United States) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)   

This review is from: Carl Ruggles: Composer, Painter, and Storyteller (Music in American Life) (Hardcover)

Carl Ruggles was an crusty ol' opininated prejudiced, cantankerous, stubborn man. Most of his durationally short sculpted-like music reflects this. The overwhelmingly powerful symphonic poems, The Sun Treader or Men and Mountains. There you will find large robust,full-bodied brass and lyrical lines,in octaves and unisons to enhance their sheer power. Yet Ruggles has miniatures, his Portals a mere 63 odd measures for strings alone, or his mysterious Angels for muted trumpets and trombones is even shorter than that. He has only one single work for the piano, Evocations, which he revised his entire life. Marilyn Ziffrin was quite brave searching for Ruggles alone in retirement, barely able to hear at his home,she found him eating,crumbs falling on his sweater in the clapboard Cut Leaf Maples Motel in Arlington Vermont. He wouldn't allow her a tape recorder so she took copious notes. But it wasn't until a full year later returning from work at The University of Chicago that her story begins of one of our most fascinating American pioneers. Ziffrin tells a good story following the Ruggles throughout there lives in various places, New York, Winona, Minneapolis, Florida,and Arlington. She captures the details of the everyday, Carl chomping on his cigar while searching for dissonant tones and resonance on his rented piano. Harmonies we learn were incidental, Ruggles was a contrapuntal composer who wrote in his own invented atonal language. He had distinguished friends as well, Robert Frost, Charles Ives, Leopold Stokowski, and the pianist John Kirkpatrick who became the executor of his Estate.In reading this comprehensive work, we learn of American history as well, and how one coped with the Depression years. Ruggles was a consummate painter with over 300 paintings which are part of museaum collections in Detroit, but primarily privatly owned. The two disciplines fused together for Ruggles, he said he "painted" music, as well as supporting himself with its sale.