Customer Reviews

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

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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.