Carl Ruggles (born Charles Sprague Ruggles; March 11, 1876 – October 24, 1971) was an American composer, painter, and teacher. His music used a technique called "dissonant counterpoint," a term created by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' style. His method of atonal counterpoint avoided repeating a note until eight other notes had been used. He is considered one of the founders of the ultramodernist movement among American composers, which included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger. He did not receive formal musical training but was very meticulous, writing music very slowly and producing only a small number of works.
Ruggles was known for having a difficult personality but maintained close friendships with Cowell, Seeger, Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and painter Thomas Hart Benton. His students included experimental composers James Tenney and Merton Brown. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas promoted Ruggles' music, recording all of his works with the Buffalo Philharmonic and occasionally performing Sun-Treader with the San Francisco Symphony. Later in life, Ruggles also painted many works, selling hundreds of paintings during his lifetime.
Early life
Carl Ruggles was born in Marion, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1876. His last name comes from the town of Rugeley in Staffordshire, England, where many people moved to Boston in 1637. Several of Ruggles' ancestors held important roles in early Massachusetts, including military leaders and politicians, such as Micah Haskell Ruggles, who served as a representative in the Massachusetts General Court from 1833 to 1838.
He was born to Nathaniel Ruggles and Maria Josephine Ruggles (née Hodge), who was from New Hampshire and a step-cousin of former U.S. president Franklin Pierce. Carl showed an early interest in music, making his own violin from a cigar box at age six. He remembered his mother, Maria, singing traditional songs by composers like Stephen C. Foster. A local lighthouse keeper gave him a small violin, and he learned to play by listening rather than reading music. Ruggles once said, "I began to play hornpipes and jigs by ear—I couldn't read a note. People would come for miles to hear me play those hornpipes." In 1885, when President Grover Cleveland visited Marion, the nine-year-old Carl performed a violin duet with First Lady Rose Cleveland.
When Carl was fourteen, his mother, Maria, died. Afterward, he was raised by his father and grandmother in Lexington. His father struggled with alcohol and gambling, which led to the loss of much of the family’s wealth. Carl had a distant relationship with his father and stopped seeing him at age 29. He changed his name from Charles to Carl, partly because he admired German composers like Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss. Though he never legally changed his name, he used "Carl Ruggles" on all his documents and works. In 1892, he became the director of the YMCA orchestra. A reviewer wrote, "A musical program was performed in the church, with each piece receiving loud applause. Master Charles Ruggles' violin performances were filled with emotion and skill. He impressed the audience with his confident presence and clearly belonged on the concert stage."
Career
In 1899, C.W. Thompson & Co. published Ruggles' first compositions, three songs titled How Can I Be Blythe and Glad, At Sea, and Maiden with Thy Mouth of Roses. Only one of these songs remains today; the others are believed to have been destroyed by Ruggles himself. As his family's financial situation worsened, Ruggles needed to find work to support himself. He took on various odd jobs and began teaching violin and music theory privately, though this work did not bring much income or success. In 1902, he started writing music criticism for the Belmont Tribune and the Watertown Tribune. He continued this work until July 1903. Ruggles' reviews were known for being direct and strong. He was not afraid to share his opinions, whether positive or negative.
In 1906, Ruggles met Charlotte Snell, a contralto. To support their future marriage, he sought steady employment and moved to Winona, Minnesota, to teach violin at the Mar D'Mar School of Music. He also became a soloist and later directed the Winona Symphony Orchestra. Charlotte joined him as a vocal teacher at Mar D'Mar. After the music school closed, Ruggles continued to lead the symphony. Charlotte became a choir mistress at the First Baptist Church, and Ruggles was hired to conduct the YMCA orchestra and glee club. Both also taught private students.
In 1912, Ruggles moved to New York and began writing an opera based on the German play The Sunken Bell by Gerhart Hauptmann. However, he did not finish the opera due to his slow progress and anti-German feelings caused by World War I. He submitted a version to the Metropolitan Opera but later destroyed his work, believing he lacked the skills needed for stage performances. Ruggles continued to compose and earned extra income by teaching composition. In 1919, for his son's fourth birthday, he wrote Toys for soprano and piano, his first piece in an atonal, contrapuntal style.
Later life and death
He lived and worked in New York until 1938, when he started teaching composition at the University of Miami. He stayed there until 1943. After that, he moved to a small school that had been changed into one room in Vermont. There, he spent time revising his music and painting. Throughout his life, he created hundreds of paintings and was invited to have exhibitions that featured only his work.
In 1963, he was chosen to become a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters.
According to Donal Henahan, Ruggles spoke in a way that surprised many people. He smoked cigars and told jokes that were considered inappropriate. He criticized other composers and rarely respected them, except for Ives. He refused to act like a polite or refined artist. He used strong language and was opposed to Jewish people. For example, he wrote to Henry Cowell about "that filthy bunch of Juilliard Jews … cheap, without dignity, and with little or no talent," especially criticizing Arthur Berger. His friend Lou Harrison ended his friendship with Ruggles after the 1949 performance of Angels because of Ruggles' racism. This included a lunch at Pennsylvania Station in New York, where Ruggles shouted harmful comments about Black people and Jewish people.
Ruggles’ wife died in 1957. They had one son, Micah. Ruggles died in Bennington, Vermont, on October 24, 1971, after being sick for a long time.
Music
Carl Ruggles created music using a method he called "trial and error." He would sit at the piano, move his fingers, listen carefully to the sounds, and sometimes shout out parts of his music. Ruggles said he never studied music theory and never examined the works of other composers. Most of his early compositions, except for a work called Toys, were destroyed, making it difficult to know how they sounded. Some reviews suggest his style was similar to the romantic music of the late 1800s.
Ruggles' music often used harsh, complex sounds and layered melodies. His style is similar to Arnold Schoenberg's, but he did not use Schoenberg's twelve-tone system. Instead, he may have been influenced by Charles Seeger's method of using dissonant counterpoint. Ruggles avoided repeating the same note within eight notes and never used sprechstimme (a type of vocal technique) in his works, even though he admired Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He completed only ten pieces because his creative process was very slow and involved many changes.
Ruggles' most famous work, Sun-Treader, was written for a large orchestra. It was inspired by the poem "Pauline" by Robert Browning, especially the line "Sun-treader, light and life be thine forever!" (Browning was referring to Percy Bysshe Shelley, though he did not name him). The piece often uses intervals such as minor seconds, perfect fourths, and augmented fourths. One pattern involves repeated fourths with notes 13 or 11 semitones apart, while another uses three notes connected by small steps, often separated by an octave. A unique feature of Sun-Treader is its "waves" in both volume and pitch, where notes rise to a peak and then fall, creating a self-repeating, fractal-like structure. Sun-Treader premiered in Paris on February 25, 1932. It was later performed in the United States by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in Portland, Maine, on January 24, 1966, as part of a celebration of Ruggles' 90th birthday.
Ruggles was one of five American composers known as "The American Five," along with Charles Ives, John J. Becker, Wallingford Riegger, and Henry Cowell.
Ruggles' music was published by Theodore Presser Company.
Although Ruggles wrote many pieces, his recorded works are limited. Sun-Treader and Men and Mountains are most often performed, usually in collections of 20th-century American music. Only one album has focused solely on Ruggles' music: The Complete Music of Carl Ruggles, which includes all of his surviving works performed by the Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra under Michael Tilson Thomas. It was first released in 1980 by CBS Masterworks on two vinyl records and later reissued as part of a Tilson Thomas collection by Sony Classics.