Carl Ruggles

Carl Ruggles (actually Charles Sprague Ruggles , born March 11, 1876 in Marion , Massachusetts , † October 24, 1971 in Bennington , Vermont ) was an American composer and painter .

Ruggles was a student of Albert Spalding and John Knowles Paine . From 1908 to 1912 he directed the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra . He then lived in Arlington and in 1937 became a composition teacher at the University of Miami .

Ruggles composed only a few pieces in a very personal style, reminiscent of Expressionism with its richness of dissonances and strongly contrapuntal , which he reworked and re-orchestrated several times. His entire work only takes about 80 minutes. However, due to their long and careful elaboration, the works are to be regarded as significant throughout. Ruggles was rather skeptical about twelve-tone music. He once said: " The row is a dog chasing its tail " ("The [twelve-tone] row is a dog that chases its tail").

He was one of the American Five , a loose group of avant-garde composers who, in addition to himself, included Charles Ives , Wallingford Riegger , Henry Cowell and John J. Becker . In old age Ruggles worked mainly as a painter. His pictures are close to abstract expressionism.

In 1954 he was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

Works

• The Sunken Bell , opera (1912-13, unfinished and destroyed by the composer, only sketches survived)
• Toys for voice and piano (1919, first recognized composition)
• Men and Angels for five trumpets and bass trumpet (1920–21)
• Vox clamans in deserto , Three songs for soprano and chamber orchestra based on texts by Robert Browning (1923)
• Men and Mountains for orchestra (1924)
• Portals for 13 strings (1925)
• Sun-Treader for large orchestra (1926–31)
• Evocations for piano (1935–43)
• Organum for orchestra (1944–47)
• Exaltation (1958)
• Polyphonic Compositions for three pianos

Individual evidence

1. ^ Members: Carl Ruggles. American Academy of Arts and Letters, accessed April 23, 2019 .