Carl Ruggles - Music

Music

Ruggles' compositional style was apparently “trial and error. He sat at the piano and moved his fingers around, listened hard to the sounds... shouting out some of the lines.” According to Ruggles himself, he never learned any music theory; either way he never analyzed other composers' pieces. Since the majority of his early works (before Toys) are destroyed, we can only speculate on their compositional style. Reviews suggest similarities to late 19th century Romanticism.

His dissonant, contrapuntal style was similar to Arnold Schoenberg's although he did not employ the same twelve tone system. He used a method similar to (and perhaps influenced by) Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint and generally avoided repeating a pitch class within 8 notes. He also never used sprechstimme in any of the songs he composed although he admired Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire. He only composed ten pieces due to his lengthy composition and revision process. He did, however, paint hundreds of paintings over the course of his lifetime and he was offered the opportunity to have one-man shows (which he turned down).

Sun-treader, his best known work, was scored for a large orchestra. It was inspired by the poem Pauline by Robert Browning, particularly the line “Sun-treader, light and life be thine forever!” The most common intervals in the piece are minor seconds, perfect fourths and augmented fourths. One group of pitch classes he uses is fourths in sequence where the respective notes are either 13 or 11 semitones apart; the other is three notes which are chromatically related (though often separated by an octave). Another distinctive feature of Sun-treader is the presence of 'waves', both in dynamics and pitch. Pitches will start low, then rise up to a climax, then descend again. Within the ascent (and descent) there are small descents (and ascents) leading to a self-similar (fractal) overall structure.

Ruggles's music is published by Theodore Presser Company.