American composer Charles Sprague Ruggles (March 11, 1876 - October 24, 1971), better known as Carl, wrote finely-crafted pieces using "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music. Famous for his prickly personality, Ruggles was nonetheless friends with Henry Cowell, Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, Ruth Crawford Seeger, and Charles Seeger. One time friend Lou Harrison dissasociated himself from Ruggles after the 1949 performance of Angels because of the older composer's racism, noting specifically a luncheon at Pennsylvania Station in New York at which Ruggles shouted anti-black and anti-semitic slurs (Miller and Lieberman 1998, p.44). Ruggles wrote painstakingly slowly so his output is quite small with compositions including: A composer is a person who writes music. ... 11 March is the 70th day of the year in the Gregorian Calendar (71st in Leap year). ... 1876 is a leap year starting on Saturday. ... October 24 is the 297th day of the year (298th in leap years) in the Gregorian Calendar, with 68 days remaining. ... 1971 (MCMLXXI) is a common year starting on Friday (click for link to calendar). ... In poetry, dissonance is the deliberate avoidance of patterns of repeated vowel sounds (see assonance). ... Counterpoint is a musical technique involving the simultaneous sounding of separate musical lines. ... Charles Seeger (Mexico City, Mexico, 1886 - 1979) was musicologist, composer, and teacher. ... Henry Cowell (March 11, 1897 - December 10, 1965) was an American composer, musical theorist, pianist, teacher, publisher, and impresario. ... Edgar (or Edgard) Var se (December 22, 1883 – November 6, 1965) was a French-born composer, who moved to the United States in 1915, and took American citizenship in 1926. ... This photo from around 1913 shows Ives in his day job: he was the director of a successful insurance agency. ... Ruth Crawford-Seeger (July 3, 1901 in East Liverpool, Ohio - November 18, 1953 in Chevy Chase, Maryland), born Ruth Crawford, was a modernist composer. ... Charles Seeger (Mexico City, Mexico, 1886 - 1979) was musicologist, composer, and teacher. ... Lou Silver Harrison (May 14, 1917 - February 2, 2003) was an American composer. ...

• Toys (1919), song for soprano and piano
• Angels (1921), for muted brass. (Originally for six trumpets. In 1940, Ruggles rescored the work for trumpets and trombones.)
• Men (1921), for orchestra
• Vox Clamans in Deserto (1923), for soprano and orchestra
• Men and Mountains (1924), for orchestra
• Portals (1925), for orchestra
• Sun-Treader (1931), for orchestra - at 16 minutes, Ruggles' longest work
• Evocations (1943) - two versions: for orchestra or solo piano
• Organum (1947), for orchestra
• Exaltation (1958), his last work, a hymn dedicated to the memory of his wife.

His students include James Tenney. Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has championed Ruggles' music, recording the complete works with the Buffalo Philharmonic and occasionally performing Sun-Treader with the San Franscisco Symphony. James Tenney (August 10, 1934 in Silver City, NM) is an American composer and influential music theorist. ... Michael Tilson Thomas (born December 21, 1944), nicknamed MTT, is a Jewish-American conductor, pianist and composer. ...

His method of atonal counterpoint was based on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number such as eight pitch classes intervened. Ruggles was also a prolific painter, selling hundreds of paintings during his lifetime. Atonality in a general sense describes music that departs from the system of tonal hierarchies that are said to characterized the sound of classical European music from the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries. ... In the music theory of European classical music serialism is a set of methods for composing and analyzing works of music based on structuring those works around the parameterization of parts of music: that is, ordering pitch, dynamics, instrumentation, rhythm, and on occasion other elements into a row or series... In music and music theory a pitch class contains all notes that have the same name; for example, all Es, no matter which octave they are in, are in the same pitch class. ...

Source

• Miller, Leta E. and Lieberman, Frederic (1998). Lou Harrison: Composing a World. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195110226

External links

• The Carl Ruggles Page
• Presser Online: Carl Ruggles
• http://www.luminet.net/~rlindner/ruggles1.htm