aworks :: "new" american classical music

Mood (1918). Carl Ruggles /silence and mood/

The New Sounds blog has some polls up for voting on best albums of the year. Since the only two albums I've heard this year are TV on the Radio's Dear Silence and Jennifer Koh's classical album String Poetic (lala) with music written by Jennifer Higdon, John Adams, Carl Ruggles, and Lou Harrison, I naturally voted for both recordings. I'm still delighted Koh included Ruggles amongst those other more recent and possibly easier to appreciate American music titans.

However, Art of the States indicates Ruggles' Mood may not be precisely the composer's work:

Kirkpatrick transcribed the various sketches into a short, atmospheric piece that may or may not reflect Ruggles' original intention. (He gave it, at one point, another title: 'Prelude to a Tragedy.')

Upon further study, I also realize I've heard Vampire Weekend, Lil' Wayne and Coldplay. But I'm sticking with my votes.

Organum, for Orchestra (1944-47). Carl Ruggles

In Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell 1921-1964, Cowell describes his friendship with Carl Ruggles and calls him "irascible, lovable, honest, sturdy, original, slow-working, deeply emotional, self-assured, and intelligent." As an example, he tells how it was important for Ruggles to rank composers by historical importance and they spent many hours debating if Tchaikovsky was thirteenth or fourteenth. He also, not surprisingly, praises Ruggles for his mastery of dissonance.

Cowell also does a short analysis of Ruggles' Organum and points out how the melody line does not repeat the same note too soon, how despite the composer's tendencies the final chord must be less dissonant if not consonant, and how an example of dissonant counterpoint works.

He finishes by suggesting that Ruggles is in a similar position to Anton Webern, in having written a small number of short, dense works, albeit with more melodic flow.

Wikipedia on the concept of organum here. An MP3 example of organum here.

Men and Mountains (1924/36). Carl Ruggles

I'm reading A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives by Larry Starr as well as Essential Cowell: Selected Writings on Music by Henry Cowell 1921-1964 edited by Dick Higgins. And today, not coincidentally, I was listening to the Christoph Von Dohnanyi recording of the music of Ives, Carl Ruggles, and Ruth Crawford Seeger. While listening to Sun-Treader and Men and Mountains by Ruggles, I was thinking how Ives and Cowell and their music are, relatively speaking, well-known and yet, who knows much about Ruggles?

Then, I find out that the first edition of Cowell's New Music Quarterly, published to promote modern music at the time, contained the score for Ruggles' Men and Mountains. And as we know, Charles Ives helped subsidize the publication from his insurance industry wealth.

To continue the circle, Cowell and his wife Sidney went on to write the book about the music of Charles Ives. And to return to the early days of Henry Cowell, he studied at age seventeen with Charles Seeger, the husband of Ruth Crawford Seeger (mentioned above), at UC Berkeley.

Appropriately, Michael Broyles has a thesis that the American musical mavericks greatly benefited from a community of like-minded composers, despite the stereotype of them being rugged individualists.

To conclude, Thomas Herlin's Ruggles web site has a good quote:

Charles Ives is said to have said to a heckler of Ruggles's music: "When you hear strong masculine music like this, get up and use your ears like a man!"

Disclaimers: I never finished reading Cowell's seminal New Musical Resources. I did finish Broyles' Mavericks and Other Traditions in American Music. I just read that Cowell taught George Gershwin and Alan Hovhaness; I knew he taught John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Burt Bacharach. Today's post originated in San Jose .