Composers: Old Salt

Composer Carl Ruggles has had a writer’s block that has stretched out for nearly all of his 92 years. He toiled for ages on a single work. Writing with crayons on brown wrapping paper, he would trace out his python-long melodies, then weave dissonance into dissonance, then unravel the whole thing and start again. His long opera The Sunken Bell (1923) occupied his time for 13 years. And just when it was near completion, Ruggles threw the score aside in a furious fit of dissatisfaction and abandoned it forever. That helps to explain why he has produced only eight works that total a mere 90-minutes’ worth of music—which in turn explains why so few Americans have ever heard of Ruggles or his work.

Still, what Ruggles has produced is powerful, direct, dense, thoroughly modern American music. In the 1920s and 1930s, when he wrote most of it, he was considered to be every bit as original and daring as his composer pals Edgar Varèse (whom he always called “Goofy”) and “Charlie” Ives. The correctness of that judgment again became clear last week at Bennington, Vt, where Ruggles’ friends, colleagues and neighbors staged a concert of his complete works. There were a song cycle, Vox damans in Deserto, a piano suite called Evocations and a short composition for muted brass called Angels. Most impressive was the granite-hewn intensity of his orchestral miniatures, Men and Mountains, Portals and Organum. His most ambitious work, the tone poem Sun Treader glinted with an ice-age grandeur, evoking craggy ranges and northern lights.

Over the Cracker Barrel. Ruggles has had to struggle harder than any other composer for answers to 20th century musical questions. Nobody else’s methods—not Stravinsky’s, Bartok’s, Webern’s or Berg’s—would suffice. And so, what he worked out for himself was a tone-clustered, highly contrapuntal and dissonant style. By his self-imposed rules, no note in a melodic line could be repeated until eight or so others had intervened. His work has an atonal quality that often sounds like Schoenberg’s middle-period serialism. Yet Ruggles had no use for the strict twelve-tone row, which he called “a dog chasing its tail.” He evolved his own technique. “You know that place in Sun Treader where the canon comes round and overlaps with its retrograde?” he asks. “It took me a year to make that turn.”

His musical doubting and questioning does not mean that Ruggles lacks a ready supply of answers when he sits chatting with visitors in the living room or over the cracker barrel at the country store. Salty and profane as a whaler captain, he has a mean word for everybody. Composer Deems Taylor? “What a punk!” His Mississippi steamboat-captain grandfather, Charles Henry Ruggles? “A terrible old tyrant—he had to be captain of the ship all the time.” His father Nathaniel? ‘Drunk all the time.” His boyhood hero, Actor Richard Mansfield? “A fine actor but a mean bastard,” To this day, he has only one answer when asked about the state of American music: “I think Sun Treader is the greatest composition” And his reply to the obligatory question about his remarkable longevity is always the same: He thrives on dirty stories. “If it hadn’t been for all those laughs, I’da been dead years ago ”

The Test. Understandably, Ruggles has inflicted more than a few wounds in his time. One sympathetic but forthright neighbor admits that the old fellow is “downright quarrelsome.” And even one of his most loyal friends, Mrs. Henry Cowell, widow of the composer, concedes that “sometimes his profanity got a little tiring.” But all that was forgotten at the Bennington affair. Vermont’s Governor Philip Hoff gave Ruggles a medal and friends made speeches. Carl was able to hear the whole thing over a loudspeaker in his nursing home near by.

During the festivities, the story was told of the day years ago when Carl was sitting at the baby grand piano inside his little white house in nearby Arlington. He was hammering out the same dissonant chord over and over in an all too obvious and painful search for yet another answer. Outside, Composer Cowell paused, listened, finally burst into Ruggles’ room. “Carl,” he cried out, “what in God’s name are you trying to do with that chord?” Replied Ruggles: “I’m giving it the test of time.” It must have passed the test.