38 Facts About Carl Ruggles

Carl Ruggles's pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music.

Carl Ruggles is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others.

Famous for his prickly personality, Ruggles was nonetheless close friends with Cowell, Seeger, Edgard Varese, Charles Ives, and the painter Thomas Hart Benton.

Carl Ruggles's students include the experimental composers James Tenney and Merton Brown.

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has championed Carl Ruggles' music, recording the complete works with the Buffalo Philharmonic and occasionally performing Sun-Treader with the San Francisco Symphony.

Especially later in life, Carl Ruggles was a prolific painter, selling hundreds of paintings during his lifetime.

Carl Ruggles was born in Marion, Massachusetts on March 11,1876.

Carl Ruggles's surname comes from the town of Rugeley in Staffordshire, England, whose various inhabitants emigrated to Boston in the year 1637.

Many of Carl Ruggles' ancestors served important military and political positions in the early Massachusetts colony, including generals and captains, as well as Micah Haskell Carl Ruggles, a former representative to the Massachusetts General Court.

Carl Ruggles was born to parents Nathaniel Ruggles and Maria Josephine Ruggles, a native of New Hampshire and step-cousin of former US president Franklin Pierce.

The young Carl Ruggles developed an interest in music early on, crafting his own violin from a cigar box at age six.

Carl Ruggles recalled his mother, Maria, singing him traditional songs from Stephen C Foster and other folk hymns.

Carl Ruggles would receive a quarter size violin from a local lighthouse keeper, and continued learning to play by ear.

Carl Ruggles' father became an alcoholic after his wife's death, and was rumored to have a gambling addiction that cost most of the family's inherited wealth.

Carl Ruggles was never very close to his father and did not see him from the age of 29 onwards.

Carl Ruggles modified his given name Charles to the more Teutonic Carl at an early age, partially due to his great admiration for German composers, especially Richard Wagner and Richard Strauss.

Carl Ruggles was appointed director of the YMCA orchestra in 1892.

Carl Ruggles captivated the audience by his manly bearing, and is evidently at home in the concert room.

Carl Ruggles worked a number of odd jobs and started to teach violin and music theory privately, though teaching did not provide much income or success.

Carl Ruggles did not hesitate to express his opinion, laudatory or not.

Carl Ruggles began a search for steady employment so that he and Charlotte could marry.

Carl Ruggles became active as a soloist as well, eventually directing the Winona Symphony Orchestra.

Carl Ruggles continued to direct the symphony after the music school closed.

Charlotte then was a choir mistress at the First Baptist Church and Carl Ruggles was hired to conduct the YMCA orchestra and glee club.

In 1912 Carl Ruggles moved to New York and began writing an opera based on the German play The Sunken Bell by Gerhart Hauptmann.

Carl Ruggles destroyed what he had written after he decided he lacked the instinct required for the stage.

Carl Ruggles continued to compose, supplementing his income by giving composition lessons.

Carl Ruggles continued to live and compose in New York until 1938, when he began teaching composition at the University of Miami, where he remained until 1943.

Carl Ruggles then moved to a converted one-room school in Vermont where he spent his time revising compositions and painting.

Carl Ruggles painted hundreds of paintings over the course of his lifetime and he was offered the opportunity to have one-man shows.

Carl Ruggles was elected to membership in the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1963.

Carl Ruggles attacked his fellow composers, sneering at almost everyone but Ives.

Carl Ruggles refused to play the part of the genteel artist.

Carl Ruggles died in Bennington, Vermont, on October 24,1971, after a long illness.

Carl Ruggles sat at the piano and moved his fingers around, listened hard to the sounds.

Carl Ruggles used a method similar to and perhaps influenced by Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint, and generally avoided repeating a pitch class within eight notes.

Carl Ruggles never used sprechstimme in any vocal works, although he admired Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire.

Carl Ruggles only completed ten pieces due to his lengthy process of composition and revision.