In Memoriam: Carl Ruggles (1876-1971)

Author(s): Charles Seeger

Source: Perspectives of New Music, Vol. 10, No. 2 (Spring - Summer, 1972), pp. 171-174
Published by: Perspectives of New Music
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/832343
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 COLLOQUY AND REVIEW
IN MEMORIAM:
CARL RUGGLES (1876-1971)
THERE is not much that I can or
would want to try to say about Carl
Ruggles that is not already printed in
the article that Carl Engel asked me
to write for the Musical Quarterly,
Volume XVIII, Number 4 (October
1932), pp. 578-92, and was reprinted
in Henry Cowell's American Com-
posers on American Music (Stanford,
1933, pp. 14-35). My close intimacy
with Carl during the years of Angels,
Portals, Men and Mountains, Sun
Treader (1918-1930) tapered off with
my increasing deafness, involvement
in the social-musical agitation of the
depression years, dawning awareness
of music idioms other than the con-
cert, professional, fine art or what-
ever, and removal to Washington, D. C.
Knowing Carl meant, primarily,
being with him and his wife Charlotte
for day-long, and without her, nearly
night-long sessions, for the first two
or three years in temporary, make-
shift quarters in or near New York,
later, in his converted schoolhouse at
Arlington, Vermont, on the dead end
of a little unpaved street on the west
edge of the town, looking over green
meadows to the fairly high moun-
tains. Almost idyllic spot. Carl told
the story himself: at a preceding town
meeting (really lively, even for New
England; they threw a troublesome
disputant out of the window at one
meeting) a motion was presented to
name the street "Ruggles Street"; and
it might have passed but for a neigh-
bor who rose to say "we all know
Mr. Ruggles is a famous composer
and Mrs. Ruggles is the nicest lady in
town, but I don't think we should
* 171 -
name a street in Arlington after any-
one who has a mortgage on his house."
And they didn't.
Charlotte was more than his alter
ego. She was a staunch middle Amer-
ican, church-goer, instantly recogniz-
able as standing for all the respectables
of the establishment. She was fully
aware that Carl, with his general row-
diness and utter impracticalness in the
business of living, transgressed every
canon of behavior of the American
husband. He adored her-and she,
him. But like a skilled horsewoman
devoted to a prize stallion, Charlotte
made it possible for him to show him-
self off at his best to all and sundry,
though never to her-he knew that
she knew him too well-as an enthral-
ling Gestalt in such a way as to make
people take him as he wished to be
taken and be done for as he would
not or could not do for himself. This
meant a warm, ordered context and a
sure management with a rein never
too tight nor too loose but held ever
firmly, lovingly and intelligently; for
she never tried to make him do what
he could not or would not. As the
stories would wax more and more
risque, Carl, sizing up the company
like a mischievous schoolboy intent
upon some prank he knew he might
not get away with, would begin and
at the same time sneak a glance at
Charlotte. "Not that one, Carl, not
that." And with a grin of enormous
satisfaction "that one" would not be
told.
I never ceased to wonder whether
the succession of wealthy patronesses
who supported the family from about
 PERSPECTIVESOF NEW MUSIC
the mid-twenties on would have risked
the sums they so unremittingly and
generously doled out if it had not
been for their respect and admiration
for Charlotte, though Carl's charisma
and daring mixture of servility and
insult could charm a stone statue if
he set his mind to it.
One might ask: what has all this
to do with Carl Ruggles as a memo-
rable figure in the history of American
composers of concert music? But it is
precisely this support of his apparent
inability to even conceive the possi-
bility of his music activity being cast
in any of the ordinary channels of
professionalism and pecuniary profit
that enabled him to be what he was,
do what he did, and live to be 95. He
neither played any instrument, con-
ducted, nor taught. He seemed never
to have submitted to any discipline
or to have learned anything from any-
body. He was 100 percent autodidact.
Like Henry Cowell, who handed in a
Bach chorale as an assignment in his
harmony class at the old Institute of
Musical Art (returned with numerous
blue-penciled corrections) and was
expelled instanter by Frank Damrosch
the next day, Carl resisted the blan-
dishments of a course in song compo-
sition at Harvard, where he was a
special student, with a Schubert song
(also fully corrected). He simply does
not class as a member of any variety
of the species professional musician.
He was, par excellence, the amateur
of music-one who loved it so pro-
foundly and devotedly that he could
not tolerate any verbal harnessing of
its radiant presence by others or by
himself. Yet he admired above all the
most disciplined of the composers of
the past: Palestrina, Bach, Beethoven.
"Brahms," in the most gravelly of
* 172 ?
voices, "was a second-rate composer."
On another day it might have been
Mozart, Debussy, or Strauss. "How
many first-raters are there, Carl?"
Well, it might be the usual three. Or
even just Bach. "Pretty good to be a
second-rater, no, Carl?" A broad grin
and the afternoon's or evening's dis-
course was well under way.
The curious thing about Carl Rug-
gles was that he would finish a paint-
ing. Regard it as a complete work. I
never knew him able to resist the
temptation to touch, retouch (and
sometimes not to best advantage) any
of his compositions. There was no
method, nothing that could be called
discipline in his compositional activi-
ty. On the other hand, his life, with
Charlotte's help, was supremely dis-
ciplined. One could challenge him on
the basis of almost any note he had
written, after, say, the first measure.
But not on his breakfast. Or conjugal
fidelity. One could keep at it for the
better part of a whole night, as we did
once with Angels. The criteria were
very seldom vertical but almost in-
variably horizontal-the momentum,
the goal, of the melodic line. His tech-
nique was essentially of the nature of
improvisation. Improvisation in writ-
ing, over long spans of time, not per-
formance time. Like the player of a
raga on a sitar; if one seemed to be in
exceptionally good form, one felt one
did better than upon the previous
occasion. For Carl, there was only
one raga: identification of Appear-
ance (the concrete composition or
performance, a purely temporary, sen-
sory thing) with Reality (the eternal
Sublime, independent of time, space,
and "art medium"). The "newness"
of "Modern" music was as nothing
before the overmastering Tradition.
 COLLOQUYAND REVIEW
The Grand Tradition, as he saw it,
though pregnant with every conceiv-
able change, never changes. Only the
artists who showed that they knew
this were worthy of his regard ....
Contemporary structuralists speak of
the "deep" and the "surface" struc-
ture of what concerns them (in other
words, the patterns of linguistic func-
tions that we use to describe them
with). Carl was so completely ab-
sorbed in the deep structure of music
that no surface structures seemed ad-
equate in his attempt to bring about
its immanence, much less its presence
to us who live most of the time on
the surfaces of life and are dependent
upon the distinctions of our minds
and senses rather than upon the unity
of these that is the prerequisite for
realization of the deep structure.
"The greatest painters, composers,
poets all say the same thing" was as
likely to begin as to end any dis-
coursive session.
Although his conversation, often
as brilliant as it was salty, customarily
expressed itself in sweeping generali-
ties more theoretical than practical,
Carl was no theorist. He admired it in
others, especially when they worsted
him in argument or brought some
point to support his contention. I re-
member his delight when I showed
him that the final chord of Angels
could be regarded as a dual senario in
inferior resonance as well as superior
sonance, with the root of both (B, in
the original version) in a position to
make a second inversion 3 in inferior
6 both, or neither; yet each man, though
resonance read as a 4 in superior so-
nance. (Is Garbusov's experiment still
remembered and the possibility that
inferior resonance may be a factor of
the sense datum, mirrorwise with res-
pect to the sonance of the sense
stimulus?)
* 173 ?
1 a
)
)~
'7
e t c.
-- - - - -j
8va bassa-J
We spent quite a while speculating
upon chordal systems with "basses"
in the middle and at the top of poly-
phonic fabrics. But in trying to ex-
plain to Charlotte, later at dinner,
what we had talked about so excit-
edly, he showed he had already for-
gotten the whole thing. "You tell
her." I declined.
There must be some significance
in the fact that both grand old men
of the most esoteric idiom of Ameri-
can music, Ives and Ruggles, felt a
need of mystical verbalization in sup-
port of their music-compositional
idiosyncrasies. Neither entered the
lists of music-professional jousting.
Could this have been because they
realized the hopelessness of the under-
taking? The period 1886-1920 was
far more inhospitable to men of their
kind than was that of the 1920's and
1930's. And the United States was
not Europe. Or could this have been
a disdain of monetization as unwor-
thy of or incompatible with the lofty
aims of their purely musical aspira-
tions and their verbalizations of them?
Candor suggests it might be either,
in very different ways, provided him-
self with a comfortable living that al-
lowed him plenty of time in which to
work above the battle, as it were:
Ives, through his competence in the
management of an insurance business;
Ruggles, through his competence in
 PERSPECTIVESOF NEW MUSIC
the management of the business of
interpersonal relations upon a novel
variety of social levels. Would their
compositional styles and outputs have
taken different turns if they had done
as most composers have done: given
lessons in instrumental technique,
competed in the arena of public per-
formance, contended with managers
and critics, insulted and wooed a
fickle public, perhaps allying them-
selves in a fin de siecle Davidsbiindler
three decades before the formation
of the International Composers Guild,
by which time they were both al-
ready on fixed courses of their own
as middle-aged men? Materialists will
say "yes"; idealists, "no." Conceiv-
ably, Ives could have made it, though
perhaps with an early death; Rug-
gles-the mind boggles at the mere
suggestion.
The two men rarely met but seem
to have respected and admired each
other. As to their verbalization about
their music: Ives stressed the histori-
cal, diachronic, aspect of a particular
locality or area, New England, in
* 174
fairly lengthy essays; Ruggles, no less
a New Englander, the ahistoric, syn-
chronic aspect of an eternal Presence
in a spacetimeless universe, in the
briefest possible categorical judgment.
Ives was the more academic: he "went
through" college; Ruggles merely nib-
bled at academic learning and was
more concert-minded. With respect
to their music itself, Ives was not
overly given to polish; rather than
mull over a composition he would let
it stand and begin another. Ruggles
probably spent much too much time
polishing and repolishing, sometimes,
I thought, wearing away the patina of
a passage. Ives blazed new paths and
may have followers; Ruggles tried to
retread old ones, though with new
feet. It will be interesting to see if he
has any follower(s). Strangely enough,
both sinned only too often with pro-
lixity, though both produced jewels.
Long may they be remembered, em-
ulated and loved-as well for what
they did as for what they wanted and
tried to do.
-Charles Seeger