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Institute for Studies In American Music |
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Inside This Issue: Music of Williamsburg by Carol J. Oja Scorsese's Narratives of Blues Discovery: Review by Eric Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?:
Review by Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger: Review by Anton Vishio Sondheim's Bounce:
Review by Gayle Sherwood and Jeffrey Magee |
Wayward Compositional Practice in the Music of The American composer Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) has tended to be viewed very much as
an isolated figure—a stubborn, reclusive, profane, “ruggedly
individualist” New Englander, painstakingly creating his
uncompromisingly dissonant music in the wilds of Vermont. This image is
somewhat misleading. It may apply better to his later years,
after he had virtually stopped composing, but during his active compositional
career (roughly from 1899 to 1947) he was a member of a close-knit group of
composers bound by close personal and professional ties and similar musical
views. This group, known as the ultra-moderns, included such figures as Henry
Cowell, Ruth Crawford, Charles Seeger, Edgard
Varèse, and Dane Rudhyar.
Charles Ives became closely associated with the group in the late 1920s,
mainly in the role of financier. Many composers of this group
have received substantial scholarly attention. Ives and Varèse,
of course, have received the most, but both Cowell
and Crawford have been the subjects of recent ISAM conferences, and Charles Seeger, in addition to his longstanding importance to
ethnomusicologists, has also received increasing attention from musicologists
and theorists.1 In comparison, Ruggles still largely basks in a benign neglect, although
interest has increased somewhat in recent years.2 One reason may be that, unlike Cowell
or Seeger, his influence on other composers has
been small. A more important reason is that he wrote very little. He
completed only nine works, of which the last, Exaltation, is a hymn only a
page long.3 Nonetheless, despite his minuscule output, his few
compositions are intense, powerful, finely crafted, and utterly
individual—they are not easily mistaken for those of any other
composer. An individuality so audible
points to distinctive musical characteristics and compositional procedures.
However, upon close examination one not only finds such procedures and
characteristics, but also discovers that they are never consistently
present—the music is not systematic in the sense of much of
Ives’s and Cowell’s music. As Robert
Tucker Robison writes, “Ruggles’s
music, in fact, defies all attempts to make it conform to any rigid set of
rules. Rather than strict systems, one finds, to use the words of James Tenney, only tendencies.”4 This consistent inconsistency is,
I am convinced, entirely purposeful on the part of the composer. Thus a persistent theme in Ruggles’s music is the tension between consistent
compositional procedures and the composer’s determination not to be
constrained by them. The strong individuality of the music points to the
former; several of Ruggles’s statements
demonstrate the latter, such as the following: All real composers create
their own formulas—I know I have created formulas of my own and some
moderns have said “Ah, too bad, he goes by formula, if he
wouldn’t do that he would be a good composer,” but I make the
point that a real composer should be able to break the formula, to bust it
all to hell when he felt it necessary to bust it; otherwise you are the
victim of your own formula, you have created only a Frankenstein monster.5 One example of this
flexibility—the ability to bust (or at least bend) the formula—is
pitch-class nonrepetition, Ruggles’s
best-known procedure: the technique of avoiding repetition of a given note
until it has sufficiently receded from aural memory. Cowell
estimates the number of intervening notes at seven or eight;6 Seeger specifies ten.7 Tenney found that the
average number of intervening notes more than doubled during Ruggles’s compositional career—from 4.17 in Toys
(1919) to 8.89 in Organum (1944).8 Nonetheless, Ruggles was
quite flexible in his application of pitch-class nonrepetition.
Regardless of the average number of intervening notes, the actual number fluctuates
widely, and sometimes the method is suspended altogether in the interests of
concentrated motivic repetition. Ruggles uses other procedures besides pitch-class nonrepetition, but with these too he is apt to break free
and do something different and unexpected. Even when he does not, a tension,
or balance, between strictness and freedom is often evident—a continuum
of flexibility within his compositional techniques. For instance, Ruggles usually constructs jagged, soaring, disjunct lines that combine into huge spiky arch shapes
that cover immense registral spaces, creating a
bright, open, spacious registration with many gaps—characteristics that
also usually apply to his vertical sonorities. But occasionally, by way of
contrast, he writes smoother lines characterized by stepwise movement and
smaller leaps, which closely fill registral gaps,
creating chromatic or near-chromatic clusters. Another example of this
continuum is Ruggles’s use of motives. A
motive can be defined as a concatenation of musical features that takes on a
temporary identity; as the features change, the motive transforms. If too many features change too rapidly or
drastically, the motive loses its identity, dissolving or mutating into another
motive. Frequently in Ruggles’s music,
motives are initially presented quite strongly and imitated fairly strictly,
but soon lose solidity as they begin to change shape, elongate, shrink,
fragment, dissolve, or (to use Schoenberg’s sinister term) are
“liquidated.”9 This is also true
of Ruggles’s sequences, which usually begin
with a fairly ordered repeated pattern that becomes progressively freer as it
mutates and dissolves. Even his canons display a balance between strict and
free imitation. Thus his motivic practice is highly
fluid, and his music is full of roughly similar shapes. A similar situation exists
with regard to the role of dissonance. Ruggles was
strongly influenced by Charles Seeger’s
concept of dissonant counterpoint, in which the traditional relation of
consonance as the norm and dissonance as the exception is reversed.10 Ruggles’s music is
highly dissonant—almost every sonority and melodic fragment contains a
major seventh, minor ninth, or tritone. For
instance, in Evocations 2, measures 34-36 contain several examples of major sevenths
and minor ninths (shown in the example as 11 and 13, which indicate the
number of semitones; crossed diagonals indicate voice exchanges).
Nonetheless, despite the almost continual chromaticism
of Ruggles’s music, whole-tone collections
are often emphasized, and consonant intervals (even All of these characteristics
(and many others) share a certain flexibility. They
are not always consistently applied, and most of them can be
“inflected” along a continuum from strict to free usage. This
results, at least in part, from Ruggles’s
refusal to be boxed in by his own procedures. This attitude is not mere
orneriness (although it is that too), but an integral manifestation of Ruggles’s basic aesthetic/spiritual
stance—the striving for the sublime and the transcendent, the effort to
move beyond the known towards the unknown.11 His stance
has been widely noted. Seeger, for example, writes: “To Carl Ruggles, there are not different kinds of beauty: there
is only one kind, and that he prefers to call the sublime.” 12 Virgil Thomson comments: “For that ecstasy in the
expression, that unrelenting luminosity of interval and sound, is needful for
producing the quality that was his overall interest and which he calls
‘the sublime.’”13 Although the quest for the
transcendent is conducted with the tools at hand—and the tools are
chosen for their fitness of purpose—in the end the goal is more
important than consistency in the use of the tools themselves. Ruggles did not value systems; he was more concerned with
striving towards the sublime, reaching towards the unknown. But how could he
reach towards the unknown if he was boxed inside a consistent, closed musical
system or set of procedures? What could be more “known” than
that? However, if his procedures could be bent or broken at will, then they
could become open-ended—not only used but transcended, in order to
evoke what lies beyond them. In addition, Ruggles’s compositional techniques as such are
directly related to his quest to transcend the known and enter the unknown.
Some examples follow: 1. He writes extremely
long-breathed extended soaring lines. In a letter to Ruggles,
Ruth Crawford wrote: “Organum was fine. In
thinking back, I have the queer feeling that its line just kept on going in
space.”14 2. He constructs large
jagged wave shapes that convey the sense of fighting or giving in to
gravity—rising and falling back through a series of subsidiary climaxes
to a main climax on the ascending side of the wave, and then reversing the
process on the descending side. His cadences are characterized by unrelenting
ascending lines that push ever higher towards a rarified registral
peak, sometimes counterpointed by contrary motion
to the deepest register in the bass. These cadences are not points of
relaxation or resolution, but rather of maximum tension, often reinforced by
added dissonances and thicker textures. 3. His customary texture of
extreme dissonance with fleeting glimpses of less dissonant or consonant
intervals and sonorities conveys a sense of restlessness, preventing the
listener from settling down or finding a comfortable resting place anywhere.
This sense of restlessness is also conveyed by Ruggles’s
fluid irregular rhythm, shifting meters, and avoidance of metrical accent and
regular phrasing—which combine into what Ruggles
termed tempo rubato. 4. The quest towards
transcendence is further evoked through Ruggles’s
work titles and epigraphs, many taken from the poetry of Whitman, Blake, and
Browning. The titles of Angels, Evocations, and Exaltation have no links to
poetry and, I think, require no commentary. Men and Mountains takes its name from Blake’s Gnomic Verses:
“Great things are done when Men and Mountains meet; This is not done by
Jostling in the Street.” Its second movement, Lilacs, derives its title
from Whitman’s When lilacs last in the dooryard bloom’d.15 Sun-Treader refers to the
opening line of Browning’s paean to Shelley, Pauline: “Sun-treader, light and life be thine
forever.” In sum, the immediate and
characteristic recognizability of Ruggles’s music is based on coherent compositional
strategies and techniques, which are, however, flexible and unsystematic in
application. But this is not a fault—Ruggles’s
lack of system is an integral part of his compositional method. The sense of
the transcendent conveyed by Ruggles’s music
is not only directly related to his compositional procedures, but were he to
use those principles systematically he would never leave the realm of “the
Known.” The fact that they are so malleable allows him to use them to
intimate what lies beyond their borders. Thus not only Ruggles’s
compositional procedures, but also his flexible application of them, comprise
the means by which he strives to “ascend and enter the
Unknown.” —Stephen
Slottow Notes 1 Two
recent books on Seeger are Taylor Aitken Greer, A Question of Balance: Charles Seeger’s Philosophy of Music (University of
California Press, 1998); and Bell Yung and Helen Rees, eds., Understanding
Charles Seeger, Pioneer in American Musicology
(University of Illinois Press, 1999). 2 For
instance, see Stephen Slottow, A Vast Simplicity: Pitch Organization in
the Works of Carl Ruggles (Ph.D. diss., City University of New York, 2001); and Thomas Herlin, Carl Ruggles and the
Viennese Tradition: A Comparative Analysis (Ph.D. diss.,
3 Ruggles’s published works are Toys, Angels,
Vox Clamans in Deserto (three songs), Men and Mountains, Portals,
Sun-Treader, Evocations (four piano
pieces), Organum, and Exaltation. 4 Robert
Tucker Robison, Carl Ruggles’s Sun-Treader (D.M.A. diss.,
University of Illinois, 1991), 16. The reference is to a letter from Tenney to Robison dated 5 Interview, New York Herald Tribune, 6 Henry Cowell, New Musical Resources (Alfred A. Knopf,
1930), 41-42; repr. 7 Charles Seeger, “Carl Ruggles,”
Musical Quarterly 18 (1932): 585-86. 8 James Tenney, “The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles’ Melodic Style,” Perspectives of
New Music 16/1 (1977): 36-69. 9 10 The
theory is fully presented in Charles Seeger, Tradition
and Experiment in (the New) Music, in Studies in Musicology II:
1929-1979, ed. Ann M. Pescatello (University of
California Press, 1994), 17-273. 11
The idea of the known and unknown refers to the first line of
Whitman’s poem "Portals" from Leaves of Grass (1881),
which Ruggles quotes as an epigram for his own Portals:
“What are those of the known but to ascend and enter the
Unknown?” 12 Seeger, “Carl Ruggles,”
580. 13 Virgil Thomson, American Music Since 1910
(Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1970), 35. 14 Letter
to Ruggles dated 15 Marilyn
Ziffrin, Carl Ruggles:
Composer, Painter, and Storyteller (University of Illinois Press,1994), 93. |
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