Carl Ruggles (Born on March 11, 1876): America’s Uncompromising Composer

 by Maureen Buja  March 11th, 2026

Carl Ruggles (1876–1971) was a musician from a young age, first playing his homemade violin (with a cigar box for the body) and then a quarter-sized violin from a local friend. His mother loved singing, and Ruggles learned his music by ear, being famed locally for the jigs and hornpipes he played on his little violin. Summer visitors to his hometown of Marion, Massachusetts, were entertained, including President Grover Cleveland in 1885. The child musician went on to play violin duets with the First Lady, Rose Cleveland.

Carl Ruggles, 1911

The death of Ruggles’ mother when he was 14 signaled a significant change in his life. Responsibility for him was split between his father and his grandmother, and his father’s alcoholism and gambling lost the family their money.

Carl’s first professional appointment occurred in 1892, at age 16, when he was appointed director of the YMCA orchestra in Lexington, Massachusetts.

His first compositions were songs that were published in 1899. As his family’s financial situation worsened, he took on more jobs in music, teaching violin and music theory.

The young Carl Ruggles

Around the turn of the century, living near Boston, he took advantage of the music that he could access: he studied violin with Felix Winternitz and composition with Josef Claus and John Knowles Paine. He audited English courses at Harvard, engraved music and title pages for the Stanhope Press, and had a short-lived, and highly contentious, career as a music critic.

In 1906, he married the contralto Charlotte Snell and sought a more stable position at the Mar D’Mar School of Music in Winona, Minnesota, as a violin teacher. He also took a more prominent role as a violin soloist, appearing with the Winona Symphony Orchestra before becoming their director. After the music school and the orchestra closed in 1912, the Ruggles moved to New York City. He started to write an opera, but its German theme did not go well in the anti-German feelings in the US during WWI. He submitted a version of his opera, based on The Sunken Bell by Gerhart Hauptmann, to the Metropolitan Opera, but destroyed his scores when he decided that opera was not his future. He’d been working on the score as late as 1923, but in 1960, the clear copy was destroyed, still unfinished.

His song, Toys, was written in 1919 for his 4-year-old son Micah’s birthday. The dissonance may surprise you, in a work referencing ‘choo-choo cars’ and a balloon, but that is the secret of Ruggles: uncompromising and cutting edge.

Carl Ruggles at his work table

Ruggles is paired most with his contemporary, Charles Ives (1874–1954), two years younger. Both sought their own sound worlds, and often it took decades for their listeners to catch up to them.

One of his early works is Angels, a hymn for six trumpets. Written in 1921 for six trumpets, it was rewritten in 1940 for trumpets and trombones and again in 1946 for piano.  

His first significant work is Vox clamans in deserto of 1923. Written for soprano and chamber orchestra, it uses poems by three very different poets: Robert Browning’s Parting at Morning, Charles Henry Meltzer’s Son of Mine, and Walt Whitman’s A Clear Midnight. Each poet has his own characteristics; Browning’s sudden horizons, Meltzer’s pained longing, and Whitman’s “fully forth emerging” soul are delivered by Ruggles with soaring melodies and dissonances.  

This was the last work he wrote with words. Henceforth, he would write music for music’s sake.

His great work is Sun-Treader, and it builds off earlier works. Men and Angels, an orchestral work written in 1921, became Men and Mountains in 1924, and finally morphed into Sun-Treader in 1926. The score was completed in 1931.

Sun-Treader uses what Ruggles called ‘dissonant melody’. Unlike the Viennese 12-tone school, Ruggles used free melodies, not rows. He spoke about his compositional process through a set of questions:

What makes you take the high note? the low note? the middle note? There’s a million things…there’s a whole generation back of that. It’s not environment, it’s not heritage—environment of course prepares things…certain factors come in there. That’s what I believe in…what makes you do that? the feeling that makes you take the right note.

Ruggles’ dissonances create a style where a held note can change definition, can change style, and can change from a melodic note to a member of a chord. The music moves in huge arcs, always releasing at the end by relaxing the pitch or the volume. Arc might be separated by echoes of what happened. One writer sees the piece as having a melody that is so free and matched with a dissonance that is so burning that we seem to be part of the sun itself, in a world of flames. 

Thomas Hart Benton: Carl Ruggles, 1934 (Benton Testamentary Trust/UMB Bank)

Thomas Hart Benton: The Sun Treader (Portrait of Carl Ruggles), ca. 1934. (Kansas City, MO: The Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art)

In 1929, Ruggles met Charles Ives, who did what he could to help him. One thing was to have his best copyist make a score of Sun-Treader, but it was quickly covered in revisions. The score was finally published in 1934, after its premiere in Paris and Berlin, conducted by Nicholas Slonimsky.

Around 1929, Ruggles took up painting, and his growing abilities had a relaxing effect on his music. His first exhibition was in April 1935, and he continued to have summer shows at the Southern Vermont Art Center for years. He also exhibited at the Chicago Arts Club (1937) and the Detroit Institute of Arts (1941). His paintings were in a modernist style and often more implied than defined their images.

Ruggles: From No. 1, Christopher Street, no date (Detroit Institute of Arts)

Ruggles: Sea Impression, no date (Detroit Institute of Arts)

His last musical works were a series of Evocations, written first for piano and then orchestrated. His same method of holding melody notes to create a dissonant melody was used, and, in its orchestral version, Evocations is a powerful work.

Carl Ruggles in his 90s

Each movement was written for a different subject, the first in 1937, then one in 1940 dedicated to Charles Ives, one in 1941 for pianist John Kirkpatrick, and the last in 1943 for his wife Charlotte. The general order of play is 1937–1941–1973–1940, with the Charles Ives movement last.   

We’ll close this life of Carl Ruggles with a work he wrote at the request of his wife. She always wanted a hymn, and so he wrote Evocation. In keeping with his lifelong vow of no more poets, it’s a hymn without words (Although Watts’s “O God, our help in ages past” will fit).   

And so, with his last song, we return to the songwriting of his youth. Ruggles wasn’t a popular composer and didn’t have an extensive output. In many ways, he matches the outliers in other artistic fields, such as Georgia O’Keeffe, Rockwell Kent, and Charles Ives. As a composer, he challenges his listeners; as a painter, he challenges his viewers. As a uniquely American artist, however, he’s unrivaled.

Musicians and Artists: Tōru Takemitsu and Cornelia Foss

 by Maureen Buja  February 23rd, 2023

German-born American painter Cornelia Foss (b. 1931) has works in the leading art museums in the US and specializes in paintings and portraits done around New York and Long Island. Her 2006 painting, Wainscott Pond, depicts an ocean-side pond in Wainscot, New York, out on the end of Long Island.

Cornelia Foss

The landscape depicts the flat terrain of the area, historically used for potato or corn fields. The area was settled by English immigrants in the early 18th century and Wainscott is named after the village in Kent, England, where many people came from.

Foss has painted Wainscott Pond for over half a century, and her work shows the pond in different lights, from different angles, and at different times of the year. In the first picture, you can see the dunes that separate the pond from the sea.

Foss: Wainscott Pond I

Foss: Wainscott Pond II

Foss: Wainscott Pond, 2006

Her work inspired the Japanese composer Tōru Takemitsu (1930–1996) in writing his last work for guitar, an instrument he was fond of. At the end of his life, he became fascinated with the sea, creating a 3-note motive (E-flat – E – A) or in German (Es – E -A) to set the basis for his ‘tonal sea’. His final work, written from his hospital bed, Mori no naka de (In the Woods) uses water images.

Tōru Takemitsu (photo by Kiyotane Hayashi)

The first movement, Wainscot Pond (after a painting by Cornelia Foss) was dedicated to the guitarist John Williams. The rippling and reflective movement of the water is carried through the guitar line.  

The second movement, Rosedale, is dedicated to the Japanese guitarist Kyoshi Shomura, who gave the premieres of and performed many of Takemitu’s guitar works. It has been described as ‘a trek uphill and downhill in scintillating light.’

The final movement, Muir Woods, is dedicated to the guitarist Julian Bream. It is this final movement that takes Takemitsu to his beloved sea. He starts on the California coast in the mighty and ancient redwood forests of Muir Woods, he meets a whale that plunges into the sea only to emerge off the coast of Spain and then leaves a fading whirlpool as it dives again to return to the depths of the sea.

Muir Woods, 2022 (photo by Marty Aligata)

The première of Wainscot Pond, performed by Norio Sato, took place at the funeral service for Tōru Takemitsu in Tokyo on 29 February 1996 and Julian Bream gave the first performance of Muir Woods in London on 4 October 1996. The work in its entirety, including Rosedale, was first played by Kiyoshi Shomura in Tokyo on 15 October 1996.

We don’t know which of Foss’ many Wainscott Pond paintings gave inspiration to Takemitsu, but the end result is a beautiful and thoughtful reflection on music and nature.

New English Orchestral Music: David Matthews

 by Maureen Buja  January 12th, 2026

The new recording on SOMM of two selections from David Matthews’ opera Anna is a welcome addition to modern symphonic repertoire. The opera, which was given in a concert performance at The Grange Hampshire, in July 2023, would have only a limited circulation, but now, in this orchestral reduction, Matthews’ evocative music can find a new audience.

David Matthews’s opera Anna

Anna, the opera, looks at the personal implications of the 1989 revolutions in Central Europe. Whole countries were freed, but when the countries started looking at how the previous regimes were so successful, stories of betrayal and bravery stood side-by-side. Anna and her brother Peter are orphans. When Anna falls in love with Miro, he eventually must tell them that it was his work with the secret police that caused their father’s arrest and subsequent death. Anna wishes to forgive him, but Peter confronts Miro with a gun, and, in the ensuing struggle, it is Anna who is killed. The death unites the two men, and the opera ends in a general chorus for forgiveness. The ending lines of the chorus: ‘She paid the price of our bitterness. For love of her, we must forgive’, could be true in so many situations today.

The orchestral reduction consists of a diptych: Anna in Love and Lament for Anna, starting with her emotional happiness and ending with the two men’s realisation that they have killed the one person they both loved.

Matthews was encouraged to make his Anna reduction by Jac van Steen, the conductor of The Grange Hampshire performance, following the example of Richard Strauss and his own reductions of Intermezzo and Die Frau ohne Schatten.

David Matthews

The single-movement Symphony No. 11, Op. 168 follows. The composer says it was inspired by such diverse things as Schoenberg’s First String Quartet and Sibelius’ Symphony No. 7, a trumpet player he heard at a festival in 2022, and Lord of the Rings’ description of the woods of Lórien. There are calls to battle and a chaconne; the horn of Rohan has a part as well.

The final work on the recording is his Flute Concerto, Op. 166. It rests on the melodic aspect of the flute, and the composer says, ‘My Concerto alternates between song and dance’. He uses a small ‘Haydn-sized’ orchestra (strings plus 2 oboes, 2 bassoons, and 2 horns), and takes a page from Nielsen’s Flute concerto and the comments that its first movement ‘spends all its time looking for a key’. Accordingly, the movement begins in E flat major and moves through a descending line of F, G, A, B flat, C, D before returning to E flat major for the recapitulation. The coda starts the key search again, and the movement ends in D major. The flute line throughout is glorious.

David Matthews: Flute Concerto, Op. 166 – I. Allegretto

Movement II, Lento, moves down a half step and starts in D flat major. The slower outer sections frame a quicker allegretto middle section, which I thought of as a dance to celebrate Pan with panpipes, and which is mostly pentatonic.

The final movement, with a somewhat Irish flavour, is based on a melody the composer wrote for his wife, Jennifer, for Christmas in 2016. More dances liven the movement.

The music is filled with a wealth of invention and successfully integrates the modern lack of a tonal centre with traditional forms and constructs. In the Symphony No. 11, the recapitulation section does land us back at our starting key of E flat major, but that is not the key destined to end the piece; it is, however, the key that ends the last piece on the recording, to bring everything around full circle. Matthews’ music, in this expansive presentation by the Ulster Orchestra, brings us a composer we may not have been familiar with and gives us the opportunity to hear parts of his recent opera.

David Matthews: Anna: Symphonic Diptych; Symphony No. 11, Flute Concerto

Emma Halnan (flute); Ulster Orchestra; Jac van Steen (conductor)
SOMM Recordings: SOMMCD 0710
Release date: 17 October 2025

Official Website

For The Patron: The Jour de Fête Quartet

 by Maureen Buja 

On Fridays, the publisher Mitrofan Petrovich Belaieff had his musical gatherings, bringing together the cream of the St Petersburg composers. The earlier group, who came together around Mily Balakirev, known as the Mighty Handful, or just The Five (Balakirev, Alexander Borodin, César Cui, Modest Mussorgsky, and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov), had done their best to embody Russian national music, but fell apart after the early death of Mussorgsky. The timber merchant Belaieff stepped forward next.

Portrait of Alexander Glazunov

Belaieff, with the family fortune in the timber industry behind him, was also a musician. He played the viola and, through Anatoly Lyadov, was introduced to Alexander Glazunov. In the early 1880s, Belaieff held Friday musical meetings for string quartet concerts at his house. Initially, they were playing through the quartets of Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven in chronological order, but soon Russian music was making its appearance.

Portrait of Mitrofan Belaieff by Ilya Repin

Musically, Glazunov was the new driving force behind what became known as the Second Petersburg School. Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, Glazunov, the critic Vladimir Stassov, and many others flocked to Belaieff’s soirees. Rimsky-Korsakov, Lyadov, and Stassov had been important members or adjuncts to The Five. The Belaieff meetings were never cancelled. Rimsky-Korsakov recalled that if a member of the original quartet fell ill, Belaieff quickly found a stand-in. Belaieff always played the viola in the quartet.

A normal evening would include a concert at around 1 am, after which food and wine flowed. After the meal, Glazunov or someone else might play the piano, either trying out a new composition or reducing a symphonic work to a 4-hand version.

The composers would all contribute to a group project, such as the string quartet for Belaieff’s 50th birthday in 1886, composed by Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, Lyadov, and Glazunov. Called the String Quartet on the Theme ‘B-la-F’, using the principal syllables of Belaieff’s last name. A year earlier, Glazunov, Lyadov, and Rimsky-Korsakov composed the three-movement ‘Jour de fête’ or ‘Name-Day Quartet’ for their patron.

For the Jour de Fête quartet, Glazunov contributed an opening movement called Les chanteurs de Noël. The Jour de Fête celebrates Christ’s birth, celebrated on January 6-7 on the Orthodox calendar. The Christmas singers bring joy to the festivities.

Felix Galimir at Marlboro

This recording was made in 1950 by the Galimir Quartet. Founded by violinist Felix Galimir (1910–1999) in 1927, the quartet was made up of him and his three sisters (Adrienne on violin, Renée on viola, and Marguerite on cello). They were the right quartet at the right time, recording Alban Berg’s Lyric Suite and the String Quartet of Maurice Ravel under the supervision of the composers, who were present during the rehearsals and recording sessions in 1936. These recordings were awarded two Grand Prix de Disques awards. After fleeing Germany because of his Jewish background, he ended up in Palestine and, together with his sister Renée, was a founding member of what would become the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra. In 1938, he moved to New York, where he re-founded the Galimir Quartet, this time with members Henry Seigl on violin, Karen Tuttle on viola and Seymour Barab on cello. In New York, he was a member of the NBC Symphony orchestra, concertmaster of the Symphony of the Air, and taught at The Juilliard School, the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, and Mannes College of Music in New York. In the summers, from 1954 to 1999, he was on the faculty of the Marlboro Music Festival.

Performed by

Galimir Quartet

Recorded in 1950

Official Website

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Dance, Dance, Dance: The Baroque Dance Suite

by ,Maureen Buja

Allemande, Courante, Sarabande, and Gigue

In the new series on dance music, Dance, Dance, Dance, we’ll be looking at dance and how it comes into classical music. You’re going to be surprised at some of the places where it has made an appearance.

We’ll start with not the oldest dances, but with some of the most familiar. In the Baroque era, the dance suite was one of the most popular forms of instrumental music. Pairing of dances was common in the medieval period, but it wasn’t until the 17th century that the keyboard virtuoso Johann Jakob Froberger codified the movements of the suite to include four specific dances: the Allemande, the Courante, the Sarabande, and the Gigue.

Each dance came from a different country and had a different tempo and time signature so that along with the variety of country styles, each dance had its own character.

As its name indicates, the Allemande comes from Germany. It started as a moderate duple-meter dance but came to be one of the most stylized of the Baroque dances. In its earliest versions it was simply called ‘Teutschertanz’ or ‘Dantz’ in Germany and ‘bal todescho’, ‘bal francese’ and ‘tedesco’ in Italy.

Guillaume: Allemande, 1770

It is often paired with a following Courante (from France). When the Allemande was a dance, it was performed by dancers in a line of couples who took hands and then walked the length of the room, walking 3 steps and then balancing on one foot. Musically, the allemande could be quite slow, such as in this piece by Johann Jakob Froberger. Since it was originally intended as a walking piece, the tempo is understandable.

As the century went on, however, the Allemande became faster and eventually functioned like prelude, exploring changing harmonies and moving through dissonances.

In England, the Allemande, or, as it was known there, the Almain or Almand, also became a part of the repertoire. Although this example is short, it could have been repeated multiple times.

By the 18th century, the allemande could get to be quite lively. It has gotten disassociated with its dance and exists solely as a musical form.

In the Baroque suite, the Allemande was followed by the contrasting Courante (from France). The name, derived from the French word for ‘running,’ is a fast dance, performed with running and jumping steps. Following the Allemande in duple meter, the Courente was in triple meter.

In his 17th-century collection Terpsichore, German composer Michael Praetorius collected 312 pieces of dance music, for 3-5 unspecified players. This collection of French dances brought together music of the latest fashion, ‘as played and danced in France’ and that was ‘used at princely banquets or particular entertainments for recreation and enjoyment’. The three courantes here show the different ways one style could be changed.

J.S. Bach used Allemande / Courante pairs in his Partitas and we can hear again that the tempos are contrasting, but really too fast for dancing.

The next dance in the Baroque Suite came from Spain, the Sarabande. It started as a sung dance in Spain and Latin America in the 16th century and by the 17th century, was part of the Spanish guitar repertoire. The Spanish line of development means that it also had Arab influences. As a dance, it was usually created by a double line of couples who played castanets. Once the sarabande got to France, however, what had begun as a fiery couples’ dance changed character completely. It slowed in time, and gradually became a work that might be described as the intellectual core of the Baroque suite.

Fritz Bergen: The Sarabande, 1899

And in a more stately manner:

Feuillet and Pécourt: Recüeil de dances: Women’s steps for the beginning of the Sarabande, 1704

The final element of the Baroque dance suite was the English Gigue (or jig). This was a fast dance in 6/8 time that was paired with the slower sarabande. Jigs have been known since the 15th century in England, but as it reached the continent in the 17th, is divided into distinct French and Italian versions. The French gigue was moderately fast with irregular phrases.

In Feuillet’s and Pécourt’s early 18th century collection, they present the choreography as used in various ballets, mostly by Lully. Here is the middle section of a slow gigue. The two dances start in the center and then move in opposite directions, starting with a large irregularly shaped circling around each other.

Feuillet and Pécourt: Recüeil de dances: Men’s and Women’s steps for the Gigue Lente, 1704    

The Italian giga, although it sounded faster than the French gigue, actually had a slower harmonic rhythm. It also didn’t have the irregular phrases of the French model.

When dances were the social entertainment, there was an enormous business in traveling dancing masters teaching the latest steps, and books published to show how to perform them. This early 18th-century book shows your foot positions, where you turn your leg, where you beat your foot, and bend your knee while your leg is in the air.

Dufort: Trattato el ballo nobile, 1728

In this more elaborate image from Raoul-Auger Feuillet and Guillaume Louis Pécourt’s 1704 book Recüeil de dances, they give examples of foot movements based on the musical rhythm.

Feuillet and Pécourt: Recüeil de dances, 1704

By the 18th century, the dancing manuals were decrying the introduction of ballet steps onto the dance floor. One 1818 manual asks that dancers be more aware of what they are doing: ‘The chaste minuet is banished; and, in place of dignity and grace, we behold strange wheelings upon one leg, stretching out the other till our eye meets the garter; and a variety of endless contortions, fitter for the zenana of an eastern satrap, or the gardens of Mahomet, than the ball-room of an Englishwoman of quality and virtue.’ In 1875, an American dance manual starts out with the plain declaration that ‘The dance of society, as at present practiced, is essentially different from that of the theatre, and it is proper that it should be so. The former, consisting of movements at once easy, natural, modest and graceful, affords an exercise sufficiently agreeable to render it conducive to health and pleasure. The latter…requires in its classic poses, poetical movement, and almost supernatural strength and agility, too much study and strain…to admit of its performance off the stage…’

As these dance works entered the instrumental repertoire and took to the concert stage versus the dance floor, they became disassociated from their dances – their tempos changed so as to be undanceable and it is the contrast between movements that become the focus: duple or triple meter? Fast or slow tempo? In the next parts we will look at other dance movements, some from the Baroque and others more familiar from the Classical and Romantic repertoire.