The Uncovered Ruggles

Chronique

"That Carl Ruggles," musicologist Mike Seeger once said with a knowing smile "was a piece of work." Ruggles was enormously versatile artistically and could claim creative mastery as a composer, painter, orchestra builder, symphonic bandleader, music teacher, and raconteur. Yet Ruggles was also curmudgeonly, irascible, vulgar, and temperamental, the antithesis of the personality type one would associate with a disciplined man of the arts. Both sides of Ruggles' disunited disposition are on full display in pianist Donald Berman's collection The Uncovered Ruggles on New World, which presents a number of previously unrecorded works in critical editions prepared by Berman's late mentor, pianist John Kirkpatrick.
Of the 16 selections included on The Uncovered Ruggles only the familiar Evocations: Four Chants for Piano and the song Toys have appeared on recordings before. Visions, March, Parvum Organum, and Valse Lente are Ruggles piano pieces that didn't achieve a final form in the composer's lifetime, and all are significant, as Ruggles' acknowledged titles make a worklist even shorter than that of Edgard Varèse. Mood for violin and piano represents Ruggles' earliest extant foray into dissonant counterpoint, and contains the only music we will ever hear from Ruggles' destroyed opera "The Sunken Bell." The songs Ich fühle deinem Odem, Windy Nights, and Prayer are more conventional outings, revealing his strong affinity for established nineteenth century traditions in melody and harmony. The rest consists of alternate versions or arrangements of works already known, revelatory in themselves. The orchestral Organum is heard in a two-piano arrangement made by Kirkpatrick in 1946, once published in a literally unplayable reduction for one piano.
The tone and quality of all this previously unknown music is impressively consistent, with Ruggles' thorny and unrelentingly dissonant harmony combining with his penchant toward contrapuntally conceived polyrhythm to produce gentle works that evoke delicate and nostalgic memories, a love of old things. In Ruggles' mature work, two and two add up to 17 -- while there is almost no referencing to traditional harmony, out of the skeins of Ruggles' corrosive dissonance grows an "ugly beauty." Berman plays the pieces in a sensitive and controlled manner that would make Kirkpatrick proud, and the songs as done here represent some of soprano Susan Narucki's finest moments on disc. The Uncovered Ruggles is a major release in terms of revealing a key twentieth century composer who truly was "in the American grain," an innovator, iconoclast, and "a piece of work."

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