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Drew Massey, Imagining the Infinite in Carl Ruggles’s ‘Evocations’, Music and Letters, Volume 92, Issue 4, November 2011, Pages 582–606, https://doi.org/10.1093/ml/gcr065
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Abstract
For most of the twentieth century, commentators have drawn on tropes of space and timelessness to describe the music of Carl Ruggles (1876–1971). A collective vision, as articulated by Dane Rudhyar, Charles Seeger, Lou Harrison, Virgil Thomson, and others, has emerged that presents Ruggles as a composer in touch with the infinite, able to render the mysteries of the universe in thimble-sized musical spaces. This essay explores Carl Ruggles’s creative process in his only work for solo piano, Evocations (1937–43; rev. 1956), as revealed through his editorial collaboration with John Kirkpatrick (1905–91). I argue that Ruggles’s compositional approach shows a gradual refinement of how he sought to represent the ‘timeless’ and ‘resonant’ in these pieces. His use of register and the overtone series in particular shows the connection between his musical materials, two key techniques (known as ‘tempering’ and ‘after-tone’), and broader aesthetic goals. Ruggles’s collaboration with Kirkpatrick also raises questions about editorial agency and the different roles that Kirkpatrick played throughout the editorial process. Exploring how commentators on his music sought to position Ruggles as a composer with special access to ‘ancient’ truths, and how Ruggles’s collaboration with Kirkpatrick on Evocations complements that critical discourse, does more than broaden our perspective on Ruggles’s music. It shows that Ruggles was not simply ‘Ives without the tunes’, as music critic Alex Ross once described him. Rather, Ruggles assumes renewed significance for helping to articulate the nature of American modernism’s relationship to the Western musical canon.
