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Ad Code: 3
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from Auction House Records.
Snow Storm From Hotel Chelsea
Artwork images are copyright of the artist or assignee
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Biography from AskART:
| The following biography was provided by Allen Sweet who wrote that he was not a relative of the artist but "ran across his music by accident and found him to be one of the most interesting people of his generation."
Carl (Charles) Sprague Ruggles was born in East Marion, Massachusetts, on March 11, 1876. His birth name was Charles, but he later changed it to Carl because his love of German culture led him to adopt a more German- sounding name.
Trained as a violinist, he studied theory and composition in Boston with Josef Claus and John Knoles Paine. In 1907 Ruggles moved to Winona, Minnesota where he founded and conducted The Winona Symphony. He composed counterpoint so complex that he used colored crayons to better keep track of his work.
Ruggles moved to New York City in 1917, and was supported by teaching music as well as private patrons, among them Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney. His associates at this time were Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, Charles Seeger and Nicolas Sloninsky who conducted many of his works.
During 1938 to 1943, he taught composition at the University of Miami. He then settled in a converted schoolhouse in Arlington, Vermont where he had been spending summers since the '20's. It was here that he befriended and was inspired by Robert Frost and Norman Rockwell.
He was a self taught painter, starting in 1921 at the urging of another artist friend, Rockwell Kent, for whom he posed in a painting of Captain Ahab that became famous. He also modeled for a number of other Kent's paintings as well as for Thomas Hart Benton, who did the portrait of Ruggles on the recording of the complete music of Ruggles. He was a member of the Southern Vermont Art Association.
He painted over three hundred works, mostly water colors, including a group made at the Hotel Chelsea in New York City, where he spent winters. His works are in many private collections and museums.
Of Ruggles, Alfred Frankenstein wrote: "At his best his pictures have an inspired, mystical, radiant, jewel-like quality which is by no means unlike the spirit of his tonal creations.
In 1952, The Detroit Institute of Art featured Ruggles' pictures and music in an exhibition. Ruggles died in 1971. His son, Micah, and friend, John Kirkpatric assembled all his papers, both music compositions as well as paintings and gave them to Yale University in New Haven. The Cleveland Symphony Orchestra was nominated for a 41st Grammy Award for recording a work by Ruggles.
Sources include:
Articles: "Carl Ruggles an Ultramodern Composer as Painter" by Archibal Nina
Marchetti, University of Minnesota, P. H. D. 1979.
"Carl Ruggles, Composer, Painter, and Storyteller" by Marilyn J. Ziffrin, l994,
Urbana, University of Illinois Press, 1994.
Carl Ruggles, A Bio-Bibliograpy, Jonathan D. Greene Westport, Connecticut Greenwood 1995
About Carl Ruggles, Lou Harrison Yonkers, N. Y. Yale University Music Library
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| ** If you discover credit omissions or have additional information to add, please let us know at registrar@AskART.com. |
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