Composers Datebook™ is a daily two-minute program designed to inform, engage, and entertain listeners with timely information about composers of the past and present. Each program notes significant or intriguing musical events involving composers of the past and present, with appropriate and accessible music related to each.
Ruggles at Carnegie Hall
On today’s date in 1949, at Carnegie Hall, Leopold Stokowski conducted the New York Philharmonic in the first performance of the last major work of the American composer Carl Ruggles. In a letter to his friend Charles Ives, or “Charlie” as he called him, Ruggles hinted that in this piece, he was perhaps, "stumbling on something new.” Another composer-friend, Edgard Varèse, agreed, but wrote: “The use [of intervals of] 5ths and 4ths is very remarkable, because that was done hundreds of years ago—let’s call it ‘Organum’.” And so “Organum,” a word referring to an early medieval polyphony, became the title of Ruggles’ final orchestral piece. After that, Ruggles, then already 73 years old, pretty much gave up on the musical establishment and devoted himself to painting. In 1966, he moved to a nursing home, where he died in 1971 at the age of 95. Shortly before his death, Ruggles was visited by Michael Tilson Thomas, who recalls the feisty old man saying, “Now don’t go feeling sorry [for me]. I don’t hang around this place, you know. Hell, each day I go out and make the universe anew—all over!”