It’s perhaps not surprising that a solitary, iconoclastic 20th century composer should identify with a solitary, iconoclastic 18th century poet. Ultra-modernist American composer Carl Ruggles took as the title for one of his most famous orchestral pieces, a phrase from a motto by early Romantic British poet William Blake which ran, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”
On today’s date in 1924, Ruggles’ Men and Mountains received its premiere performance at a New York concert of the International Composers’ Guild.
The music critic of the New York Times was in attendance and wrote: “Mr. Ruggles … leaps upon the listener with a yell. There is a wild shriek of the brass choir, and thereafter no rest for the wicked. It is as if the irate composer had seized a plump, disparaging critic by some soft and flabby part of his anatomy, and pinched him blue, crying the while, ‘You will hear me and you’ll not go to sleep, either!’”
By the time of his death in 1971, at 95, Ruggles was seldom performed, yet he was still revered as the craggy, last-standing survivor of the craggy ultra-modernist movement of the early 20th century.
Carl Ruggles (1876-1971): Men and Mountains; Buffalo Philharmonic; Lukas Foss, conductor; Vox 8155