I found this interview by Bruce Duffie with the fine composer, teacher and the biographer of Carl Ruggles, Marilyn J. Ziffrin who I took some classes with many years ago and who introduced me to Ruggles' music. I'd like to post the entire interview because Marilyn Ziffrin is such a fascinating and strong and unforgettable person, herself but here is part of what she said about Ruggles.
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BD: Let’s talk a little bit about your friend, Carl Ruggles. What kind of a guy was he?
MJZ: In some ways he was a very charming man, and in some ways a very difficult man. He was a very stubborn, irascible guy.
BD: How long did you know him?
MJZ: He died in 1971, and I knew him from 1964. I spent a year with him in about 1967, and then went back to visit him about every six weeks until he passed away. So I knew him very well the last seven or eight years of his life. Of course he was a very old man when he died. He died at 95, and a lot of people thought he was senile. That was one of the great tragedies because he was not senile at all. He was very hard at hearing, and you had to take the time to make him hear you because he refused to wear a hearing aid. This was an example of his stubbornness, and so you simply had to sit there and shout at him to make yourself heard. But if you did, he was very lucid and quite bright, and not at all senile. The last years of his life he spent a great deal of time alone, in isolation, and a nursing home. But he always knew me, and we always had great conversations when I would come over and talk to him. He was, I think, a marvelous painter, which he always felt was of less value than his compositions. He felt much more secure as a painter than he did as a composer, but he was determined to be known as a composer, and made it!
BD: So he was a success in the end?
MJZ: Yes. At least he was recognized, but only partially so.
BD: There are so many composers who are not that much recognized.
MJZ: That’s true, but he wanted to be really recognized. He wanted the world to think that he was the great American composer.
BD: He wanted to stand along Ives?
MJZ: At least, if not above! Ives was the only American composer that he really was willing to admit was his equal, if not his superior. They were very close friends, and Ives was a wonderful benefactor to him. Ives sent over money for extra rehearsals when his Sun-Treader was done in Europe. And after he died, Mrs. Ives gave him the secretary that Charlie had used, and Carl was very proud of it. They worked in his school house home for many years. He always said that he and Ives were the two great American composers, but the world didn’t think that. The world thought that Ives was, but they weren’t quite sure about Carl. There was always this doubt.
BD: Is the world reassessing Ruggles now?
MJZ: No, I really don’t think so, I regret to say. He has had some performances lately, which is very nice. The New York Philharmonic recently did the Sun-Treader. They did it on a program with Ives, Wallingford Riegger and Henry Cowell, and they called them ‘The American Eccentrics’. [See program shown below.] I’m not sure Carl would have been pleased about that at all, although he’d have been delighted to be on the same program with Ives. I since learned that the Cleveland Orchestra is going to do some of Ruggles, but I don’t think there’s any resurgence that he’s going to be played a lot all over, suddenly, forever, and all that sort of thing. On the other hand, I don’t feel that his music is ever really gone out. It’s just that it would get played rarely, but it would continually get played rarely. His paintings, on the other hand, are in major museums. Most are in private collections, but the Detroit Institute has some and the Brooklyn Museum has some. He had well over three hundred paintings but he only had ten compositions. That’s pretty good, you know!
BD: Why didn’t he want to be known for his paintings?
MJZ: He always felt that it came too easily to him. He found out that he could make money at it, which he did, whereas composition was tough. That made it more valuable because you fought over it, and he’d been trained as a musician. He’s not here to speak for himself, so you have to understand I’m trying to put myself into his mind. But he loved Beethoven and Wagner. He used to say Wagner made them burn, and the music touched him more deeply than any painting ever could. And because it touched him that way, he wanted to do that to other people. That was his great goal. He wanted to write great music. He wanted to make people burn the way Wagner made him burn, and he would be satisfied with nothing less.
BD: Is it a pity that he didn’t give more attention to his painting?
MJZ: I think so because he was a very fine painter. On the other hand, the pieces of music that he wrote are chiseled out of granite. He worked over them and worked over them. His whole method was trial and error, and you really had to pull his music away from him because he would never let go of the pieces. He wrote Angels back in 1922, and in 1966 I was writing a musicological article on that work, including some of the history and so forth. I was with him at the time and I was telling about the article, and he still wanted to change some of the notes! I told him it was ridiculous! It was forty-some-odd years later, but he still wanted to make some changes. So the pieces that are extent which, as I say, are ten, are really chiseled out of granite.
BD: Is the music all available? Does the two-record set have everything?
MJZ: Everything that is available, yes. Having said that, I should say that somewhere between 1910 and 1920 he decided to destroy all of the pieces that he had written previous to that. They had been written in the late nineteenth century parlor song tradition, and he quite literally tore them up. What he didn’t realize was that there were a couple of songs that had been published by Gray & Company, and copies were in the Library of Congress. They are indeed nothing but parlor songs; they’re really not good at all. So they are the only ones that still exist that are not on those two records.
BD: Does the recording do his music justice?
MJZ: [Hesitantly] Yes, I think so. There are two versions of the Evocations on there including the one that John Kirkpatrick did, and of course he’s the definitive interpreter of those pieces. The recording that Judith Blegen did of Toys is magnificent. Michael Tilson Thomas has since recorded the Sun-Treader on DGG and it’s out on CD. It may be a slightly different version but, of course, he recorded it on the two record set, too. So yes, I would say the performances are very good.
BD: Should we treat the music of Ruggles with kid gloves, or should we throw out there and let it be heard?
MJZ: Oh, I’d say throw it out and let it be heard, absolutely! I’d say that for any music. What do you mean by playing music with kid gloves?
BD: Playing it with over-reverence.
MJZ: I don’t think any music should be treated that way. Just throw Carl’s music out and play it and let the people respond. It’s certainly not that dissonant anymore. The modern day ear would find it acceptable, if not moving. There will be some who will say it’s dreadful because it’s so tense and so tight, but there will be others who’ll wonder why they haven’t heard this before. It would probably generate some controversy. I don’t mean people would fight, though I guess they did when the pieces were first performed. But that’s fine! Carl would like that! The more people fought about his stuff, the more he liked it.
BD: He would rather have that than universal accolades?
MJZ: I think probably so. He loved fights! He would take one side, and if he had the feeling that you agreed with him, something was wrong, so then he would take the other side. He was sort of a natural antagonist, and he could take either side because it didn’t matter to him, just as long as there was some sort of controversy going on. He loved controversy.
BD: But he wanted an outcome?
MJZ: Oh, yes, he wanted you to hear his music. That was important, absolutely important. Hear the music and then fight about it afterwards, and continue to hear the music. But you need a fight.
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I can't help smiling when I read this because I can hear the frank, no-nonsense voice, the never far off smile and humorous delivery of Marilyn Ziffrin in that. Thinking back, she probably was the strongest influence on me of all the musicians and teachers I knew. I notice her 90th birthday is coming up in a little over a month. I might spend a lot of it on her music, as I find it available for posting. She is a very fine composer and a strong one.
Update: Here is something M.J.Z. wrote, Carl Ruggles And The University of Miami. It is a good example of how through her biographical methodology is. I remember hearing someone ask her how the Ruggles biography was going - she spent years and years researching it. She smiled broadly and said, "I've finally managed to kill him off," and then gave her deep, wonderful laugh.
Update: As I said, I'll go with what someone like Marilyn Ziffrin thought over a third-rate pop-music critic. She was entirely realistic about him, as her paper, Interesting Lies and Curious Truths About Carl Ruggles shows. She, a very up front liberal who doesn't put up with stuff like that, was, nevertheless able to maintain a friendship with him over a number of years. I never claimed he was anything like a saint, I said that he wrote a number of fine pieces of music and one indisputed masterpiece. He never wrote any music that promoted racism or antisemitism as so many, such as Wagner. He never approached anything like the massive promotion of racism and sexism in "Brown Sugar" or "Some Girls". He never ripped off black musicians, professionally.
As a number of people who knew him said, Ruggles was apt to say things that were shocking and outrageous because he seemed to crave contention and confrontation. I will go with Ms. Ziffrin's frank and unflinching assessment of his character, formed over a number of years of close encounters with him.
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