One of America's great composing legends, Carl Ruggles (1876-1971) was a man of deep concentration. That is, while he only wrote some 15-20 pieces in his whole life, he worked incredibly hard on them and they exhibit a concentrated dramatic power unlike anything else. Working mostly within a dissonant counterpoint system (developed contemporaneously with Charles Seeger's method), his mature works sound like the War in Heaven - intensely dramatic, vaulting and anguished - and sport apocalyptic titles such as Men and Mountains, Angels and Sun-Treader. And I love them so - in fact, Angels is one of my favorite pieces for brass, possibly one of my favorite pieces ever. I haven't gotten around to featuring him on one of my blogs yet because, well, at this point he's well-known in America and I normally don't cover well-known people. Oh, sure, I linked to his song Toys in my Cos Cob Song Volume article, but that was small potatoes and a bit before his style was developed (but it's still dang fine, and a blast to perform). He was much more productive as a painter, and you can see some of his wonderful work here. His only leaf (that I know of) is also the last piece he completed and his only piece of outright sacred music, an odd fact considering how cosmologically themed his pieces were. It's incidental that I'm doing a piece of Christian sacred music today, because I've got a confession to make. Specifically, I'm not sure I get this piece.
At first glance, Exaltation doesn't look that different from a normal chorale, but then the odd notes creep in. Ruggles was notably free from the constraints of formal compositional training, having never learned tonal theory or studied other composers' works - he composed largely through trial and error, contributing to his glacial pace - but despite this he keeps to the chorale guidelines of stepwise motion and tight voicing. That doesn't mean he can't have jarring dissonances every third or fifth beat, and at first these clashes are off-putting in the context of this otherwise conventional, and quite American, hymn. However, many of them obtain a bittersweet luster after multiple hearings, and these become more important once you find out the piece was written in memory of Ruggles's wife Charlotte, who died the year before. A trumpet colleague of mine was fortunate enough to have visited Ruggles at his house, and noted that near the end of his life Ruggles's eyesight was so bad that he had enormous staff paper made for him and he composed with it on the floor, so his usual sluggish pace became even more strained, and a more heartless critic would be tempted to wonder if the "wrong notes" were as unintentional as the critic wanted them to be. I got the chance to perform Angels some years ago with Judson Scott at the University of Puget Sound, and after the performance he quoted Rilke ("Every angel is terrifying.") and we played it again, a move I thought was unnecessary at the time but still sparks a few synapses when I hear this piece.
Or maybe I'm thinking way too hard about it.
Anyways, Exaltation only grows in value the more you hear it, and the recording by Gerard Schwarz (yes, that Gerard Schwarz), a brass ensemble and the Gregg Smith singers repeats it about six times with instrumental variation. Presser's published version is just the bare chorale with no words, as Ruggles intended the chorus to hum, perhaps to heighten the sense of nostalgia and loss, but the recording finds words for it (and I'm sure it's a hymn I'd recognize if I was of the churchin' folk), and they could have been working from an alternate version Ruggles kept in his desk drawer. It's a lovely solution to a semi-problematic piece, and is a nice eulogy to Ruggles as well. You can listen to everything Ruggles wrote in a couple of hours, so have at and take in, lest the angels terrify you too much.
~PNK
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