"That Carl Ruggles," musicologist Mike Seeger once said with a knowing smile "was a piece of work." Ruggles was enormously versatile artistically and could claim creative mastery as a composer, painter, orchestra builder, symphonic bandleader, music teacher, and raconteur. Yet Ruggles was also curmudgeonly, irascible, vulgar, and temperamental, the antithesis of the personality type one would associate with a disciplined man of the arts. Both sides of Ruggles' disunited disposition are on full display in pianist Donald ...
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"That Carl Ruggles," musicologist Mike Seeger once said with a knowing smile "was a piece of work." Ruggles was enormously versatile artistically and could claim creative mastery as a composer, painter, orchestra builder, symphonic bandleader, music teacher, and raconteur. Yet Ruggles was also curmudgeonly, irascible, vulgar, and temperamental, the antithesis of the personality type one would associate with a disciplined man of the arts. Both sides of Ruggles' disunited disposition are on full display in pianist Donald Berman's collection The Uncovered Ruggles on New World, which presents a number of previously unrecorded works in critical editions prepared by Berman's late mentor, pianist John Kirkpatrick.Of the 16 selections included on The Uncovered Ruggles only the familiar Evocations: Four Chants for Piano and the song Toys have appeared on recordings before. Visions, March, Parvum Organum, and Valse Lente are Ruggles piano pieces that didn't achieve a final form in the composer's lifetime, and...
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