A Vast Simplicity: The Music of Carl Ruggles (review)

A Vast Simplicity. Stephen Slottow derived the title of his book (based on his dissertation) from a letter that Carl Ruggles wrote to John Kirkpatrick on Easter Sunday of 1941. In his letter, Ruggles asked Kirkpatrick to react to some revisions he had made to his composition Portals in preparation for a concert at the University of Miami. After setting forth some examples in notation, Ruggles strove to make himself emphatically clear: “I’m after a vast simplicity. As I wrote you some time ago: there are too many notes in most of the Modern Music. Notes that have no time to sound.”

The task Slottow has set for himself, while vast, is anything but simple. The author uses all of Ruggles’s (admittedly small) oeuvre of published works as well as unpublished manuscript excerpts from correspondence to exemplify and explain the composer’s compositional framework.¹ He views Ruggles’s work through various theoretical lenses, ultimately providing the reader with a complex matrix of information that leads to a greater understanding of this iconoclast’s work.

Slottow combines theoretical opinions by Ruggles’s contemporaries Dane Rudhyar, Henry Cowell, Arnold Schoenberg, and Charles Seeger with somewhat more recent observations by James Tenney and, ultimately, scholars fluent in the most recent schools of atonal music theory.² The result is a presentation of Ruggles’s work that at times pits opinions of the composer’s contemporaries against later theories of contour, pitch, interval, and set class analyses. Slottow tackles this complicated task with vigor, and the results are important for those interested in Ruggles’s unique approach to atonality. The use of contour segment analysis is especially helpful in illuminating the emotional power of Ruggles’s music.

Slottow divides his study into chapters on melody, motive, and counterpoint/harmony. He begins with a brief summary of Ruggles’s place in the early twentieth century, highlighting the composer’s role in the ultramodern movement, and concludes with a useful chronology of Ruggles’s publications. In between, Slottow provides thoughtful analysis of Ruggles’s music. Numerous musical examples are incorporated—examples that illuminate Ruggles’s works using set class and contour segment analysis in the context of all aspects of the composer’s compositional style. A table of “Terminology and Abbreviations” (p. viii) is especially helpful in informing the uninitiated.

The author’s chapter on melody makes judicious use of metaphor, as Slottow describes Ruggles’s “jagged arches” and “switchbacks” in measurable formulas. Slottow considers the composer’s goal of the “sublime” as an undercurrent in his investigation of Ruggles’s use of whole tones, pitch class and interval distribution, and contour segment analysis. The chapter on motive examines echo and repetition, call and response, cardinality, fragmentation, and “unfoldings.” Slottow achieves a third dimension to his examination in his chapter on counterpoint and harmony. Often approached with Seeger’s theories of “dissonant counterpoint” in mind, this chapter considers elements of vertical intervals, voice exchange, canon, and dynamics in Ruggles’s music. Ample examination of the composer’s iconic use of canon is provided.

A Vast Simplicity is not written for the general reader or the undergraduate student; it is a theorist’s book at heart. As such, the volume represents a departure from Pendragon’s more universally accessible Dimension and Diversity series. Slottow explains the theoretical foundation of Ruggles’s work in detail from various vantage points. He includes copious detailed musical examples, some reproduced more successfully than others. Duplications of previously published scores often appear blurry, and the design of some tables requires the reader to flip pages in order to compare data. The terminal sentence on page 20 remains incomplete—perhaps a casualty of the complexity of material necessarily presented throughout the volume, but troublesome nonetheless.

Despite these challenges in production, this book provides a valuable contribution to our understanding of an important composer in the...