Carl Ruggles

Carl Ruggles (1876–1971) was an American composer and painter, born in Marion, Massachusetts. A relentless reviser, he left only a handful of finished works, written in a dissonant, tightly worked contrapuntal style of his own. He was a close friend of Charles Ives and belonged to the circle of American modernists around Henry Cowell and Edgard Varèse. From the 1930s he gave more and more of his time to painting and exhibited regularly; he spent his later decades in Vermont. Sun-treader is his largest and best-known work.