Sun-treader

Program notes

About the Work

Carl Ruggles finished about ten pieces in a life of ninety-five years, and Sun-treader is the biggest of them. He worked on it from 1926 to 1931, revising constantly. According to one account it was meant for a New York concert that Edgard Varèse was to conduct in the autumn of 1926, and missed its deadline by nearly five years. When Ruggles met Charles Ives in 1929 the two became close friends, and Ives had his best copyist prepare a clean score, which Ruggles promptly covered in corrections.

The title comes from Robert Browning’s early poem Pauline, in which the poet salutes Shelley: ‘Sun-treader, life and light be thine for ever!’ Ruggles was less interested in the poem than in the single image of a giant striding across the sky.

Nicolas Slonimsky conducted the first performance in Paris in February 1932 and repeated it in Berlin, and the score was published in 1934. The first American performance is reported to have come only in 1966, when the composer was nearly ninety. It is still a rarity in the concert hall; Michael Tilson Thomas, who recorded all of Ruggles’s music, has been its most persistent advocate.

Ruggles’s method was his own. He wrote long, leaping melodic lines in which, as a rule, no note returns until at least seven or eight others have sounded, and he set those lines against one another in what has been called, in a phrase credited to his friend Charles Seeger, ‘dissonant counterpoint’. The result is as dissonant as the music of Schoenberg and Berg but follows no system, and it has a craggy, rhetorical grandeur that writers like to connect with New England granite.

What to Listen For

The opening is the image of the title. Timpani pound out heavy, even strokes and the brass stride upward over them in huge intervals. This music returns several times as a pillar holding up the structure, and it invites comparison with the drumbeats at the start of Brahms’s First Symphony.

Between the pillars the music moves in waves. A line starts low, climbs through the orchestra to a peak and falls back, and inside each large wave are smaller ones, so that the piece seems always to be straining upward. Quieter passages for strings and woodwind, where the lines turn lyrical, alternate with sudden accelerations. The work is in a single movement of about a quarter of an hour.