The Chronological Development of Carl Ruggles' Melodic Style

Abstract

The music of Carl Ruggles has recently become a subject of theoretical interest again, after a long period of neglect. In particular, Steven E. Gilbert has pointed out certain features of Ruggles' later works which are amenable to "trichordal" analysis.' In this paper I shall report the results of some statistical analyses of Ruggles' melodic lines, carried out with the aid of a computer. Certain aspects of Ruggles' music-the general shape of the lines, the ever-present dissonant sonorities-are so consistent throughout all of his pieces that one can easily get an impression of singular stylistic homogeneity-as though there were no significant changes or developments in style from 1919 (Toys) through 1944 (Organum). My results suggest just the opposite conclusion-at least with respect to his melodic writing-and lend support to a statement he made in a letter to Henry Cowell in January 1926: More and more I'm gaining that complete command of line which, to me, is the basis of all music. There is absolutely no comparison between that which I've done [and] that which I'm doing now. 2 Significant changes in Ruggles' melodic style are manifested in my statistical results in three ways: (1) a gradual shift in the distribution of melodic-interval frequencies; (2) a more and more effective avoid

A Model of Melodic Expectation for Some Neo-Romantic Music of Penderecki

“…Robinson (1998), 46. 7. This method of analysis is very similar to, although not equivalent to, the method used to measure pc diversity in Tenney (1977). Tenney assigns a non-duplicative pc succession to every pc in a Ruggles melody; the length of this succession is measured as the number of non-duplicating pcs that lead up to and include the pc.…”

“…Seeger (1932), 582: "Then again, there are only twelve semitones to the octave and everyone knows that is a pitiful number, especially when you have eight octaves, and, at least theoretically, no melody [of Ruggles] may repeat a given tone unless nine or ten others have intervened." Tenney (1977) notes a gradual increase in the average length of non-duplicative pc successions: from 5.7 in the works from 1919-1923to 8.89 in Organum (1944. However, Slottow (2003) recognizes that "Ruggles was quite flexible in his application of pitch-class nonrepetition.…”