Introduction

Carl Ruggles was an American composer, painter and teacher. His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music. His method of atonal counterpoint was based on a non-serial technique of avoiding repeating a pitch class until a generally fixed number of eight pitch classes intervened. He is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others. He had no formal musical education, yet was an extreme perfectionist—writing music at a painstakingly slow rate and leaving behind a very small output.