For some people, being a master in one field, it seems, just isn’t enough. This Sunday night on “The Lost Chord,” we’ll have an hour of music by ambidextrous artists. We’ll hear works by the cantankerous American modernist, Carl Ruggles, and the Lithuanian romantic, Mikalojus Ciurlionis. We’ll also have time for a little piano work by the painter Lyonel Feininger.
Ruggles, a friend of Charles Ives, lived from 1876 to 1971 – 95 years. As a creator of a handful of meticulously-crafted, uncompromising works, his complete, authorized output amounts to four times the length of an LP side. We know this, because Michael Tilson Thomas recorded everything as part of a two-LP set, issued on the Columbia Masterworks label back in 1980.
Ruggles’ method was described by musicologist Charles Seeger as “dissonant counterpoint,” a system wherein all the traditional rules of counterpoint are reversed, so that dissonance, rather than consonance, is the norm. The very practice smacks of contrarianism!
Not surprisingly, he was beloved by Ives. When someone had the audacity to boo a work by Ruggles at a concert given in 1931, Ives berated the critic as a sissy. “Why can’t you stand up before fine, strong music like this, and use your ears like a man?” he asked.
In addition to his activities as a composer, it just so happens that Ruggles created hundreds of paintings over the course of his life, and he was successful enough at it that he was invited to hang shows and even sold many of his canvases.
His musical composition “Sun-Treader” was inspired by Robert Browning’s poem, “Pauline” – in particular the line, “Sun-treader, light and life be thine forever!”
In contrast to Ruggles, who was a gifted dilettante who tossed off paintings in an afternoon, Mikalojus Ciurlionis was every bit as important a painter as he was a composer.
In his 35 years – Ciurlionis lived from 1875 to 1911 – he managed to compose about 400 pieces of music and paint about 300 canvases. A pioneer of abstract art in Europe, he was an exemplar of the symbolist and art nouveau movements, a representative of the fin de siècle epoch, and a major figure in Lithuanian culture. Interestingly, Ciurlionis was a synesthete; that is to say, he perceived colors and music simultaneously. We’ll be listening to his vibrant symphonic poem, “The Sea.”
Lyonel Feininger alone of our composers this week is known almost exclusively as a visual artist. Feininger lived from 1871 to 1956. Born and raised in New York, he moved to Germany at the age of 16. There, he became a leading practitioner of German Expressionism and the Bauhaus. With the rise of the Nazis in the 1930s and the party’s campaign against modern art, Feininger was driven out of Germany, and after 50 years returned to the United States, where he met with great success.
Feininger had no formal music studies beyond a few years of violin lessons. Regardless, he composed thirteen fugues (with extant sketches for a fourteenth). These, he composed by ear, with the music of Johann Sebastian Bach being an undisguised influence. Feininger claimed that the influence of Bach was equally evident in his painting.
I hope you’ll join me for “Fixtures at an Exhibition” – music by successful composer-painters – this Sunday night at 10 EDT, with a repeat Wednesday evening at 6; or that you’ll listen to it later as a webcast at wwfm.org.
“Sagittarius,” by Mikalojus Ciurlionis
