Word: music
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...transformed it into a night club--not a discotheque or a coffee house--a night club, circa 1952. They've packed the place with candlelit tables covered with red-checked table cloths, added some polite entertainment (varying from week to week), and filled the lulls with the kind of music our parents danced to before they learned the Twist...
Dave Hammond opens the show with a repertoire of show tunes. This could be grim, but Hammond is from Dudley House and knows where it's at when it comes to Broadway. He isn't about to sing of hills alive with the sound of music. Rather, he launches into some of the great obscure and near-obscure songs of our time...
...occupied his time for 13 years. And just when it was near completion, Ruggles threw the score aside in a furious fit of dissatisfaction and abandoned it forever. That helps to explain why he has produced only eight works that total a mere 90-minutes' worth of music-which in turn explains why so few Americans have ever heard of Ruggles or his work...
Still, what Ruggles has produced is powerful, direct, dense, thoroughly modern American music. In the 1920s and 1930s, when he wrote most of it, he was considered to be every bit as original and daring as his composer pals Edgar Varèse (whom he always called "Goofy") and "Charlie" Ives. The correctness of that judgment again became clear last week at Bennington, Vt, where Ruggles' friends, colleagues and neighbors staged a concert of his complete works. There were a song cycle, Vox damans in Deserto, a piano suite called Evocations and a short composition for muted brass called...
...musical doubting and questioning does not mean that Ruggles lacks a ready supply of answers when he sits chatting with visitors in the living room or over the cracker barrel at the country store. Salty and profane as a whaler captain, he has a mean word for everybody. Composer Deems Taylor? "What a punk!" His Mississippi steamboat-captain grandfather, Charles Henry Ruggles? "A terrible old tyrant-he had to be captain of the ship all the time." His father Nathaniel? 'Drunk all the time." His boyhood hero, Actor Richard Mansfield? "A fine actor but a mean bastard," To this...