His pieces employed "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by fellow composer and musicologist Charles Seeger to describe Ruggles' music.

He is considered a founder of the ultramodernist movement of American composers that included Henry Cowell and Ruth Crawford Seeger, among others.

Famous for his prickly personality, Ruggles was nonetheless close friends with Cowell, Seeger, Edgard Varèse, Charles Ives, and the painter Thomas Hart Benton.

Conductor Michael Tilson Thomas has championed Ruggles' music, recording the complete works with the Buffalo Philharmonic and occasionally performing Sun-Treader with the San Francisco Symphony.

The young Carl developed an interest in music early on, crafting his own violin from a cigar box at age six.

Ruggles would receive a quarter size violin from a local lighthouse keeper, and continued learning to play by ear.

[3] Ruggles' mother Maria died when he was fourteen years old, and he was thereafter raised by his father and grandmother in nearby Lexington.

Ruggles' father became an alcoholic after his wife's death, and was rumored to have a gambling addiction that cost most of the family's inherited wealth.

A reviewer wrote: "A musical program of entertainment was rendered in the church, each number of which received hearty applause.

Thompson & Co. published Ruggles' first compositions, three songs titled How Can I Be Blythe and Glad, At Sea and Maiden with Thy Mouth of Roses.

Charlotte then was a choir mistress at the First Baptist Church and Ruggles was hired to conduct the YMCA orchestra and glee club.

In 1912 Ruggles moved to New York and began writing an opera based on the German play The Sunken Bell by Gerhart Hauptmann.

For example, he wrote to Henry Cowell about, "that filthy bunch of Juilliard Jews ... cheap, without dignity, and with little or no talent," especially targeting Arthur Berger.

He used a method similar to and perhaps influenced by Charles Seeger's dissonant counterpoint, and generally avoided repeating a pitch class within eight notes.

It was inspired by the poem "Pauline" by Robert Browning, particularly the line "Sun-treader, light and life be thine forever!".

Jean Martinon conducted the Boston Symphony Orchestra in its U.S. premiere in Portland, Maine, on January 24, 1966, as part of a Bowdoin College tribute marking Ruggles' 90th birthday.

Given the size of his catalogue, Ruggles' discography is not large, with Sun-Treader and Men and Mountains appearing most frequently, usually in anthologies of 20th Century American music.