Carl Ruggles (born Charles Sprague Ruggles; Marion, Massachusetts, March 11, 1876 – Bennington, Vermont, October 24, 1971) was an American composer, teacher and painter. He is known for his "dissonant counterpoint", a term coined by the musicologist Charles Seeger to describe his music. A member of the modernist group known as the American Five, alongside Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John J. Becker and Wallingford Riegger, he is regarded as one of the founders of the American ultramodernist movement.
Ruggles lost his mother when he was fourteen and was raised by his father and grandmother. He taught himself the violin and was appointed director of the YMCA orchestra in 1892. His first compositions were published in 1899, but for years he had to earn a living outside music, including writing music criticism for Massachusetts newspapers between 1902 and 1903. In 1906 he met the contralto Charlotte Snell, and he began looking for steady work so they could marry. That search took him to Winona, Minnesota, where he taught violin and directed the local symphony orchestra.
In 1912 he moved to New York and began an opera based on Gerhart Hauptmann's The Sunken Bell, a project he never finished. In 1919 he wrote Toys for soprano and piano, his first work in the dissonant contrapuntal style. Ruggles composed very slowly and revised relentlessly, leaving only about ten completed pieces. His best-known work, Sun-Treader for large orchestra, took its inspiration from a line in Robert Browning's poem "Pauline" and premiered in Paris in 1932.
From 1938 to 1943 he taught at the University of Miami, after which he moved to Vermont, where he revised his scores and painted, producing hundreds of canvases over his lifetime. His music endures through performers such as Michael Tilson Thomas, who recorded his complete works, and through students such as James Tenney.