It’s perhaps not surprising that a solitary, iconoclastic 20th century composer should identify with a solitary, iconoclastic 18th century poet. The ultra-modernist American composer Carl Ruggles took as the title for one of his most famous orchestral pieces a phrase from a motto by the early Romantic British poet William Blake which ran, “Great things are done when men and mountains meet.”

On today’s date in 1924, Ruggles’ “Men and Mountains” received its premiere performance at a New York concert of the International Composers’ Guild.

The music critic of the New York Times was in attendance and wrote: “Mr. Ruggles, in his ‘Men and Mountains,’ leaps upon the listener with a yell. There is a wild shriek of the brass choir, and thereafter no rest for the wicked. It is as if the irate composer had seized a plump, disparaging critic by some soft and flabby part of his anatomy, and pinched him blue, crying the while, ‘You will hear me and you’ll not go to sleep, either!’ No one slept, either during or after the concert, for there is a Ruggles contingent, and a determined one. They applauded in phalanxes, while others kept silent or groaned. This was,” concluded the Times, “one of the most entertaining moments of the evening.”

By the time of his death in 1971, at age of 95, Ruggles would come to be revered—if not always performed—as the craggy, last-standing survivor of the craggy ultra-modernist movement of the early 20th century.