Music Against Gravity

_'Madame X installed a piano in the Alps."_ -- Rimbaud, 1886

An old man not far from death lies in his bed in a nursing home in New England. The conductor Michael Tilson Thomas enters the room with a tape recorder. He places earphones on the gaunt head and turns the machine on. "Great! DAMN FINE WORK!" the old man declares, coming alive as he sings along with the music. He is Carl Ruggles, American composer (1876-1971), in the last of his 95 years. He is hearing his own composition, _Sun-Treader_, whose title was inspired by the epithet that Robert Browning bestowed upon Percy Bysshe Shelley.