Dane Rudhyar
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Dane Rudhyar (March 23, 1895, in Paris – September 13, 1985, in San Francisco), né Daniel Chennevière, was a modernist composer and humanistic astrologer. He was the pioneer of modern transpersonal astrology.
Most of Rudhyar's more than forty books and hundreds of articles concern astrology and religion. The book that established his reputation in the astrological field was his first on the subject, The Astrology of Personality (1936). Arguing that astrology is not essentially predictive but rather productive of intuitive insights, this has proven to be one of the most influential tracts of "free-will" astrology, despite being written in the dense, circuitous style that characterizes much of Rudhyar's writing. He also wrote two novels and extensively on music as well, producing such books as Claude Debussy and His Work (1913), Dissonant Harmony (1928), Rebirth of Hindu Music (1928), The New Sense of Sound (1930), and The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music (1982).
Rudhyar's own compositions tend to employ dissonant harmony, emphatically not of a systematic variety such as Charles Seeger's—Rudhyar was philosophically opposed to such a rigid approach. His musical thought was influenced by Henri Bergson and theosophy, and he viewed composers as mediums, writing that "the new composer" was "no longer a 'composer,' but an evoker, a magician. His material is his musical instrument, a living thing, a mysterious entity endowed with vital laws of its own, sneering at formulas, fearfully alive." Rudhyar's most distinctive music is for piano, including his Tetragram (1920–67) and Pentagram (1924–26) series, Syntony (1919–24, rev. 1967), and Granites (1929). His works are almost all composed of brief movements—he felt that length and its attendant structural demands led to abstraction and away from the sensuous physicality of sound. He influenced several early-twentieth-century composers including Ruth Crawford and Carl Ruggles, members of the group centered around Henry Cowell known as the "ultra-modernists." Cowell paid homage to him with a solo piano piece, A Rudhyar (1924).
Late in his life, Rudhyar's musical work was rediscovered by the composers James Tenney and Peter Garland, who declared that Rudhyar's "best works occurred in the 1920s and...1970s!!!">
[edit] References
- Kirkpatrick, John, et al. (1997 [1988]). 20th-Century American Masters: Ives, Thomson, Sessions, Cowell, Gershwin, Copland, Carter, Barber, Cage, Bernstein. New York and London: W. W. Norton. (A Rudhyar: p. 129.)
- Rudhyar, Dane (1926). "The Birth of the Twentieth Century Piano: Concerning John Hays Hammond's New Device." Eolus 5, 14-17. (On "the new composer": p. 15.)
[edit] External links
- Dane Rudhyar's Vision of American Dissonance article from American Music (Summer 1999), by Carol J. Oja
- Explorations: Astrology and God-Realization article by John White on Rudhyar explains the tenets of transpersonal astrology
- Rudhyar Archival Project reproduces many of Rudhyar's original writings on music, astrology, and spirituality
