Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art (review)

In 1936 Dane Rudhyar published The Astrology of Personality: A Reformulation of Astrological Concepts and Ideals, in Terms of Contemporary Psychology and Philosophy. His book was based on numerous articles he had written in the early 1930s, particularly for American Astrology, and postulated a new “humanistic astrology” that argued the stars did not directly shape human affairs but instead revealed the psychological forces at work in the human psyche. The work shocked many of his friends who knew him primarily as a composer, and his work in this arena created perennial problems for his later musical reception. Indeed, the complexity of a man who passionately pursued and excelled at such disparate fields has long been a barrier to any attempt to encompass Rudhyar’s achievements in their totality. Add to these skills Rudhyar’s painting acumen and his novels, such as Rania—An Epic Narrative (1973) and one quickly discovers why Rudhyar is frequently mentioned but rarely explored in depth.

Thankfully, Deniz Ertan has risen to the challenge of Rudhyar’s eclectic accomplishments with Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art. Throughout her detailed study, Ertan systematically explores Rudhyar the musician, aesthetician, painter, and astrologer following three themes she finds central to his ideology: autumn, synthesis, and resonance (23). This exploration does not follow the traditional chronology one might expect from a study subtitled “His Music, Thought, and Art.” Instead, part 1 delves into the “Autumnal Decay” of early twentieth-century Europe, part 2 looks into resonances between Rudhyar’s ideas and those he found in the “Orient,” and part 3 finds “Rawness and Vigor, Innocence and Experience” through the synthesis Rudhyar accomplished in the United States.

Part 1, “Autumnal Decay: Seed Ideas,” opens boldly with the declaration that “Dane Rudhyar often referred to himself symbolically as a seed thrown away from the old world of Europe to the New World of America” (13). Since Rudhyar saw the seed as symbolic of “sacrifice, decay, death, rebirth, . . . direction and expectation” (13), Ertan uses the metaphor extensively to provide the philosophical and aesthetic background out of which the composer, then known by his given name of Daniel Chennevière, emerged. She traces Nietzsche’s influence on Rudhyar’s belief in the “glorification of an individual against a universe” (15), Henri Bergson’s decisive impact on his understanding that “creative evolution is concerned with both continuity (of life or tradition) and discontinuity (of products)” (17), and Debussy and Scriabin’s shaping of his musical language. Most tellingly, however, Ertan delineates the negative influences on Rudhyar’s development, particularly those of Stravinsky and Schoenberg. These two composers represented for Rudhyar a striving for superficial originality and new sensations; in contrast, Rudhyar trusted intuition more than formula or nationalistic impulses. Ertan rightly argues that many composers, particularly those who ultimately worked in the United States in the 1920s, saw that as “Western music was becoming increasingly artificial by breaking away from Nature (favoring instead the ego, status, and patriotic fanaticism), it was epitomizing a civilization that had become spiritually dead” (48). Rudhyar’s increasing frustration with the direction of European music and the sickness he saw infesting it led him to “dis-Europeanize” himself, adopt a new name from Rudra, the god of radical transformation, and move to the United States.

Part 2, “Wholeness: The Scope of the Orient,” explores the resonances in Rudhyar’s music, thought, and art from his encounters with the “Orient” that were ultimately “a conceptual awakening to new transpersonal possibilities and transcultural syntheses” (70). Here, a sophisticated interplay between diverse philosophies and aesthetics work together with musical analyses to present a complex portrait of Rudhyar’s aesthetic. Ertan systematically teases out what the “Orient” meant for Rudhyar, showing how he found integration or “wholeness,” as he put it, in Asian and Indian arts and religious practices. Like Harry Partch, Rudhyar wanted to break Western boundaries between music and visual art and ritual. Like John Cage, he wished to...