Rudhyar in Retrospect 2: The Occult

Dane Rudhyar studied astrology briefly in the 1920s, with Alice Bailey among others, but didn't delve into the subject seriously until after marriage to his first wife, Malya Comfort (above), who introduced him to the seminal American astrologer Marc Edmond Jones (below), a fascinating character who conjured the 360 Sabian symbols with the medium Elsie Wheeler in 1925.



According to the Sabian symbols website, it was shortly after Jones had published the 1931 mimeographed version of the Sabian symbols that Rudhyar became interested in his work. Marc described their association as follows: "The Sabian Symbols happened to fascinate Dane Rudhyar and I gave him permission to present them in the frame of, in his way today of explaining it, his different or 'special social psychology and abstract philosophy' and in his abridgment they gave a redoubled indication of their validity. His Astrology of Personality and articles in the magazines at the time were very largely responsible for bringing my contribution out in the open or to first broad public notice. He however has never been a member of the Sabian Assembly or in any real sense a student of mine, but always has been his own man very completely, and this makes the current development all the more significant. In his new book that has just by several days come to my hand from his with a warm autograph, An Astrological Mandala: The Cycle of Transformations and Its 360 Symbolic Phases, he explains this later contribution of his on the dust jacket as "A reinterpretation of the Sabian symbols, presenting them as a contemporary American I CHING."



According to the Khaldea website bio of Rudhyar, astrology became the vessel where he could "demonstrate in a concrete and effective way the workings of cyclic and holistic patterns in the lives of individuals and nations — as a personalized application of his philosophical and psychological concepts...This enabled him to get in much closer touch with the reactions and aspirations of people who, intuitively if not clearly, could respond to his ideas." A crucial character was Paul Clancy, who started "American Astrology" magazine in 1932, which became nationally distributed on newsstands in 1934, "and its phenomenal growth began at once. Paul Clancy requested more and more articles, and Rudhyar began to write two or three long astrological articles monthly for the magazine, providing him, for the first time, with a regular and dependable income."



"Alice Bailey, after reading Rudhyar's 1934 articles, urged him to collect and amplify them in a book which her Lucis Publishing Company agreed to publish. And so was born in 1936 the now famous Astrology of Personality, which Paul Clancy greeted as 'the greatest forward step in astrology since the time of Ptolemy. It represents the birth of a new epoch.' So began Rudhyar's astrological career which astounded and shocked many of his older friends at a time when 'thinking people' generally regarded astrology as an archaic superstition. Forty years later, during the late-1960s, the situation greatly changed, and Rudhyar at long last came into his own."



According to a program note in the Other Minds' presentation of Rudhyar's music this week, "After 1929, the Great Depression, the pressure of personal circumstances, and developments in the musical world stopped Rudhyar's activities as a composer for many years. Although there were brief interludes of composing and performances (especially in New York in 1949-50), his time was devoted to lecturing, painting (between 1938 and 1949), and writing. He published several books of poetry, two novels, and volumes on esthetic and social criticism. Over twenty books written between 1935 and 1978 pioneered a psychospiritual reformation of astrology."



Finding Rudhyar's books at your local bookstore or library is just about impossible, since most are currently out of print and any books dealing with the occult tend to be stolen, according to librarians. The San Francisco Library Main Branch, for instance, owns quite a number of Rudhyar volumes but they are hidden behind a locked door at a page desk on the third floor (above) with Carl Jung and other esoteric writers.



The easiest opportunity to read Rudhyar is through the Khaldea website (click here) created by his fourth and final wife, Leyla R. Hill. She has posted a number of out-of-print volumes on the site along with a gallery of Rudhyar's paintings and essays.



Rudhyar's writing style ranges from the impenetrable and jargon-filled to the simplest and most graceful prose. His ideas about "mutants" who are here to help raise consciousness are fascinating, and his theories on historical cycles, especially our own, are aging well. When he was discovered in the late 1960s by hippies getting involved in astrology, he was more bemused than anything, warning them that psychedelic drugs were all well and good as an experience, but they were just a crack in the door and that creating a higher consciousness required quite a bit more application and work.

Rudhyar in Retrospect 3: The Other Minds Concerts

In the early 1970s, Rudhyar moved from Southern to Northern California. Charles Amirkhanian (above) was Music Director of KPFA-FM in Berkeley from 1969-1992, presiding over a golden age of local public radio, and in the early 1970s he devoted a number of broadcasts to Rudhyar's music and interviews with the composer. (You can listen to highlights at the RadiOM website by clicking here.) Listening to Rudhyar and Amirkhanian in a 1972 interview is a treat, especially hearing evidence that Rudhyar had left everything behind in the Old World except a thick French accent. It's also fascinating listening to a young Amirkhanian, whose entire life has been devoted to being a "seed-man" in the world of music. Not long after these interviews, Rudhyar embarked on another spurt of composing for the last ten years of his life, this time accompanied by grants, performances, and honors.



For the 25th anniversary of Rudhyar's death, Amirkhanian's Other Minds Music organization produced a concert of Rudhyar's music from both the 1920s and the 1970s in the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco last Monday.



The small church turned out to be jammed to the gills for the performance, so I turned in my press ticket and promised to make it down the Peninsula on Wednesday evening for an encore performance in the Palo Alto suburb of Portola Valley.



Rudhyar's music from the 1920s and 1970s sounds remarkably similar, an attractively difficult mix of dissonance and beauty, with Scriabin as a model but sounding more like Charles Ives and Henry Cowell.



It also looks fiendishly difficult to play, particularly in its complicated counting. I asked Sarah Cahill (above with Other Minds Associate Director Adam Fong) if there were any special difficulties, and she replied in an email:

"Sometimes he writes about how he wants to convey the rhythms of non-verbal speech through music, so he never gives you a steady beat, but instead the music is always fluctuating and evolving through the kind of irregular rhythms we use in speech. For instance, in "Granites," if you look at the first page of the score, you'll notice there's no time signature. You'll also notice that he has measures with "3" over large brackets, entire phrases (meaning it's one huge triplet), and then sixteenth-note triplets within that and also groups of two and four sixteenth notes. That's difficult to play if you're counting precisely. But I don't think Rudhyar is like Elliott Carter, a composer who really demands a strict internal metronome. Both Leyla [his widow] and Deniz [an academic who's just written a biography], who guided me a bit in these performances, stressed that you have to feel it even more than counting strictly. But then, that "feeling" brings up another challenge: you'll see in the program notes for Transmutation that Rudhyar has a real plan for that set of seven pieces, and there has to be a real psychic transformation through the entire sequence. That is probably even more of a challenge than Rudhyar's rhythmic writing."

Valley Presbyterian Church in Portola Valley was spacious and fairly empty after the sold-out Swedenborgian performance, and the lighting of the trees behind the glass-backed altar by Allen Wilner was superb.



So were all the performers, including Julie Steinberg, piano and David Abel, violin (above) who played the opening "Poem for Violin and Piano" from 1920.



Sarah Cahill played the 1976 "Transmutation, tone sequence in seven moments" which had premiered in nearby Palo Alto. After intermission, she returned to the 1920s with "Stars from Pentagram No. 3" and "Granites." She seems to understand this kind of music as well as anyone in the world, and they were wonderful performances (click here for a Kosman review at SFGate confirming the impression).



The finale was his Second String Quartet from 1979 which was commissioned by the recently deceased Betty Freeman. The Ives Quartet (above) gave a great performance.



And so the seed continues to germinate.

Rudhyar in Retrospect 1: The Seed-Man

Daniel Chennevière was born in Paris in 1895 and died as Dane Rudhyar 90 years later in San Francisco, having experienced one of the richer lives in human history. He was bedridden at age 12 following the removal of one of his kidneys, which spared him from being killed in World War One a decade later. During his convalescence, he studied music and philosophy, receiving a degree in the latter at age 16 from the Sorbonne. As a teenager, he had an intuitive vision, according to the remarkable Khaldea website dedicated to his work (click here), "which conditioned his entire life and work: (1) Time is cyclic, and cyclicity governs civilizations as well as all aspects of existence; (2) Western civilization is coming to what could be symbolically called the autumn phase of its cycle of existence. Such realizations made Rudhyar feel the urge to divorce himself from Europe and to seek a "New World" — a land where he could sow himself as a seed, carrying within his being the harvest of whatever was viable and constructive in the European past. The ideal of the "seed man" thus rose in his consciousness, dominating his thinking and his actual living."



His first book, published in 1913, was a study of the music of Debussy and included three piano compositions of his own. Chennevière was in the center of the Western artistic and spiritual avant-garde his entire life, and his teenage years were no exception. He worked as a secretary to the sculptor Rodin, attended the premiere of "Le Sacre du Printemps," and composed music for Valentine de Saint-Point's (above) dance troupe, Métachorie. The latter, according to the khaldea website, "was a Futuristic form of multimedia performance art, an abstract synthesis of dance-motion, poetry, music, geometrical form, color and perfume. A controversial and outspoken personality, Ms. de Saint-Point is today recognized as the prototypical female performance artist."



In 1916, Métachorie came to the United States for performances at the Metropolitan Opera with Chennevière's music being conducted by Pierre Monteux. Chennevière never looked back, abandoning Europe for the New World, and legally changing his name to Rudhyar, close to the Sanskrit word for "red," with Dane added because U.S. authorities demanded a first name. He spent the next, destitute three years on the East Coast composing and studying Oriental philosophies, while befriending an amazing variety of characters from the composer Edgar Varese to conductor Leopold Stokowski. It was the latter who introduced him to the Philadelphia heiress and prominent Theosophist, Christine Wetherill Stevenson, who became his sponsor and helped Rudhyar arrive at Krotona, a utopian Theosophist colony (below) in the Hollywood Hills, on January 1, 1920. California, with a few detours, became Rudhyar's home for the rest of his life.



Rudhyar continued composing his polytonal, modernist music, and helped to found the International Composers Guild and the California New Music Society, along with his composer friend Henry Cowell, who he met in 1920 at the Temple of the People at the small Theosophist colony in Halcyon on the California Central Coast, which still exists. He also wrote incidental music for the Hollywood Pilgrimage Play (below) that was written by Christine Stevenson, which was a successor to her "Life of Buddha" outdoor theatrical starring the modern dancer Ruth St. Denis. Shuttling between California and New York, he worked with St. Denis' pupil, Martha Graham, improvising piano music for rehearsals of her earliest dance compositions. He worked a bit in films, notably playing Christ in Cecil B. DeMille's silent 1924 version of "The Ten Commandments," with appearances in the same role for six months in the live stage prologue to the film when it played at the Grauman's Theatre.



One of the first people he met in Hollywood was B.P. Wadia (above right), an important Indian labor organizer who eventually broke with the Theosophical Society and joined an offshoot called the United Lodge of Theosophists. Theosophy, an esoteric spiritual movement fusing Eastern and Western traditions, had been undergoing schisms since 1891, with the death of its founder H.P. Blavatsky (below), a wild, wandering Russian mystic whose two years in Tibet gave birth to her major text, "The Secret Doctrine." By 1920, The Theosophical Society in India was being headed by the English Blavatsky disciple Annie Besant, who was pushing Krishnamurti as the vehicle of the coming Buddha reincarnation Maitreya, a claim that Krishnamurti eventually publicly renounced himself.



Rudhyar and Krishnamurti (below) are interesting complementary figures, both nurtured by Theosophy but both strikingly individual rather than doctrinaire. Their messages can probably be summed up as: "Learn how to think for yourself, and the world will be transformed."



Krishnamurti's break in 1929 with Annie Besant and the Theosophists took place at a huge public gathering in the Netherlands, where he said the following:

"You may remember the story of how the devil and a friend of his were walking down the street, when they saw ahead of them a man stoop down and pick up something from the ground, look at it, and put it away in his pocket. The friend said to the devil, "What did that man pick up?" "He picked up a piece of the truth," said the devil. "That is a very bad business for you, then," said his friend. "Oh, not at all," the devil replied, "I am going to help him organize it." I maintain that truth is a pathless land, and you cannot approach it by any path whatsoever, by any religion, by any sect. That is my point of view, and I adhere to that absolutely and unconditionally. Truth, being limitless, unconditioned, unapproachable by any path whatsoever, cannot be organized; nor should any organization be formed to lead or coerce people along a particular path."