Dane Rudhyar

Dane Rudhyar (born Daniel Chennevière March 23, 1895 in Paris, France - September 13, 1985 in San Francisco, CA) was best known as a modernist composer and humanistic astrologer. He was the pioneer of modern psychological astrology, and he wrote dozens of books on the subject during his lifetime.

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March 23 - 1895 - Paris - France - September 13 - 1985 - San Francisco - Composer - Astrologer - Psychological astrology

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Most of Rudhyar's more than 40 books and hundreds of articles concerned astrology and religion. However, at the beginning and end of his life he wrote prolifically about music. His music books include: Claude Debussy and the Cycle of Musical Civilization, Dissonant Harmony (1928), The New Sense of Sound (1930), and The Magic of Tone and the Art of Music (1982). He also wrote two novels. The book most central to his astrological work was his first, The Astrology of Personality, which has been (despite the dense circuitousness of much of Rudhyar's writing) one of the most influential tracts of "free-will" astrology, arguing that astrology is not essentially predictive but rather productive of intuitive insights.

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Rudhyar's music uses dissonant harmony, emphatically not of a systematic variety such as Charles Seeger's (he was philosophically opposed to such a rigid approach to music composition). His musical thought was influenced by Henri Bergson and Theosophy, and he viewed composers as mediums, writing (1926, 15) 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." Arguably, Rudhyar's best music was for piano, including his Tetragram series, Syntony, Paeans, and Granites. His works are almost all composed of brief movements because he felt that length and its attendant structural demands led to abstraction, and away from the sensuous physicality of sound. He was influential on several early twentieth-century composers including Ruth Crawford Seeger and Carl Ruggles, members of the group centered around Henry Cowell known as the "ultra-modernists."

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Dissonant harmony - Charles Seeger - Henri Bergson - Theosophy - Medium - Ruth Crawford Seeger - Carl Ruggles - Henry Cowell

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In the 1970s, Rudhyar's compositions were rediscovered by fans including James Tenney and Peter Garland. Garland claimed that Rudhyar's "best works occurred in the 1920s and...1970s!"

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James Tenney - Peter Garland

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