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Rudhyar stresses that in composing music he is not, like so many other
composers past and present, fashioning or contriving musical "objects." For
him, music is and should be the exteriorization in tone of an inner life — the
flow of life (or in Ira Progoff's sense, the psyche) itself.
In his writings on music, Rudhyar has dealt with, among others, the following
themes:
1. Primordially, Sound (with a capital S) is an inaudible (anahatta in
Sanskrit) , creative, metaphysical force that precipitates, as it were, the
divine Idea of a universe into objective material manifestation. It has
essentially a "descending" movement to which matter resonates by producing
ascending progressions of audible sounds (the harmonic series of
fundamental and overtones modified by the timbre or characteristic tone-
quality of particular instruments or relating bodies).
2. Music, on the other hand, is an art -- the organization of sounds a
particular culture develops. What is acceptable in music therefore varies
from culture to culture and from stage to stage in a culture's development.
- "The historical development of music follows and can be
understood only in terms of the unfoldment of the human mind, which
builds the systems of organization giving stable structures to the sounds
the people of any culture need for communicating their collective needs
and responses.
Thus, for Rudhyar, music is a culturally- conditioned language for
communication at the psychic level — the level of the culture's collective
psychism. Long before Oriental music was acceptable to Western musicians
and musicologists — they called it "barbaric noise" — Rudhyar stressed that
Oriental music was as valid and serves the same function in Oriental cultures
as Western music does in Western cultures.
The question of whether music can ever be a truly universal language
is, for Rudhyar, an open question, depending upon how cultures and minds
respond to the new mental vibrations of the all- human process of civilization.
3. Notes versus Tones:
For Rudhyar, the tonality- dominated notes of Western music are
abstract entities having musical meaning only in relation to one another; as
they can be transposed or played on a variety of instruments without altering
their musical meaning, they do not refer to the experience of actual,
particular sounds. Moreover, in the West music resides more in the written
score than in the actual experience of hearing it. Western musical works are
"objects" whose formal structures and developmental patterns are to be
appreciated more by the eyes and intellect than by the ears and psyche.
4. In early tribal societies, on the other hand, tones were used for magical
purposes — that is, for the transmission of will and the subjugation of
biological energies. Notes and intervals were not "spatialized" by being
written down, but were dealt with instinctively and psychically.
5. In the early magical use of tones, sonic progressions (what we call
"scales") were felt to descend (that is, to proceed naturally from high to low
pitch). This use of tones by early peoples reflected the "descent" of
inaudible Sound in the cosmogenic process. The great evolutionary change
in human consciousness that occurred in the sixth and fifth centuries B.C.
had its parallel in music in the reversal of musical consciousness: the
"natural" way of producing and hearing sound switched from being
descending to being ascending. This change probably was implied in and
spread by the Pythagorean use of the monochord as a didactic instrument. In
using the monochord, Pythagoras was attempting to demonstrate the
operation of impersonal, metabiological principles of number and form as
the foundation of existence. His teachings and reform in Greece paralleled
the activity of his contemporary, Gautama Buddha, in India — and both were
manifestations of the release of a new mental vibration spurring the process
of individualization.
6. Western tonality developed on the foundation of the measurement of
exact frequencies of sounds and intervals, a written musical notation
"spatializing" music, and polyphony — all of which are products of the kind of
intellectual mind developing in the West since the sixth century B. C.
Polyphony paralleled the acceleration of the process of individualization in
European culture: whereas tribal peoples express their psychic unanimity by
singing "as of one voice," the members of a society affected by the process
of individualization feel moved to express their individual differences in
multiple melodic lines. Tonality became necessary to integrate this
centrifugal kind of music.
7. Tonality is the musical equivalent of the autocratic rule of the king (the
tonic), his prime minister (the dominant), and a bureaucracy that measures
and enforces relationships within the whole. In a pluralistic European
culture, the music of which consists of abstract notes, it substitutes for the
psychic power of integration what once was inherent in sequences of
communicative tones.
8. The tonality-system had to be transcended sooner or later, and late
Romantic works (for example, the late works of Franz Liszt) pushed the
structure to its limits. The process of transcending tonality in music parallels
what Rudhyar calls the "deculturalization" and "dis- Europeanization" of
Western consciousness.
Four composers of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century
were central to this process: Scriabin, by trying to pour a mystical
consciousness into old forms and instruments; Satie, by spoofing musical
conventions and thereby becoming the precursor of Dadaism and the
anarchic type of avant- garde; Stravinsky, by stunning the European
aristocracy with the neoprimitivism of his "Rite of Spring," thereby opening
the possibility of a renewed sacromagical use of sound (but, frightened by
the primal power of what he had released, he sought refuge in retreat —
neoclassicism); and Schoenberg, by abandoning tonality altogether (but he
replaced it with other rigid intellectual rules that were, for Rudhyar, "like
substituting totalitarianism for the divine right of kings" .
9. Of the various trends of avant-garde music developed since World War
I, Rudhyar believes that most are a continuation of the cathartic, catabolic
process of deconditioning. But, for him, deconditioning and severance from
the past are necessary before any significant rebirth or transformation can
occur, and he feels the same way about most trends in contemporary society.
The current "minimalism" in avant- garde music, especially "meditation
music" composed of simple, highly repetitive statements simulating ancient
magical practices — having been strongly influenced by its composers'
experiences of psychedelic drugs and Oriental philosophies and practices
(often highly modified for Western consumption), also represents mainly a
deconditioning process.
Since young composers opposed to the materialism of Western
culture have to face the difficult problem of having their works performed by
highly paid professional musicians, they often resort to electronic
instruments — products of the very technological mentality they decry — the
actual tones of which sound, to Rudhyar, hollow and devoid of a human,
expressive, or ensouling quality. On the other hand, while the actual tones
produced by some composer- musicians working with acoustically resonant
instruments (gongs or bells, for example) have this ensouling quality and
beauty, the organization of sounds into music lacks cohesion and inspiration
and often banalizes the tones used.
10. For Rudhyar, any truly significant rebirth or transformation in music
must integrate within a broader, more inclusive frame of reference and
organized consciousness values of both non- Western, sacromagical music
and features of the Western mental approach based on proportion and
form. Needed for the development of a new musical consciousness and thus
a truly new music are:
* a new sense of musical space paralleling a new philosophical and
metaphysical understanding of space: space as fullness of being rather than
space as an empty container in which unrelated material entities act and react
according to "natural laws";
* a renewed sense of the sacred in sound;
* a new sense of "holistic resonance" of actual tones;
* a new sense of organization in music.
11. Consonant versus Dissonant Harmony:
Since 1925 Rudhyar has spoken "of the difference between consonant and
dissonant harmony, a distinction which applies not only to music, but to all
types of relationships. I spoke therefore of the Consonant and Dissonant
Orders of relationships."
- "While the Consonant Order finds its unifying principle in a
unity of origin (the fundamental tone, No. 1), the Dissonant Order
experiences unity (or rather, multi- unity) in the cooperative association
of equal entities, each with a different character. In terms of social
organization, the Consonant Order manifests as the tribal order,
spiritually, if not biologically, rooted in a common Great Ancestor who
lived in a more or less mythical past; the Dissonant Order refers to the
true democratic [or companionate] order in which individuals who are
basically different and equal come together in order to work out a
common purpose to be fulfilled in the future.
- "A typically consonant, tonal music is ruled by the tonic and the
dominant, just as ancient monarchies were ruled by the king and the prime
minister . . . Everything in the realm theoretically belonged to the king,
and all developments followed a formalistic principle embodying
variations on a root unity. The emphasis was on looking back to the
original one.
- "The dissonant approach to music, to society, and to human
existence in general moves in an opposite direction. Unity is not given, it
is to be made in the consciousness of the auditors. Life and music
constitute, from this point of view, a problem of integration. One can still
speak of a unity of origin in a metaphysical or occult sense, but this
dissonant approach is existential in that it deals with what exists now —
that is, with separate individuals engaged today in a vast process of a
global. harmonization, individuals seeking to organize their differences,
so as to reach a state of all- inclusive integration, a state of plenitude."
Recently, Rudhyar has begun to think about substituting the term
"transsonant" for dissonant, to evoke the possibility of a dissonant, highly
resonant sound acting as a vehicle through which inspiriting meaning could be
transmitted. More than new developments in composition, performance
technique, or instruments, however, a transsonant use of sound would
depend primarily on the level of consciousness of the composer- performer
and the hearers.
12. While Rudhyar has written orchestral and chamber music, he has
composed mainly for the piano, pioneering a technique which he calls
"orchestral pianism," in which the total resonance of tone produced is more
significant than separate notes and formal articulation. For him, the basic
sonic material produced by a piano comes from the "holistic resonance" of
its entire sounding board rather than from the separate vibrations of its
strings. Moreover, for him, the "physical world of human experience is not
unlike an immense sounding board; and the sounding board of a piano is the
best illustration or symbol afforded by Western music, because the seven
octaves of the piano symbolize the normal extension of our practically
usable musical space."
For Rudhyar, it is significant that one person at the piano can
"directly manipulate the . . . whole musical space to which human beings can
respond," and can "fecundate" it with his or her creative will and
individualized psychism. This act of fecundation parallels in human
experience the descending activity of cosmogenic (inaudible) Sound: the
creative will and emotions of the performer impact the keys of the piano, and
the resonant material of the piano's sounding board produces audible tone
carrying the "message" of the creative intent.
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