Does the personality of a composer matter? Will knowing more about the life of a composer enhance our experience of his or her music? “You bet!” is Other Minds’ answer, as judged from its Monday Sept. 27 combo of exhibit, discussion, and performance that brought the remarkable Dane Rudhyar (1895-1985) back to life. The new music organization’s event at the Swedenborgian Church in San Francisco turned out to be one of the most engaging, intimate, and succintly comprehensive memorials I have ever attended. Were only the man’s music as inherently interesting as his life!
Rudhyar was born Daniel Chenneviere in Paris, but in 1917, not long after emigrating to the U.S., he renamed himself in part after the Rigvedic storm god Rudra. Becoming fascinated with matters philosophical, psychological, and occult, he became a specialist in astrology, and influenced many through his writings and lectures — his major source of income. Over the course of his peripatetic life and four marriages, he lived in or near many spiritual centers in southern California, the Eastern seaboard, New Mexico, and other locales before settling in Palo Alto in 1976. Much of his music was written prior to 1930, in the span of 1949-1952, and later in the 1970s. He was a man of strong and varied artistic impulses: In addition to his music, books, articles, novels, and poetry, he took up painting for a decade or so starting in 1938.
Other Minds’ splendid 32-page program included four full-color reproductions of his art, excerpts of his writings on music, more than two dozen excellent photographs, and an excerpt from a book published (last year the University of Rochester Press) by musicologist Deniz Ertan: Dane Rudhyar: His Music, Thought, and Art. In addition to his paintings, the exhibition displayed many personal letters from illustrious individuals like Henry Cowell, Carl Ruggles — and Anaïs Nin, who wrote, “ … being writers, philosophers, mystics, we immediately responded to your cosmic vision which embraces all.” Ruggles, also an artist/composer like Arnold Schoenberg and Rudhyar, wrote “I often think of you and your splendid loyalists like some lone star suddenly appearing in the night.”
Meeting Rudhyar the First Time
The cramped church was the location of the concert itself, which was preceded by an all-too-short panel discussion moderated by Other Minds’ Artistic and Executive Director Charles Amirkhanian. On the panel were the composer’s assistant, Joseph Jacobs (who reported that when he first met Rudhyar, “I felt like I was in a scene from Forbidden Planet), his last wife, Leyla Rudhyar Hill (who met her husband from an ad in Psychology Today), and Ertan (who introduced some of Rudhyar’s philosophical concepts such as the cyclic nature of civilizations and the function of cyclic “seed points”).
With all this background, and intimations of possibly heavy-duty philosophy underlying the music I was about to hear for the first time, I was expecting to be thrown into a complex and phantasmagorical musical mesh à la Kaikhosru Shapurji Sorabji’s Opus Clavicimbalisticum. What a surprise, then, when the first work on the program, the 1920 Poem for Violin and Piano was dutifully performed by violinist David Abel and pianist Julie Steinberg. It came across as if the late 19th-century French composer Ernest Chausson (who wrote the romantic Poem for violin and orchestra), had not died in a bicycle accident, but had lived to take a couple of lessons from Arnold Schoenberg.
The next piece, Transmutation, tone sequence in seven movements, from 1976 for solo piano, was only a little thornier, replete with early Modernist influences, but it was easy to grasp. This was due to three signal characteristics of Rudhyar’s style: habitual repetition of sometimes catchy little motives, an preponderance of heavy bass notes, and contrasting strivings upward. Like Olivier Messiaen, he was chord focused, building steadily and deliberately from a base with intervals, or quickly rolling chords — deftly executed by pianist Sarah Cahill. Form was of lesser interest: Ideas introduced, pulsed, and succeeded themselves until they were exhausted. This limited style made it difficult for the composer to maintain contrast over the length of the whole work. For example, the third and fourth movements sounded too much alike; either could have been dropped without damage.
Star Piece of the Evening
After intermission, and more audience examination of the fascinating exhibits, Cahill returned to play two more piano works. Stars from Pentagram No. 3 (1925) was my favorite. Short and scintillating, it brought me closest to the immensity of the night sky and its distant suns, the source of preoccupation for ancient and modern astrologers. The second number, Granites, was most like the music of Rudhyar’s friend Ruggles, brittle, uncompromising — and overly reminiscent of dated avant-garde movements in the late 1920s.
The concert concluded with the 1979 Crisis & Overcoming (String Quartet No. 2), dryly accomplished by the Ives Quartet. Here the erstwhile Romantic was trying to come back to the fore, without much help from the performers. I heard snippets of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, a motive from Tchaikovsky’s Sixth Symphony, some fugal entries, and a pleasant violin melody to finish up.
Were Rudhyar alive, I’m sure he would defend the significance of his music with statements of his like
… my music is inspired by the ideal of dissonant harmony, in which unity is to be achieved as the result of a process of integration involving both development in time (melody) and the resonance of musical space. In the former approach chords appear as stong tonal relationships, while in dissonant harmony they become “simultaneities of sound,” area of resonant intensity, the vibratory quality of which is determined by the dramatic process the music endeavors to evoke.
Unfortunately, Rudhyar’s music seems limited by the man’s verbosity: Most of it moves at the pace of a deep and sincere oral disquisition, without a scherzo to liven it up from time to time. What it does offer has been better accomplished by others. Nevertheless, my short acquaintance with his output has been enlightening. Whatever the merits of his music, Rudhyar’s life is a sterling example of multifarious artistic strivings of the human spirit, without which the world would be a poorer place. I thank Other Minds for bringing him again to our attention.