A few days earlier I wrote pen pal Larry Polansky and included a new revision of my earliest still-existent composition Accords (sketched 2011, revised 2014 and 2017). His reply, "it really reminds me a bit of Rudhyar…. but more interesting!!!!", may have been over-generous… but it was encouraging, and intriguing.
Having never heard Rudhyar's music (or name) before, it was thrilling that the more deeply I looked the more I found methods and aims of the early American Modernist composers in some sympathy with own; particularly the emphasis on less academic, rigorous, rational modes of composition, performance, and listening, recognition of disorientation as an enlivened state, and exploration of other potential spiritual effects from organized sound.*
For several years I had been intrigued by Henry Cowell's chamber works and also by Leo Ornstein's gentler side (featuring examples of these in my WRIR and WMMT radio programs), but was not much familiar with Ruth Crawford (Seeger) and not at all with Dane Rudhyar. It was very encouraging to discover an American movement/tradition which gave me a feeling like kinship, connection, rootedness, belonging, even if I was 80 years late to the party.
I had always imagined my piece Accords as though it was some forgotten artifact of early 20th century chamber music—now I was discovering its unknown context!**
Here is a recent recording of Accords. Incidentally, it lasts just as long as it takes to read through what follows.
{*A decade and a half earlier, making recordings with synthesizers with the aim of inducing altered states of consciousness was a late-teenage preoccupation of mine. I made dozens of these experiments which were mostly unsuccessful, both in terms of aesthetics and utility.
**When Accords was originally sketched in 2011 I was very familiar with early 20th century chamber music from lesser-known eastern European composers and very few Americans. The most comparable or vaguely related music I could have been inspired by would have been the more atmospheric sides of Roslavets, Bacewicz, Stanchinsky, Feinberg, Lourié, Esphai, but also Bax, Bloch.}
Judith Tick's article on Ruth Crawford, Dane Rudhyar & the influence of Spiritual Concepts & Theosophy on their music was originally published in the Journal of the American Musicological Society, Vol.44, No.2. You can access the full piece from Northeastern University here.
These are the extracts that I margin-marked as most special/inspiring.
- The core of Ruth Crawford's transcendental modernism is what she termed "spiritual concept."
Crawford once wrote that the greater truth for her was "feeling" an idea rather than thinking it, that "her tendency was toward 'spiritual concept'." She "liked to wonder about things rather than know about them." Such wonder can be filled with awe as well as doubt.
- Crawford's reading was a mixture of American, Eastern, and occult writers.
- Criticizing the religious ethnocentrism of the West, [Helena] Blavatsky postulated an "Ancient Wisdom" or truth that united all religions in a "Universal Brotherhood."
The belief in cross-cultural existential principles was precisely her point.
- Other writers and artists later used Blavatsky's theories to create visual analogies and literary paradigms for the spiritual principles she postulated as truths.
That Blavatsky's global pan-historical syntheses contributed to the emergence of modernism has been demonstrated most recently in art history, scholars have traced the varieties of "cosmic imagery" derived from Theosophy in the evolution of abstract art.
- In "Hidden Meanings," Maurice Tuchman reproduces examples of occult drawings and paintings to illustrate the "five underlying impulses: cosmic imagery, vibration, synesthesia, duality, sacred geometry."
The translation of Theosophical ideas into music is discussed in [Theosophical Society's] "The Esoteric Nature of Music" videotape.
- In Isis Unveiled Blavatsky states that the purpose of the [Theosophical] Society was "to experiment practically in the occult power of Nature, and to collect and disseminate…information about Oriental religious philosophies."
- A quotation from Thoreau's "Thoughts on Nature" is the frontispiece to Crawford's diary from 1927 and has these words underlined: "probe the universe in a myriad points… Whatever things I perceive with my entire man, those let me record and it will be poetry.
- Both as poet and philosopher, Whitman was a model for Crawford for the spiritualizing of the vernacular.
Whitman also represented the democratizing of inspiration that marks Crawford's aesthetic. Unlike German expressionists, who characteristically searched for material in the neurotic and subconscious, Crawford most typically endowed every day life with artistic expressiveness, penetrating the surface of the mundane for creative content.
Crawford made the generalization "one can draw a kind of dramatic or rhythmic or dynamic pleasure from the very smallest things."
- Sandburg's populism also appealed to Crawford. He was "right to search among down and outers for underlying poetry," she once wrote, for he was "ten times more likely to find it there than in more polite circles."
- In defending Scriabin to a fellow student, Crawford cited the critic Paul Rosenfeld's literary fantasia on the composer, claiming that it "produced in me an effect deeper than almost anything I have ever read."
- Scriabin's influence on her harmonic pallet was palpable, as others have pointed out; the issue of sonority rather than form was paramount. She freely adapted his method of constructing chords from various kinds of fourths, abandoned key signatures, and explored post-tonal language through dense dissonant harmonies.
- When in an interview the young [Gitta] Gradova described Bach's music as a "serene expression of the highest soul experience" and Scriabin's music as expressing "soul experiences so lofty that this indeed may be termed 'music of the astral body,'" she summed up the world in which Crawford moved at the time.
- [Dane] Rudhyar justified post-tonal language through his own version of "spiritual concept." He defined dissonance as spiritual symbol in the article "The Dissonant in Art."
- Crawford quoted long excerpts in her diary, impressed by Rudhyar's "vision of the brotherhood of man, which blends all as human beings, despite slight exteriors which are discordant. To bring together in harmony far-related objects is a glorious achievement And so we see that dissonance is all a matter of point of view. It depends on us whether we look at it from a tribal or a universal approach."
Thus through dissonance might the world be saved from the "feudalism" of tonality.
- Rudhyar attacked Western musical practice as decadent and overintellectualized. [And he rejected] the traditional structural forms of tonality and the techniques of counterpoint as rationalistic rather than intuitive. Perhaps deriving his method from surrealist ideas of automatism, Rudhyar claimed he composed by letting his hands drop on the keyboard at random.
Without adopting his formal nonchalance, Crawford accepted Rudhyar as "an inspiration leading her to experiment with new ideas," rather than a model. His belief in "resonance," that is to say homophonic textures of synthetic chords, did affect her more directly. - Rudhyar valued [Crawford's] music from the 1920s more highly than her later composition. It was more spontaneous, less "determined," less "intentional."
- Details in several [of Crawford's] works illuminate the ways in which [her elusive "spiritual concept" is "absorbed and arrested." Among these are the local referential gesture, exposed through expressive terminology like "mystic," "veiled," and "religioso"; the hidden program, in which an untitled work is revealed to have an extra-musical context; and the free, imaginative recreation of Eastern sacred chant.
- The term "mistico" applies to more than the harmony [in Crawford's Sonata for Violin and Piano], appearing first over a single tone, G#. Such a gesture seems disingenuous: how can one tone convey a mystic mood? The answer lies most likely in Rudhyar's theory of the symbolic content of the single tone, which he took from non-Western music.
["A pervasive Chinese concept" is "that each single tone is a musical entity in itself, that musical meaning lies intrinsically in tones themselves, and that one must investigate sound to know tones and investigate tones to know music." (from Chou Wen-chung, "Asian Concepts and Twentieth-Century Composers.")]
Thus Crawford's expression of "mystic" in relation to a single tone was intended to alter the performer's mentality, changing the nature of the concentration that would somehow be communicated through touch.
- Rudhyar proselytized for "the paramount importance of the pedals" in "blending chords": "Whereas in classical tonal music each distinct harmony had to keep its resonance separate, in this "syntonistic" music there is in theory but one harmony, that of the whole body of Sound or of Nature, and therefore chords must be made usually to blend their resonances…"
- [Djane Herz's] distinction between the artist and the mystic: the latter is simply farther along the road which the former is travelling: he has gone beyond the need for expression.
- Crawford's love of the abstract surface that hid private references was typical of her modernism.
Crawford preferred the paradoxical aphorisms of Eastern mysticism to Ivesian quotation.
- For Lao-Tse the Tao (or Divine Principle) reveals itself through a tranquility whose perfection is emphasized through the contrast with periodic motion, as suggested by this passage:
- Attan the utmost in Passivity.
Hold firm to the basis of Quietude.
The myriad things take shape and rise to activity,
But I watch them fall back to their repose.
Like vegetation that luxuriantly grows
But returns to the root (soil) from which it springs.
- Attan the utmost in Passivity.
- [from a letter written by Charles Seeger to Ruth Crawford:]
When the pranava is pronounced in earnest it [is] done at the pitch most suited to the individual voice regardless of any harmonic relation with the other pitches of other voices sounding it at the same time … the pitch gradually gets lower and lower. If kept on long enough—say twenty minutes—the men's voices especially (but the women's also), attain an almost incredible impression of depth and the whole body vibrates to the sound…
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