the-astrology-book

Rudhyar, Dane
ter. At this time he wrote Claude Debussy and the Cycle of Musical Civilization, in
which he saw Western civilization as having reached an autumnal state.
Rudhyar then refocused his attention on music and the piano and was able to
meet M. Durand, the music publisher, who read his book on Debussy, commissioned
another booklet on him, and published three of Rudhyar’s piano pieces. Rudhyar began
studying with Émile Pessard at the Paris Conservatoire but broke off his studies when
World War I began. He was exempted from military service for health reasons and in
1916 left for New York with two friends to prepare for a performance of their dancedrama
Metachory, for which he had written some music. His pieces Poemes Ironique and
Vision Vegetale were performed at the Metropolitan Opera under the baton of Pierre
Monteux in April 1917 and were the first polytonal music heard in America.
Having met Sasaki Roshi, who later became a Zen teacher, Rudhyar spent
much of the summer of 1917 in the New York Public Library, reading about Oriental
music and philosophy and Western occultism. In December of that year, he parted
ways with his former friends and moved to Toronto, where he stayed with Sigfried
Herz, and later to Montreal, where he stayed with Alfred Laliberté, a pupil of Alexander
Scriabin. He gave lectures in French and recited some of his recent poetry, published
in 1918 under the title Rhapsodies. After a summer in Seal Harbor, Maine,
where he met Leopold Stokowski, he moved to Philadelphia. There he wrote an
orchestral work, Soul Fire, which won him a $1,000 prize from the newly formed Los
Angeles Philharmonic. He also wrote Mosaics, a cycle of piano pieces; Ravishments, a
series of short preludes; and Très Poemes Tragique, for contralto. He also wrote French
poems, essays on the Baha’i movement and social organization, and plans for a world
city (anticipating those for Auroville, the international community founded by the
Indian saint Sri Aurobindo). During the winter of 1918–19, he had free access to the
Philadelphia orchestra’s rehearsals; at one of them Stokowski introduced him to
Christine Wetherill Stevenson, founder of the Philadelphia Art Alliance and initiator
of the Little Theatre Movement, who had been producing a play about the life of the
Buddha, on the Hollywood grounds of Krotona, then the headquarters of the American
branch of the Theosophical Society. She asked Rudhyar to compose scenic music
for a play about the life of Christ; it was produced in the summer of 1920 in an
amphitheater close to what would become the Hollywood Bowl.
Living among Theosophists and studying astrology, music, and philosophy at
Krotona in 1920–21 further deepened Rudhyar’s interest in Oriental philosophy, in
which he found confirmation of his beliefs about the cyclic nature of civilization and
inspiration to dedicate his life to building a new civilization on a non-European basis.
Working as an extra in the movies, he met a Dutch woman from Java, Aryel Vreedenburgh
Darma, and with her founded a store that imported artifacts from Indonesia.
Unfortunately, the store was destroyed by a fire. In other film work, he was cast as
Christ in a long-running theatrical prologue at Grauman’s Egyptian Theater and also
worked with John Barrymore and Alla Nazimova.
After leaving motion picture work in 1927, Rudhyar eked out a living giving
lecture-recitals and composing a new type of music, mostly for the piano. He also
wrote many articles on music and philosophy, had his Rebirth of Hindu Music (1928)
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