Introduction

Versatility, Principles, Priorities At the beginning of the twentieth century, many artists felt the urge to explore interrelations between the various branches of art and philosophy, and had a preoccupation with artistic utopianism. This was a time when figures such as Wassily Kandinsky, Oskar Kokoschka, Arnold Schoenberg, and Luigi Russolo chose to explore more than one artistic medium for their creative outlets, although they became innovators fundamentally in their own main fields. Despite the diversity of his interests and activities, Dane Rudhyar (1895–1985) considered himself first and foremost a composer, insofar as writing music remained the most meaningful and important activity throughout his life. And despite periods of compositional silence and inactivity—his compositional activities had considerably slowed down by the late 1930s—music as an art form remained paramount for Rudhyar precisely because of its integrating, fusing, and synthesizing potential, its capability to reflect both physical and psychological life, and its multidimensionality (of time, space, and movement). He typically asserted that music made his life complete. Yet today, more than one hundred years since his birth and more than a quarter of a century after his death, he is still little known as a composer, and even less as a painter and poet, compared with his reputation as an astrologer and thinker. At times he felt somewhat misrepresented by the much greater emphasis and attention that his astrological work received: But why don't they mention that I have written five books of poetry. I have written about five or six books, or seven books dealing with philosophy and psychology in which there is absolutely no mention of astrology whatsoever. I have written two novels… . I mean, why single [out] astrology? My painting has been exhibited… . But it is all one philosophy. It is one way of thinking of life. My thinking process—and I must say, even my feeling process—are very different from those of almost anybody I know. I mean, in that sense, my life has been absolutely lonely… However specialized, Rudhyar's astrological work enabled him to “belong” socioculturally, in contrast to the prolonged sense of alienation that marked his artistic life.

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