Rudhyar
// February 16th, 2009 // composition, literature
My better half pointed my attention towards the following (from Dane Rudhyar). Interesting thoughts for conversation…
“Composers whose sense of music has been trained according to the rigid traditions of the European culture find it very difficult, if not impossible, to experience the wholeness of musical space available to the human consciousness and therefore to experience the quality inherent in the wholeness of that space, Tone.”
Rudhyar defines the capitalized word “Tone” as “the quality inherent in the musical space which the human ear perceives as sound and to which the human mind, developed according to a particular culture, can respond as music.”
….The most creative and future-oriented musicians of the twentieth century – which does not mean the most famous and most often performed! – have been attempting to expand their musical feelings and their approach to composing or performing music. The more or less conscious and consistent urge to dis-Europeanize and even deculturalize music has driven them to repudiate the organizational rules and patterns of their Western tradition (the European tonality system) and to try to free their musical consciousness from the exclusive use of traditional instruments that produce only particular qualities of sounds. They have done the latter by introducing many types of non-harmonic sounds and noises. These traditionally non-musical sounds exist within the musical space experienceable by human beings. In principle they can be given a musical meaning, but this gift of meaning can be made neither by the intellectual mind, eager for novelty and fame-producing personal “originality,” nor by an emotional revulsion banal through too much repetition, even though such a revulsion has become fashionable. In order to create a new sense of reality, the gift of meaning must proceed from a consciousness of the wholeness of musical space and the inner-most realization of Tone as its essential quality,”
Rudhyar, D. Dissonant Harmony, Pleromas of Sound, From Campbell, D. (Ed.). (1991). Healing with Sound. Wheaton, IL: Theosophical Publishing House.
