About
the Rudhyar
Audio Archives...
Hear
Rudhyar in his own voice
Brought to you in conjunction with Leyla Rudhyar
Hill and RITA, the Rudhyar
Institute for Transpersonal Activity, the Rudhyar
Audio Archives freely provides numerous
presentations made by Dane Rudhyar, acknowledged
visionary in his own time. Hearing Rudhyar, in his
own words, in his own voice, makes his complex
material more easily accessible. Often
rich in concepts, Rudhyar's lectures are
well structured and the topics
profound and inspiring.
The audio selection was most recently
updated November 7, 2007, and new
audios will continue to be added regularly. Eventually,
you'll find the complete series of
Rudhyar's presentations on Astrology and Visionary
Philosophy,
as well as audios of Rudhyar reading his own Poetry and
performances of his Musical
Compositions. You will also be able to experience
the entirety of the presentations given at the
two RITA Conferences in September
1983 and March
1985
which include talks by Rudhyar himself, Leyla
Rael, Alexander
Ruperti,
and others deeply connected to Rudhyar's work.
Many of these insightful, informative
and sometimes intimate moments with
Rudhyar were professionally recorded
and edited. However, because these
recordings were made between 1960 and
1985 on reel-to-reel tape, capturing
live presentations at workshops
and conferences, sometimes the sound
quality is less than ideal. However,
the content more than compensates for
the audio quality.
Group
Learning Opportunities...
These recordings lend themselves
well to individual or group listening.
Many talks are related to material
found in one or more of Rudhyar's
books. On these pages you'll find
links to the books which
are referred to in the talks, as
well as related articles by Rudhyar.
Many of these are now freely available
online at the Rudhyar
Archival Project,
while others are available for
purchase. Study alone at your own
pace, or develop a study group
meeting around one of these recordings
and a related book.
New recordings are being
added regularly...
including not only Rudhyar's presentations on his
groundbreaking approach to astrology, but also his
talks on philosophy, as well as his poetry and music.
More audios are coming soon, including additional
lectures and performances from the two RITA conferences.
Would
you like to be notified as new audios
are added?
If you'd like to receive email
notification when new recordings are
added to the Rudhyar Audio Archives, Email
Nicki Michaels. (You will not receive
any other email notices nor will your
email address be shared.)
Technical
Difficulties or Comments
If you have any comments
or questions about these audios or
if you encounter any technical problems,
please Email
Nicki Michaels.
Top
About
Dane Rudhyar
Dane Rudhyar
(March 23, 1895 -
September 13, 1985) was an award-winning
composer, internationally respected
philosopher, and the world's preeminent
astrologer. He was born in Paris, France
into a middle-class
family of Norman and Celtic ancestry.
His youth was marred only by ill health,
which led in 1908 to a life-threatening
operation that removed his left kidney
and adrenal gland, and the sudden,
untimely death of his father in 1911.
The period of convalescence following
surgery permitted his nascent mind
and imagination to develop in peaceful
solitude. At the age of 16, shortly
after his father's death, he had an
intuitive realization of the cyclic
nature of all existence—of
all natural organisms and especially
cultures and their artistic manifestations.
He felt that the European culture was
passing through the "autumnal" phase
of its cycle and that the music of
Debussy particularly, represented the
poignant but ephemeral and decadent
beauty of such a phase. The outbreak
of World War I was for him an "equinoctial
storm" confirming his intuition.
From Rudhyar's point of view, then
and throughout his life, any person
living at such a time faces a basic
choice. That is, symbolically speaking,
one can identify oneself
either with "the realm of the
leaves"—with
the glowing but soon decaying products
of the ending cycle—or with the
small, inconspicuous seeds that hold
the promise of new life the following
"spring." Rudhyar's
choice was "seedhood."
Rudhyar's long and
innovative career began at the age
of 16 in his native Paris with the
publication of his first book (a biography
of Claude Debussy) and piano compositions.
After receiving his baccalaureate in
philosophy, brief studies at the Paris
Conservatoire, and a short stint as
secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin,
Rudhyar came to New York in 1916 for
a performance of his orchestral works
by Pierre Monteux at the Metropolitan
Opera (April 1917—the
night America entered World War I).
This was the first performance of
dissonant, polytonal music in America.
In his adopted country, Rudhyar severed
himself as completely as possible from
his natal French culture, language,
family, mental conditioning and name.
He identified himself as "a seed
blown across the ocean...to sow itself
in the fertile, virgin soil of a 'New
World.'"
In realizing the symbolic nature of
his intuitions and acts, he also realized
the significance of symbols: far from
being "unreal" they constitute
the root-reality affecting the mentality
and behavior of human beings. In America
in the 1920's and '30's, he tried to
promote the idea of a "new American
civilization." The "winds" of
prevailing opinion held against the "seed."
But Rudhyar had to find some connection
with the new ground, America—a
way to make an impression, to become
known.
The initial way was music, creating
it and writing books and articles about
music and the musicians of the time
he knew, and also about Oriental music,
which was then totally unknown and
unappreciated in the West. Later on,
when his musical endeavors were made
futile by the Great Depression, the
Neoclassical movement, and World War
II, the field of astrology opened as
an unsought avenue of contact with
the American consciousness. Yet whether
the means be music or astrology, what
Rudhyar had to bring could be explained
and understood only on the basis of
a new philosophical outlook which took
many years to mature fully. It started
in 1917 with a daily study of books
at the New York Public Library.
In 1920 Rudhyar
came to California to write music
for the Hollywood Pilgrimage Play and
to continue his intensive studies of
oriental philosophies and music, at
a time when most western musicians
considered oriental music barbaric
noise. In New York and California in
the 1920s, he was a founding member
of the International Composers Guild
and the California New Music Society.
Between 1917 and 1928 Rudhyar made
an in-depth study of occult and various
Oriental philosophies. His studies
confirmed his early intuition about
the importance and universality of
cycles. The Secret Doctrine of
H.P. Blavatsky especially laid the
foundations for much of his later philosophical
development.
But Rudhyar did not study theosophy
and Oriental philosophies to accumulate
a mass of scholarly data or interesting
"information." Through his studies
he consciously tried to develop a new
type of mind able to deal with universal,
spiritual, and metaphysical principles
and cyclic processes. He came definitely
to feel that his dharma (destiny or
truth-of-being) would be to reformulate
ancient and traditional metaphysical
and occult concepts in terms that would
both nourish the development of, and
be understandable by, this kind of
mind, which he calls "the mind of wholeness,"
through a process which he called "clairthinking"—the
direct experience of ideas.
While he studied a vast number of
books and met an impressive list of
notable personalities, Rudhyar remained
isolated from the mainstream of official
and academic thought. Between 1933
and 1968, his work in reformulating
astrology along humanistic and transpersonal
lines was his main contact, not so
much with his own generation as with
succeeding ones. Yet his astrological
work cannot be understood fully unless
it is seen within the context of the
basic philosophy and metaphysics he
formulated in his books The
Planetarization of Consciousness (1970) and Rhythm
of Wholeness (1982), as well as others
of his non-astrological works.
The oriental concept of cycles was
central to his philosophy, writings
and life, and was expressed in over
a thousand articles and twenty books
(translated into six languages) completely
reformulating astrology. The
Astrology of Personality, first published in
1936, is still in print and has become
a classic in its field. For his continuing
endeavors to integrate astrology and
depth-psychology, Rudhyar was awarded
honorary doctorate degrees in 1980
from John F. Kennedy University and
the California Institute for Transpersonal
Psychology.
In 1978 the American Academy and Institute
of Arts and Letters honored him with
the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award, given
quadrennially to a composer whose career
demonstrates sustained artistic integrity
and achievement. In 1982, Rudhyar was
one of six American composers to whose
works an entire program was devoted
at the Kennedy Center in Washington,
D.C. In 1984, the San Francisco and
Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras also
performed compositions by Rudhyar.
In 1981, under Rudhyar's
guidance, the Rudhyar Institute
for Transpersonal Activity (RITA) was
created. It was developed
by his wife Leyla Rael Rudhyar, along
with other young people who were close
to Rudhyar at that time, and to whom
Rudhyar was a teacher and mentor. In
September 1983 and March 1985 RITA
sponsored conferences to both honor
and share Rudhyar's legacy including
his music, philosophy, and astrology.
Rudhyar himself presented talks on
astrology, music and philosophy as
well as readings of his poetry. These
were accompanied by performances of
his music along with presentations
about his approach to astrology, psychology,
and new age philosophy by others who
were inspired by his body of work.
Rudhyar remained active as a writer
and composer until just weeks before
his death. His final book, The
Fullness of Human Experience, along
with numerous others of his books,
articles and an
extensive
biography are now available
for free online reading.
Rudhyar is survived by his wife,
now Leyla Rudhyar Hill, and countless
"spiritual children" throughout the
world—students
and appreciators of his music and writings.
Biography adapted
by Nicki Michaels
from writings by
Leyla Rudhyar Hill including
The
Essential Rudhyar: An Outline And
An Evocation (1983). Read a more
complete Illustrated
Biographic Sketch of Rudhyar available
freely online.
If you encounter
any technical problems listening to
Rudhyar audios, or if you have any
comments, please Email Nicki Michaels
Top
Listening
Tips: Stream or Download Audios
Audio Streaming
Each recording ranges
from approximately 30 to 45 minutes
long. You can pause the recording
and then hit play to begin listening
where you left off. Or you can
note down how far into the recording
you were when you stopped (listed
to the right on each play bar)
and then return at a later time
to the same point in the recording.
However, if you do play part of
an audio and then return to listen
to the rest at a later time, do
the following: After clicking on
the "play" icon, wait
for a few minutes, so that the
entire audio can load into the
player bar. As this occurs, you
will notice the player bar darkening
slightly. Once the entire audio
is loaded you can drag the bar
forward and backward through the
recording to pick up where you
previously left off.
Downloading mp3
To download an audio file
to your hard drive, simply click
on the "Download as mp3" link
and follow the instructions on
your computer. All downloads
are for personal listening only.
If you encounter any technical
problems listening to Rudhyar audios,
or if you have any comments on
the Rudhyar Audio Archives, please
Email
Nicki Michaels
Certain audios in the Rudhyar Audio Archives are
licensed under a Creative
Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative
Works 3.0 Unported License. For more
information on exactly what this means for you, please
read Licensing
FAQ page.
Top
Rudhyar
Audio Archives was created
by Nicki Michaels in cooperation
with Leyla Rudhyar Hill and the Rudhyar
Institute for Transpersonal Activity. RITA is
a non-profit public benefit corporation
dedicated to the dissemination of
the work and essential message of
Dane Rudhyar. All material is copyrighted.
Read the License
FAQ page for more details.