The Sickness of Western Music

By 1922, Rudhyar was convinced that the “living France” had turned into “a handful of internationalized seeds scattered amidst the living nations of the Earth,” and that only individuals who turned away from “the poisoned atmosphere” of Paris would be able to connect and identify with humanity on a global level. In its autumnal phase, the West had the choice of attuning either to the rhythm of falling leaves or to that of falling seeds: “Two basically different kinds of ‘falls’: one toward re-absorption into the undifferentiated chemical state of humus, the other toward … the potentiality of seed-immortality, if the seed falls into fertile soil.” Mourning that the contemporaneous state of the West and its music had turned into a world of leaves and branches without roots, he proclaimed:

A year later in 1927, Rudhyar continued his lament by expressing that European music no longer had “tonic power” but only “an esthetic meaning.” The underlying comparison here clearly relates to ancient and non-Western musics as well as the ultramodernist music scene in America, which aimed to embrace that very tonic power.

He asserted that the European seeds lay mainly threefold within the delta modern music (through Scriabin, Stravinsky, and the analytic and formalistic Schoenberg), hinting at an inherently stylistic divergence: of spiritual aesthetics, primitivism, and reactionary formalism. As mentioned earlier, Rudhyar's admiration for Scriabin stemmed from the Russian's “far-flung gaze” and “extatic serenity on the threshold of the music of to-morrow.” He defined Scriabin’s “soul-fire” as “the birth of the great power within man,” which he aligned primarily with the Romantic temperament. But Rudhyar viewed the historical and subjective ramifications of Romantic efforts with great suspicion, because it was “chaotic” and “emotional,” its passion too nostalgic, like “a dark red flame, engrossed with material desires, sullied by sentimentalism and theatricalism.” And on a geocultural level, he proposed that the “music of power” was born in Russia, with Scriabin as its mother and Stravinsky as its father: “Both of these composers incarnate the two aspects of this human fire; the psychic and the mental aspects … its two polarities.”