If it is fair to say that the so-called Orient, with all its otherness and mystical connotations, has tended to constitute a kind of antithesis for the Western mind, it may be contended that American music, particularly in the twentieth century, displayed a greater openness toward it and a stronger tendency toward a synthetic approach than Europe. While the model of the Orient frequently emerges under Western eyes as a mythical field, America has displayed a tendency toward self-mythologization, symbolizing a pluralistic and quasi-utopian territory. American music and culture were not envisaged as some syntheses of a European past, an Ancient East, and a Native America, but of divergent personalities, qualities, and temperaments. Thoreau, Poe, Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Dickinson frequently point to the intricate and enigmatic processes of self-recognition and self-description through essentially incompatible multitudes: of the innocent and the unprincipled, the pioneer and the citizen, Nature and urban civilization, and freedom and the lawbook. Hence it is possible to observe, on the one hand, such characteristics as rawness, naturalness, ruggedness, immediacy, spontaneity, innocence, tenderness, noncontrol, nostalgia, and on the other, austerity, constraint, competition, outer toughness, control, and need for progress.

As twentieth-century America became a playground of artistic and conceptual polarities, distinct personalities emerged, collided, and coexisted, creating a new dynamic with healthy nuances as well as schismatic tensions. Although such divergence and a delta of contrasting styles and perspectives are reflected within the evolution of twentieth-century Western music in general, America exemplified the synthetic approach to a greater extent—in a much “bigger” way—especially through its readiness to explore, to journey, and to accomplish. During the 1920s, Rudhyar was highly conscious of the crucial ramifications of modernity, and that its history was being written. This is evident in a review article by Luigi Vainani, who wrote for Kansas City Journal Post in October 1929: “It is Rudhyar's contention that we live in the midst of modernity and of tremendously significant changes which we cannot afford to ignore or misinterpret.”

That Europe was decadent and in direct contrast to the naturalness and vigor of American culture was a recurring theme during the 1920s. A decade later on June 20, 1939, Henry Miller in his letter to Rudhyar subjected European culture to heavy criticism as follows: