ABSTRACT
Music should be created, like the dance, as an act of the body itself: not as communication of feeling, but as a magical performance. The title comes from the Hermetic Astronomy of Paracelsus, and while it refers to the "science" of alchemy, it implies that the generator of change—the transmuter of base metal into gold—is the human imagination. In Charles Griffes's Clouds the bitonal floating of the ostinato chords and the unresolved appoggiaturas over a swaying drone induce a sense of separation, as well as of emptiness. The man who ultimately followed through the implications of that extraordinary work was Edgard Varese: who fought to get Griffes's later music performed and who in the years following Grifres's death. When Henry Cowell began to produce, in cornucopia-like profusion, more conventionally "composed" music, he significantly attempted a fusion of the modality and the rhythmic and tonal simplicity of the American primitives with the melismatic and percussive styles of Eastern music.
