ABSTRACT
In this chapter, the author shows how Rudhyar found his way through several universes of discourse and practice in order to find a place in the cosmos of vibrations. He proposes that his primary technique was akin to that of the early Pythagoreans when they argued that ostensibly inaudible sounds were known only through reason and heard only through the special sensitivity of the blessed. Dane Rudhyar has rarely been acknowledged for the central role he played in the development of American modernist music, let alone for his contribution to a musical rhetoric of sound per se. With respect to modernist musical discourses, Rudhyar was most notably involved in legitimating a certain type of “natural” or “spiritual” dissonance based on acoustical properties of musical sounds. His appeal to distant cultures was not in the service of appropriating musics at a stylistic level but was part of a perennial philosophical approach correlating cultures at a more theoretical level.
