Biography
Dane Rudhyar earned recognition as an American composer while also developing a humanist lens on astrology and producing extensive writings on both fields. Born Daniel Chennevière in Paris before 1900, he attended the premiere of Stravinsky’s “Rite of Spring.” He relocated to the United States in the 1910s during his early twenties and kept composing. His work “Paens” appeared on a program alongside pieces by Ruggles and Copland that Henry Cowell assembled, and it was featured in Cowell’s inaugural New Music Editions in the late 1920s. Although the piano piece “Stars” became his best-known composition, the orchestral work “Soul Fire” brought him a prize from the LAPO. His books on music—Dissonant Harmony (1928) and The New Sense of Sound (1930)—shaped many composers, yet Rudhyar remained largely overlooked as a musician until James Tenney and Peter Garland drew attention to his output late in life. Garland noted that Rudhyar’s “best works occurred in the 1920s and… 1970s!” At that stage he resumed composing and experienced a revival at age eighty, focusing chiefly on piano and chamber music. Rudhyar stayed creatively engaged throughout his life despite these musical shifts, taking up painting in New Mexico in the late 1930s, continuing to write about music, and exploring religion, philosophy, and theosophy—the last of which prompted his name change drawn from a Sanskrit term. He went on to articulate a more spiritual conception of astrology and authored many books on the subject as well as his own biography.