The Rudhyar Audio Archives were created by and are curated by Nicki Michaels.
Dane Rudhyar Audio Archives
A 20th Century Voice with 21st Century Vision
About the Rudhyar Audio Archives…
Hear Rudhyar in his own voice
Brought to you in conjunction with Leyla Rudhyar Hill and RITA, the Rudhyar Institute for Transpersonal Activity, the Rudhyar Audio Archives freely provides numerous presentations made by Dane Rudhyar, acknowledged visionary in his own time. Hearing Rudhyar, in his own words, in his own voice, makes his complex material more easily accessible. Often rich in concepts, Rudhyar’s lectures are well structured and the topics profound and inspiring.
Eventually, you’ll find the complete series of Rudhyar’s presentations on Astrology and Visionary Philosophy, as well as audios of Rudhyar reading his own Poetry and performances of his Musical Compositions. You will also be able to experience the entirety of the presentations given at the two RITA Conferences in September 1983 and March 1985 which include talks by Rudhyar himself, Leyla Rael, Alexander Ruperti, and others deeply connected to Rudhyar’s work.
Many of these insightful, informative and sometimes intimate moments with Rudhyar were professionally recorded and edited. However, because these recordings were made between 1960 and 1985 on reel-to-reel tape, capturing live presentations at workshops and conferences, sometimes the sound quality is less than ideal. However, the content more than compensates for the audio quality.
Group Learning Opportunities…
These recordings lend themselves well to individual or group listening. Many talks are related to material found in one or more of Rudhyar’s books. On these pages you’ll find links to the books which are referred to in the talks, as well as related articles by Rudhyar. Many of these are now freely available online at the Rudhyar Archival Project, while others are available for purchase. Study alone at your own pace, or develop a study group meeting around one of these recordings and a related book.
About Dane Rudhyar
Dane Rudhyar (March 23, 1895 – September 13, 1985) was an award-winning composer, internationally respected philosopher, and the world’s preeminent astrologer. He was born in Paris, France into a middle-class family of Norman and Celtic ancestry. His youth was marred only by ill health, which led in 1908 to a life-threatening operation that removed his left kidney and adrenal gland, and the sudden, untimely death of his father in 1911. The period of convalescence following surgery permitted his nascent mind and imagination to develop in peaceful solitude. At the age of 16, shortly after his father’s death, he had an intuitive realization of the cyclic nature of all existence—of all natural organisms and especially cultures and their artistic manifestations. He felt that the European culture was passing through the “autumnal” phase of its cycle and that the music of Debussy particularly, represented the poignant but ephemeral and decadent beauty of such a phase. The outbreak of World War I was for him an “equinoctial storm” confirming his intuition.
From Rudhyar’s point of view, then and throughout his life, any person living at such a time faces a basic choice. That is, symbolically speaking, one can identify oneself either with “the realm of the leaves”—with the glowing but soon decaying products of the ending cycle—or with the small, inconspicuous seeds that hold the promise of new life the following “spring.” Rudhyar’s choice was “seedhood.”
Rudhyar’s long and innovative career began at the age of 16 in his native Paris with the publication of his first book (a biography of Claude Debussy) and piano compositions. After receiving his baccalaureate in philosophy, brief studies at the Paris Conservatoire, and a short stint as secretary to the sculptor Auguste Rodin, Rudhyar came to New York in 1916 for a performance of his orchestral works by Pierre Monteux at the Metropolitan Opera (April 1917—the night America entered World War I). This was the first performance of dissonant, polytonal music in America.
In his adopted country, Rudhyar severed himself as completely as possible from his natal French culture, language, family, mental conditioning and name. He identified himself as “a seed blown across the ocean…to sow itself in the fertile, virgin soil of a ‘New World.'” In realizing the symbolic nature of his intuitions and acts, he also realized the significance of symbols: far from being “unreal” they constitute the root-reality affecting the mentality and behavior of human beings. In America in the 1920’s and ’30’s, he tried to promote the idea of a “new American civilization.” The “winds” of prevailing opinion held against the “seed.” But Rudhyar had to find some connection with the new ground, America—a way to make an impression, to become known.
The initial way was music, creating it and writing books and articles about music and the musicians of the time he knew, and also about Oriental music, which was then totally unknown and unappreciated in the West. Later on, when his musical endeavors were made futile by the Great Depression, the Neoclassical movement, and World War II, the field of astrology opened as an unsought avenue of contact with the American consciousness. Yet whether the means be music or astrology, what Rudhyar had to bring could be explained and understood only on the basis of a new philosophical outlook which took many years to mature fully. It started in 1917 with a daily study of books at the New York Public Library.
In 1920 Rudhyar came to California to write music for the Hollywood Pilgrimage Play and to continue his intensive studies of oriental philosophies and music, at a time when most western musicians considered oriental music barbaric noise. In New York and California in the 1920s, he was a founding member of the International Composers Guild and the California New Music Society.
Between 1917 and 1928 Rudhyar made an in-depth study of occult and various Oriental philosophies. His studies confirmed his early intuition about the importance and universality of cycles. The Secret Doctrine of H.P. Blavatsky especially laid the foundations for much of his later philosophical development.
But Rudhyar did not study theosophy and Oriental philosophies to accumulate a mass of scholarly data or interesting “information.” Through his studies he consciously tried to develop a new type of mind able to deal with universal, spiritual, and metaphysical principles and cyclic processes. He came definitely to feel that his dharma (destiny or truth-of-being) would be to reformulate ancient and traditional metaphysical and occult concepts in terms that would both nourish the development of, and be understandable by, this kind of mind, which he calls “the mind of wholeness,” through a process which he called “clairthinking”—the direct experience of ideas.
While he studied a vast number of books and met an impressive list of notable personalities, Rudhyar remained isolated from the mainstream of official and academic thought. Between 1933 and 1968, his work in reformulating astrology along humanistic and transpersonal lines was his main contact, not so much with his own generation as with succeeding ones. Yet his astrological work cannot be understood fully unless it is seen within the context of the basic philosophy and metaphysics he formulated in his books The Planetarization of Consciousness (1970) and Rhythm of Wholeness (1982), as well as others of his non-astrological works.
The oriental concept of cycles was central to his philosophy, writings and life, and was expressed in over a thousand articles and twenty books (translated into six languages) completely reformulating astrology. The Astrology of Personality, first published in 1936, is still in print and has become a classic in its field. For his continuing endeavors to integrate astrology and depth-psychology, Rudhyar was awarded honorary doctorate degrees in 1980 from John F. Kennedy University and the California Institute for Transpersonal Psychology.
In 1978 the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters honored him with the Marjorie Peabody Waite Award, given quadrennially to a composer whose career demonstrates sustained artistic integrity and achievement. In 1982, Rudhyar was one of six American composers to whose works an entire program was devoted at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. In 1984, the San Francisco and Milwaukee Symphony Orchestras also performed compositions by Rudhyar.
In 1981, under Rudhyar’s guidance, the Rudhyar Institute for Transpersonal Activity (RITA) was created. It was developed by his wife Leyla Rael Rudhyar, along with other young people who were close to Rudhyar at that time, and to whom Rudhyar was a teacher and mentor. In September 1983 and March 1985 RITA sponsored conferences to both honor and share Rudhyar’s legacy including his music, philosophy, and astrology. Rudhyar himself presented talks on astrology, music and philosophy as well as readings of his poetry. These were accompanied by performances of his music along with presentations about his approach to astrology, psychology, and new age philosophy by others who were inspired by his body of work.
Rudhyar remained active as a writer and composer until just weeks before his death. His final book, The Fullness of Human Experience, along with numerous others of his books, articles and an extensive biography are now available for free online reading.
Rudhyar is survived by his wife, now Leyla Rudhyar Hill, and countless “spiritual children” throughout the world—students and appreciators of his music and writings.
Biography adapted by Nicki Michaels
from writings by Leyla Rudhyar Hill including
The Essential Rudhyar: An Outline And An Evocation (1983). Read a more complete Illustrated Biographic Sketch of Rudhyar available freely online.
More on Rudhyar
Read an interview with Dane Rudhyar on the occasion of his 89th birthday, conducted by Barbara Somerfield, Founder of the National Astrological Society (NAS0) and Owner of Aurora Press, which publishes a number of Rudhyar books.
Much of Dane Rudhyar’s lifelong work is made freely available worldwide at the Rudhyar Archival Project including an extensive biography.
To gain an understanding of Rudhyar’s approach to cycles, read the article on this site, A Brief Overview of Dane Rudhyar’s Approach to Cycles.
This section was last updated in July 2010.
Others on Rudhyar
“…Of all the books I have read on Astrology, Rudhyar’s works eclipse all others. He has the very special gift of always keeping before our minds the whole. His ability to dissect and analyze, to show the relation between the parts, and finally to relate the parts to the whole, is a most exceptional one. Reading Rudhyar, I am forever impressed by his ability to put in words, what is even difficult to express or understand…He is forever awakening in us the relatedness of things, their profound spiritual significance. This is the sense of the whole which, when relayed to us by an Astrologer lifts Astrology to its proper place and puts us in our proper place with respect to its aim and purpose.”
Henry Miller
Author
“Dane Rudhyar revolutionized 20th century astrology, using the symbolic language of the stars and planets to explore the nature of spiritual destiny. His was an astrology concerned less with measurement than with meaning, with the sense of purpose and connectedness to the universe which he thought was essential to a harmonious and positive life.”
Nick Campion, Ph.D.
Director, Bath Spa University Ph.D. astrology program, Author of Mundane Astrology and The Book of World Horoscopes
“…the pivotal book that launched humanistic astrology and made it clear that astrology was a subject for intelligent and perceptive minds, not merely for fortune telling.”
Rob Hand
Astrological Author
“…the greatest step forward in Astrology since the time of Ptolemy.”
Paul Clancy
Founder, American Astrology
“I am particularly pleased because Rudhyar’s whole trend of thought is in the spirit of psychosynthesis. From different starting points and using a different terminology he arrives at the same basic conclusion on important issues such as: harmonizing the opposites in individuals and in society; the central importance of purpose; the need of a new humanistic psychology.”
Roberto Assagioli
Psychologist and Author
“Astrological Mandala is invaluable not only for the student of astrology but for every person seriously interested in symbols as a medium for achieving the kind of transformation necessary to bring about the ‘new age.’ That this book is primarily practical as well as informative only underlines the real significance of this most unusual gift from a man rare in any age.”
Jose Arguelles
Author of The Transformative Vision and Mandala.
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