Dissonant Harmony and “Seed-Tones”

French-American composer Dane Rudhyar’s (1895–1985) vision of dissonance as a spiritual discipline was profoundly influential upon American ultra-modernist composers in the 1920s and ’30s. Rudhyar’s own compositions manifest his theoretical ideas, which revolve around a mystical conception of Tone as the totality of all possible musical sounds. His prose reveals several interrelated methods of creating Tone: using the piano’s sounding board as a gong, employing dissonant harmony (relating pitches by geometric relationships, which manifest as interval cycles), applying “the new sense of space” (beginning from wholeness, which requires equal divisions of the octave), and creating organic forms by basing each composition on a “seed-tone” (a dissonant tonic sonority). Rudhyar’s theoretical writings suggest two compatible methods of constructing seed-tones: building quintal sonorities (which exemplify dissonant harmony in Rudhyar’s theory) and employing “interpenetrating harmonic series.” These two methods facilitate the identification of seed-tones and their elaborations in Rudhyar’s piano music. Schenkerian-style graphs accompany detailed analyses of two of Rudhyar’s piano pieces: “Stars” and the first movement ofGranites. Rudhyar’s seed-tones may suggest new analytic perspectives for other post-tonal repertoire. In addition, Rudhyar’s connection of dissonance with spirituality serves as a reminder that many early-twentieth-century pioneers in atonality and dodecaphony perceived a numinousness in this new music.