Conference Agenda

Henry Cowell’s biographers have noted his relationship with the Temple of the People, a Theosophical community near Halcyon, California (Hicks 2002, Sachs 2012). As Johnson (1993) and Ivey (2013) have pointed out, Cowell composed his famous cluster piece, “The Tides of Manaunaun,” for a Temple festival, and he drafted New Musical Resources during his period of close Temple affiliation, 1916-1931. Still, the relationships between Cowell’s musical experimentalism, pedagogy, and Theosophical theories of sound have yet to be fully explored. This paper reinterprets Cowell’s Rhythmicon as a product of the Neoplatonic music theories cultivated at Halcyon and disseminated through their journal, The Temple Artisan. I will show how Cowell’s Rhythmicon aligns with several Theosophical preoccupations: Pythagorean/Neoplatonic ideas of a cosmos organized according to musical proportions; vibrations, resonance, and the overtone series; the integration of spirituality, science, and technology; the unity of light and sound; and the idea that ordinary human physical and perceptual capabilities can be transcended.

I argue that Halcyon’s culture of experimentalism fostered Cowell’s musical creativity and that his work illustrates the significance of music to the “spiritual science” practiced at the Temple. Halcyon Theosophists believed that musical vibration was a spiritual force and that the ratios of the harmonic series governed the structure of the universe. Consequently, their activities centered musical and mathematical instruction. Community members could take a course in “Occult Mathematics” or “Music and Mysticism,” read primers on music theory published in The Temple Artisan, and take a correspondence course in piano taught by Cowell himself. I conclude by reevaluating Cowell’s New Musical Resources in light of the Theosophical Neoplatonism that motivated his Rhythmicon project, particularly his belief that the overtone series was “itself a living essence from which all musicality springs” (Cowell 1930, 139). By extending the complex relationships generated by the harmonic series to all musical parameters, Cowell offered a modernist’s interpretation of Theosophical Neoplatonism, ensuring that new music would still reflect the structure of the cosmos.

The fourth and final edition of George Russell’s magnum opus The Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization has a markedly different focus from previous editions: to foster each reader’s “intellectual brilliance, intuitive perception, emotional fire, and spiritual depth” (2001: 98). This development can be traced to Russell’s engagement with the esoteric spiritualist tradition known as the “Fourth Way,” specifically as represented in texts by G. I. Gurdjieff, P. D. Ouspensky (1931, 1949), and Maurice Nicoll (1952, 1953). This paper investigates the relationships between these spiritualist texts and Russell’s musical and music-theoretical output, highlighting an influence on Russell’s work largely ignored by previous scholars.

In this paper, I focus primarily on Nicoll’s Living Time and the Integration of the Life (1952), as Living Time was of particular interest to Russell: Russell named his band the “Living Time Orchestra” and twice recorded an album-length work called “Living Time” (1972, 1997). In Living Time, Nicoll argues that time contains higher dimensions beyond our familiar “passing time.” “Eternal recurrence” is a time-concept that is simultaneously cyclical and ever-present, analogous to the fourth-dimensional experience of the Tralfamadoreans in Slaughterhouse Five (1969) or the heptapods in Arrival (2016). “Unity” represents the highest dimension of time: a oneness between cosmology and human consciousness that is the apotheosis of Fourth Way spiritual practice.

After discussing these core principles of Fourth Way metaphysics, I draw parallels between “unity” as used in Fourth Way spiritual practice and “unity” as used in Russell’s chord-scale theory, demonstrating how Russell’s preferred way of analyzing chords arises from his multidimensional conception of time. Using excerpts from Russell’s albums Living Time (1972), Vertical Form VI (1981), and It’s About Time (1997), I also illustrate how Fourth Way ideas appear in Russell’s music: Russell represents “eternal recurrence” through repetitions and transformations of thematic material, and Nicoll’s “integration of man” (i.e., the work towards unity) as transitions from bitonal, aperiodic grooves to homophony.

While research on Victorian music-evolutionism has flourished over the past quarter century, scholars have continued to overlook women’s contributions to early music-evolutionary thought (Brotman 2005; Bolt 2010; Zon 2014; Bannan 2016; Zon 2017; Piilonen 2024). This paper addresses that gap and furthers recent work on historical women in music theory (Raz 2018a, 2018b; Lumsden 2020, 2022; Venturino 2024). I focus on one notable—yet presently neglected—female music theorist-evolutionist, Mrs. F. J. Hughes, whose Harmonies of Tones and Colours Developed by Evolution (1883) garnered considerable contemporaneous attention in Britain and America. Hughes connects theories of music and color with the evolutionary ideas of her cousin, Charles Darwin. She also employs copious theological language, ostensibly intimating a higher purpose. I argue that Hughes’s idiosyncratic brand of “Christian Darwinisticism” influences and ultimately distorts her music-theoretical ideas (Moore 1979). But while she may not convincingly explain harmonic practice, Hughes uses music theory to perform an equally significant type of labor: mediating between the scientific and religious discourses of her time. In conclusion, I examine the historiographical lessons learned from “taking a look” at Hughes’s music-theoretical mythmaking (Hacking 2002; Martin 2019). Beyond providing insight into Victorian intellectual culture, study of her “failed” music theory reveals persistent strains of positivism in our field and encourages us to expose modern mythmaking in our histories of music theory.