Session 3
Panel 3A: Symbolism
Location: Singelkerk
Chair: Gillian McCann (Nipissing University
Christel Naujoks (Aix-Marseille
University)
‘'Spiritual steps and artistic evolution of Paul Sérusier
(1864 – 1927)’
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At the end of 1888, Paul Sérusier (1864-1927), along with Maurice
Denis, is the founder of the group called Nabis (prophet in hebrew).
Under this denomination, his aim was to announce to the world what
became for him the « new evangil of the painting » (Antoine Terrasse).
In the steps of Gauguin, who he had met in Pont-Aven,
Sérusier intended to replace the image by the symbol, the
representation of nature by the interpretation of the idea. Thanks to
both an exaltation of pure colors and simplification of forms, a
symbolistic ideal would rise up and would deliberately break up with
impressionism. This double research – color and line – evolves
indissociably with spiritual quest of Paul Sérusier.
His friendship with Jan Verkade, who chose to join the
benedictin monastery of Beuron (Germany), guided him on the way to
Faith. However, he renounced to imitating his friend, as he was
concerned about keeping a total liberty of art and creation. From then
on, the artistic identity of the founder and theorist of the Nabis
group always seeked an Ideal that would takes its origin both in
spirituality and spiritualism. His friendship with Schuré as well as
his readings (Platon –le Timeaus, la Bible, Balzac – Louis Lambert ;
Séraphita, Huysmans) had a strong impact on his art, as much as on his
spiritual development.
The kind of abstraction which slowly arose in a singular
way of expression, in a context in which modern artists come back to
sheer religious art, is based on the combination of geometry, in the
way of the Aesthetic of Beuron wanted by Father Desiderius Lenz, and
the simplification of the colors chosen thanks to a triangle inside the
color circle (the « harmony door », ABC de la peinture, Paul Sérusier,
1942).
From these, the economy of both color and line expresses
Harmony in the purest way. Works of art such as The Blind Force (1892),
with the title as well as with the composition, The Origins, the Gold
Cylinder and The Tetraedrons (about 1910), as well as the wall
decoration in his own house at Châteauneuf-du-Faou (Finistère) show the
influence The Grands Initiés of Schuré probably had on Sérusier : the
iconographic choices and plastic compositions bring to light his
inclination for the Mystic. Sérusier envisaged his art as a way to God,
Harmony and Truth. According to him, Art has to be subordinated to
religious and mystical purpose, the work of art has to overcome the
technique with the aim of subserving the elevation of the mind.
In our communication, it should be important to
appreciate the actual impact the friendship and the work of Schuré had
on Sérusier, his art, his theory about line and color, and his
spiritual development. © Christel Naujoks 2013
Pascal Rousseau (Université
Paris I)
‘Aristie and Sâr Peladan: Occultism and the Sacerdotal
mediation of art’
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This paper’s analysis will focus on the occultist writer Sâr Joséphin
Péladan, promoter of the symbolist « Salons de la Rose-Croix »
(1892-1897) and his theory of “Aristie.” Derived from the Greek
“aristocracy,” Péladan’s neologism “aristie” declared the new age of
the “Arts as a Religion,” defending the “ariste” as a spiritual
authority. Not only a figure of social sovereignty but of phallocratic
egocentrism, the ariste will develop a dandy dietetics of intelligence,
based on the literature of psychical research and theosophy as well as
psychopathological medical treatises of the period, which excludes
female creativity in favor of a sacerdotal mediation in aesthetics. © Pascal Rousseau 2013
Sarah V. Turner (University
of York)
‘Orphic modernity: Theosophy, the visual arts and cultural
exchange between Britain and Belgium in the early twentieth century’
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This paper examines the important cultural networks between Theosophy
and the visual arts in Britain and Belgium at the beginning of the
twentieth century. As a case study, I look at the work of artists
associated with the Theosophical Arts Circle, which was founded by
Clifford Bax in London in 1907, and its journal Orpheus. This group had
particularly strong connections with the Belgium artist Jean Delville
and his work was regularly reproduced on the pages of the journal. My
paper traces these relationships through the articles and images
reproduced in Orpheus, an important channel for Theosophically-inspired
ideas about the mystical and imaginative power of art at the dawn of
the new century. The role of the visual arts in fostering
internationalism and cultural exchange across national borders was a
strong theme running throughout the journal and I use the connections
between Bax, Delville and the artist Francis Colmer, translator of
Delville’s The New Mission of Art: A Study of Idealism in Art into
English in 1910, to think about the international artistic networks
fostered through an interest in Theosophy and mysticism more broadly at
the beginning of the twentieth century. © Sarah V. Turner 2013
3B: Music 1
Location: Doelenzaal, UvA Library
Chair: Rachel Cowgill (Cardiff University)
Andrew Owen (Louisiana State
University)
‘Holst's Textual Synthesis: The Texts of The Hymn of Jesus’
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The textual sources of Gustav Holst’s 1917 choral masterwork The Hymn
of Jesus demonstrate the composer’s interest in ancient philosophies.
The piece’s main text is from a late second-century work titled the
Acts of John, a gnostic non-canonical text that was recovered in 1897
in the Imperial Library in Vienna. This discovery caught the attention
of the theosophist G. R. S. Mead, who was Madame Blavatsky’s former
secretary and Holst’s friend. In 1907, Mead published his own
translation and commentary on the text, ten years before Holst began to
work with it and other versions of the hymn so that he could set it to
music. With the help of Jane Joseph, G. R. S. Mead, and Clifford Bax
(who was also a theosophist), Holst’s modifications of the text
maintained the style of Mead’s translation, but made it more direct and
understandable. Many of these modifications advanced his personal
interpretations of the hymn text and many also made the hymn easier to
understand. Holst intensified the text’s emphasis on volition as a
requirement for spiritual advancement, for instance, when he changes
passive verbs like “seest” to active ones like “gaze.” Holst clearly
saw in the text the three-part pattern of a passive statement, followed
by an active statement, followed by a stabilizing “Amen” (a stability
that Mead notes in his commentary on the text). Holst directly set the
first two in various, often opposing, ways, and the “Amen” in a
consistent, repetitive way. The closer the attention goes to the
active/passive dyad, the more varied the music is, and the closer the
attention goes to the stable monad “Amen,” the more stable the music
is. Holst’s awareness of Mead’s theosophical interpretations of the
hymn greatly influenced the musical style of the Hymn of Jesus. He knew
that a more concise and direct version of the text that satisfied his
imagination and incorporated current thought on the hymn would be more
dramatically effective than a setting of Mead’s original words. Though
existing scholarship on Holst has previously considered only broad
implications of Holst’s theosophical understandings, none has hitherto
examined specifically how they affected the text and the musical
structures of this piece. With the Hymn of Jesus being the only gnostic
text set by a major composer, Holst’s incorporation of relevant
theosophical principles make the work well fit for representing the
text’s original philosophies. © Andrew Owen 2013
Dominik Šedivý (University
of Salzburg)
‘Dodecaphonic universalism: Equivalent balance as a counter
model to monocentrism and duality’
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The last century originated a number of prominent composers that have
created an elaborate combined system of a neoplatonic and hermetic
musical world view. While the scientific community is more or less
aware of Alexander Skriabin’s (1872–1915) musical mysticism,
comparatively little parts of the tremendous amount of material left by
Olivier Messiaen (1908–1992) has reached the awareness of greater
circles. Even less is known about the spiritual world of the Austrian
composer and theorist Josef Matthias Hauer (1883–1959) who created an
extensive system of universalistic thought based on the principle of
dodecaphony.
In 1919, Hauer established his “twelve-tone law” (which he called
“Nomos”) by claiming a fragile, but harmonic balance (on the basis of
the Golden Section) between all twelve pitches caused by
self-regulation. He explained this concept in terms of a Harmony of the
Spheres, saying that the “solar systems [= 12 pitches] temper each
other” by necessity and thus establish a well-tempered and dodecaphonic
Harmony of the Spheres. Although it is neither evident nor likely that
Hauer actually considered Ramon Llull’s Ars Magna (esp. fig. 1 of this
work) in his thought, the apparent similarities are indeed striking:
All different elements (pitches) concur with each other in perfect
harmony. The sum of all possible combinations that is represented by
one specific current aggregate (“atonal melody”) points to a
meta-harmony in the center of the circle of tones represented by the
term “Melos”: a fundamental spiritual idea behind the physical
appearance of sound expresses both balance and proportion as an
aesthetical and as one ethical implication. Another implication with
regard to the act of composition is the predisposition of the musical
material in terms of the twelve-tone row, its trope and the resulting
series of 4-part chords (“harmonic bond”).
Rather than to Western hermeticism, Hauer often explicitly referred to
ancient Greece, to the Harmony of the Spheres, to Daoism and to the
Book of Revelation. He considered the equivalent harmonic balance
within a plurality (of twelve items) a universal principle of thought
that is or can be combined with other twelvefold systems such as
colours, musical keys and intervals, months, zodiacs, fundamental
consonants, vocational classes, the I Ching and the set of fundamental
principles thought. To a certain extent, this “atonal” system also
constitutes a counter-model in contrast to ascending (or descending)
monocentric –therefore “tonal”: he actually referred to a “natural
trope” and the harmonic series as a counterpart to his 44 “atonal
tropes”– scales with reference to integer proportions, the Tetraktys
and the Ptolemaic system such as Robert Fludd’s pyramids or his Divine
Monochord. It also explicitly opposes bipolar concepts such as the
Platonic Lambda or the Thimusian Lambdoma. Although Rudolf Steiner was
provably aware of Hauer and saw many affinities between his own
anthroposophical understanding of music and Hauer’s musical thought, it
was Arnold Keyserling (1922–2005) who elaborated Hauers and his
Zwölftonspiel’s remarkably close connections to Boethius’s triad Musica
Mundana – Humana – Instrumentalis. © Dominik Šedivý 2013
Lucy Cradduck (The Open
University)
'"Point of Departure”: The enduring influence of Theosophy on
the composer Edmund Rubbra’
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As a student of Cyril Scott and then Gustav Holst and R.O. Morris, it
was almost inevitable that the young English composer Edmund Rubbra
(1901–86) would gain an interest in theosophy. His unpublished Op. 1,
The Secret Hymnody, is a setting of a hermetic Greek text translated by
G.R.S. Mead. During the 1920s, Rubbra’s early involvement with
theosophy was reflected in his unconventional lifestyle, including his
work as a composer and pianist with the travelling theatrical company
the Arts League of Service. Much of his early vocal and incidental
music has a connection with theosophical or mystical texts, and
musically contains the seeds of his mature style. Fifty years later,
Rubbra still singled out his first published work, the song ‘Rosa
Mundi’, Op. 2 (1921), as ‘the point of departure for [his] future
development.’
Rubbra subsequently moved out of London and from the
late 1930s began to build a reputation as a symphonist. He became
increasingly influenced by Roman Catholicism, culminating in his
reception into the church in 1947. It would be easy to dismiss his
earlier enthusiasm for theosophy as a passing following of fashion or a
youthful rebellion against his working-class, low church upbringing.
Yet, as Rubbra himself acknowledged, the interest that it aroused for
Eastern religion, philosophy and music remained with him for the rest
of his life, leaving a lasting impression on his music. This resurfaced
particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s in such works as the
Piano Concerto (1956), the Pezzo Ostinato for harp (1958) and the song
cycle The Jade Mountain (1962) setting poems from the T’ang Dynasty
translated from the Chinese by Witter Bynner. Musically, the Orient is
expressed in a sensuous concern for timbre, subtlety of rhythm and
mode, and use of delicate ostinati – qualities that are also present in
his earliest works.
This paper will explore examples of his early and later
music, setting the works in their biographical context to show how,
from the start of his career, an interest in theosophy and the East
enabled Rubbra to create a very original and individual soundworld. ©
Lucy Cradduck 2013