At the age of ninety, Rudhyar stated that his music to some extent embodied both psychological and mystical qualities.1 To this day his name has been mentioned together with such movements as Buddhism and the Baha’i. The entry on Rudhyar in the New Grove Dictionary (2001) mentions his “exploration of Rosicrucianism, Buddhism, alchemy and the Baha’i movement, and his involvement in theosophy.” These were not his foremost pursuits, however; in an interview, he explained that he had read some of Rudolf Steiner's writings but “read a little about Rosicrucianism and Masonry … [and] didn't read Max Heindel.” Rudhyar recalled that during the summer of 1917 he had very little to do: “part of the time I was walking through the streets of New York, and the rest of the time I was in the Public Library, near which I had a room. And that's where I began to get interested in oriental philosophy.” In 1917, and again in 1925, he was especially impressed with the content of these “Asiatic books concerning the subjective and psychic character of music, its attunement to the seasonal and daily rhythms of nature, its ritualistic and sacred use, and the healing power attributed to it even in the Pythagorean Greek and later, Syrian tradition.”

Douglas Kahn proposed an affinity between Rudhyar's stance and the early Pythagoreans, commenting that “ostensibly inaudible sounds [are] known only through reason and heard only through the special sensitivity of the blessed.” This kind of relativity (and relationality) is supported by Rudhyar's selective readings of such areas as Buddhist and Indian thought, Pythagoreanism, and French philosophy. His tone rhetoric can also be linked with the subsequent American avant-garde, in particular through his vibrational logic as “extant in Cage.” As Rudhyar's thought correlates transcultural schemes and transpersonal models, the associations between Pythagoreanism, Neoplatonism, and his concept of Tone indeed bridge the ancient precepts with the Western, (ultra)modern, and/ or avant-garde contexts. One minor example is the five-pointed star, known as a pentagram: it is commonly regarded as a Pythagorean symbol through which (all five) elements envelope all matter. Hazrat Inayat Khan explains that each paired combination of the five elements leads to a different aural effect: while the sound of ether with fire “has a breaking and freeing effect,” the sound of ether with air “produces calm and peace.”