The Arts: Eurythmy, Music & Architecture
The arts renewed from spiritual perception: eurythmy as visible speech and song, the inner nature of music, organic architecture and the first Goetheanum. Part of Thalira's Anthroposophical Glossary of 515 terms, and companion to the in-depth guide Eurythmy.
Steiner's claim that art is itself a way of knowing: the artist and the spiritual investigator draw from one and the same source.
Steiner's teaching that the arts are not human inventions but a sacred inheritance, each art preserving the memory of one cosmic Mystery-stage of evolution.
The form-creating power that rises unconsciously in the artist, which Steiner read as a dim first foretaste of Imagination, the opening stage of spiritual cognition.
Steiner's tone eurythmy: the art that makes the inner experience of music visible as movement of the whole human being.
Steiner's movement-art in which each sound of speech, every consonant and vowel, is shown as a precise gesture of the whole moving body.
The two soul-moods music gained with the third: major as the soul turning outward in elation, minor as the soul turning inward toward sorrow.
Steiner's building style in which a structure is shaped like a living organism, every form following inner necessity instead of the repeated right angle.
The anthroposophical study of sculpture and the plastic arts, where carved and modelled form reveals the spirit working in the human body rather than copying outward nature.
Painting worked out of colour itself, where the surface is treated as inwardly luminous rather than drawn and filled in.
Steiner's art of the word raised above prose, sounding the spirit through epic, lyric, and dramatic speech.
Steiner's teaching that the task of art is to build a bridge between the earthly world and the spiritual world.
Carved wooden figures Steiner designed to show each speech-sound as one threefold whole of movement, feeling, and character, each painted in three colours.
Steiner's account of how a single musical tone is felt not in the air but inwardly, in the ether, by the whole human being.
Rudolf Steiner's double-domed wooden building at Dornach (1913 to 1922), the first home of anthroposophy and the founding work of organic architecture, destroyed by fire on New Year's Eve 1922.
Steiner's teaching that music originates in the spiritual world the soul knows in sleep, and that audible tone is a remembered copy of it.
The musical fifth Steiner read as an older, outward way of hearing, where the soul felt lifted past its own body into the divine world.
In Steiner's aesthetics, beauty is spirit made visible in the senses: the dawn through which the soul passes from feeling into knowledge.
The one interval where the higher tone merges back into its own prime, which Steiner heard as the soul finding its self again, lifted a level.
The seven carved capitals of Steiner's first Goetheanum, named Saturn to Venus, each form unfolding out of the one before it as the nave runs West to East.
The musical wing of eurythmy, where pitch, beat and interval are made visible as movements of the human body.