In the annals of art, and measured by originality,
few figures are more revolutionary than the composer/musical
philosopher/hobo/woodworker/visual artist/dramaturg/gardener/inventor Harry
Partch. This eternally mysterious pipe-smoking pioneer's persistent impact
on the cultural groundwater that nourishes the mainstream has been a long
time coming, and its presence is now immeasurable.
Oakland-born
Partch (1901-1974) was a scabrous, sardonic, intellectually fearless and
imaginatively fertile creator of new ways of hearing, playing and thinking
about music. He was a defiantly anti-establishment outsider whose chief
contribution to the contemporary canon was a lifelong pursuit of musically
challenging ways to smash the rigid formalities of the standard Western
12-tone musical scale. His own 43-tone just-intonation scale (with 43
pitches in each octave) shaped the framework for a multitude of precisely
notated pieces between 1930 and 1972, composed for beautifully odd instruments
that he himself designed and built in order to perform his works' intricate
tonal deviltries.
Partch
was a well-read autodidact who dropped out of USC's music program, where he
was studying to become a concert pianist; he devoured library books on
Greek mythology and the physics of sound, basing many musical pieces on his
findings and theories, and also on his experiences as a homeless drifter
during the Depression. In his search for a total, corporeal art, he became
fascinated with ritualistic spectacle as well, writing his own texts, and
even costume-designing his later dance/theater works, including his magnum
opus, The Delusion of the Fury
(1966).
Several of Partch's wide-ranging
works were performed by local composer and Partch historian John Schneider's
Partch ensemble at REDCAT on May 29 and 30. The program was called "Partch
Dark/Partch Light," with partial reference to the varied degrees of persona
within this Harry Partch, a thornily complicated man who was both brooder
and droll wit, whose music scaled unearthly peaks via the savagely
scathing, the searingly comical and the ethereally alien.
Schneider's ensemble performed on
re-creations of Partch's original instruments, wonderfully strange wooden
and metallic percussive and stringed contraptions with takes-you-places
names such as Cloud Chamber Bowls, Blow Boy, the Harmonic Canon, Boo, the
Marimba Eroica and Spoils of War. According to Schneider, a classically trained
guitarist, his initial exposure to Partch's music and legacy changed
everything.
"I just didn't know what to do with
it," he says, laughing at the memory, "because I was a composing major, and
in the '60s, early '70s, when I was learning composition, serialism was
still the thing 行 European influence, all that really heady, intellectual
stuff. Somebody played me Delusion of the Fury, Castor and Pollux, and Barstow, and I just flipped out. It was too weird, it was too wild, it was
too elemental, it was not intellectual. That kind of freaked me out."
Scored in later years for Chromelodeon (retuned reed
organ), Surrogate Kithara (based on the ancient-Greek lyre) and Boo (bamboo
marimba), Barstow details in
text and music the thoughts on dating and vagrancy that Partch gleaned from
graffiti and overheard rabble-rousing on his hobo rounds along the West
Coast; it's one of his more light-toned, albeit cheekily woe-filled pieces.
For Schneider, the notion that humor
could be employed in the context of composed concert music was stunning.
"Imagine, humor in contemporary
music 行 how could that be?" he says. "They don't kid around when they call
it 'serious music,' because it usually is."
Years after his initial discovery of
Barstow, Schneider found out
from Danlee Mitchell, Partch's right-hand man and the former director of
Partch's performing ensemble at San Diego State University, that there was
a solo-guitar version of the piece. Schneider became so obsessed with the
original handmade guitar Partch had constructed to play Barstow on that he rebuilt the guitar according to what
he could figure out from Partch's book, Genesis of a Music, written in 1947 (Da Capo Press). The original
guitar, which featured frets only as you needed them, and to be removed
when not employed, doesn't exist anymore. Over the years, Schneider has
reproduced most of Partch's original handmade instruments. (Partch's
originals are now housed at New Jersey's Montclair State University, where
music students can earn a minor in Partch, and where a structure has been
built to house the Partch Institute 行 an idea that our rebellious Harry
Partch would probably have scoffed at.)
Barstow, which was performed at the "Partch Dark/Partch
Light" event, was written in 1941, and is played on instruments precisely
tuned to Partch's 43-tone scale, as are virtually all of his works. The
smearingly "dissonant" effect of this microtonal scale made a colossal
impact on his fellow musical avant-gardists, including
Terry Riley and,
notably, Lou Harrison, who discovered Partch's scale when he was assigned
to write a review of Genesis of a Music by Virgil Thompson for The New York Herald in 1949.
"Harrison had already been exploring
tunings with John Cage in the mid-'40s, and just went nuts," says
Schneider. "His famous saying is, he went out and bought a tuning hammer
and never looked back."
Harry Partch was, in his arcane way,
just writing folk music after all. Barstow and U.S. Highball tells the story of Partch's journey in empty
boxcars to Chicago as a starving, shivering hobo during the pits of the
Depression. During the trip, Partch scribbled down trackside graffiti and
snatches of hobo chat and rail-yard cop talk, and transcribed the crudely
pointed words and their barking rhythms into music. While he was homeless
and on the road, he kept a diary, later published as Bitter Music (University of Illinois Press). It became a stage
piece in which he mixed his stories with music that notated the exact
pitches and cadences of the way people talk.
"He says
in that book that he found himself dumped into a fountainhead of real
Americana, real music," says Schneider. "He was fighting all that stuff
about the European image, and he said that the best music that people have
to offer does not come from the upper classes down, it's always the other
direction. It comes from the streets, it comes from real experience."
Nevertheless,
the lessons Partch learned from his studies of Greek mythology found
metaphorical expression in most of his Americana-themed works, including
the music for the film Windsong
(1958), in which Daphne and Apollo's story is set on a Michigan sand dune,
on a shore of the Great Lakes. (Windsong and other Partch-scored films were screened at
the REDCAT event.)
The intrepid
coal-mine canary Partch remains inspirational, not least for the lonesome
road he trekked in quest of his dreams, but perhaps most for the way he
ultimately justified his vision 行 free from, as he put it, "European-style
New York chauvinism" 行 with a genuinely new music that just sounds, feels
and looks great.
"You
open a door and there's Partch," says Schneider. "What he did was open up a
whole new wing to music, saying, There are notes you've never heard before,
there are harmonies that you've never heard before, that will release
emotions that you didn't know you had. It'll put you in musical spaces.
It's like leaving the earth."
