20th Century Music - Part Three

The Dreamer: Harry Partch's Corporeal Musical Spirit

I happen to think that only in music have truly new directions been found, and that these are two and only two: electronic music and the 43-tone works and instruments of Harry Partch. -Jacque Barzun

Harry Partch (1901-1974) occupied anything but an exalted place in contemporary music before or after his death. As Partch rejected the form and tonality of the 300-year-old symphonic tradition, its theory, and notation so to did musical society reject the work of Partch.

Harry Partch was the only composer of the 20th century to compose for an orchestra of instruments he alone designed and built. He patterned and built instruments of aesthetic beauty and practical substance which allowed him to create a music with a sonic imagination so vigorous and full-blown that it can accurately be called genius.

Working in almost total isolation for almost four decades, Partch composed a music that was created out of the whole cloth of human imagination. His music, instruments, style, genre, melody, harmony, rhythm and timbre are unique in the world of music.

"Harry Partch was born June 24, 1901, in Oakland, California, the third child of Presbyterian missionaries who had spent 10 years in China prior to his birth. His boyhood was spent near Tombstone, Arizona, where, despite the total lack of formal music training, he grew up surrounded by music. His mother, a woman of talent and determination, taught her children to read music and to play several instruments. Young Harry, by the time he was 6, not only knew how to play the reed organ, but also the guitar, the clarinet and the harmonica. He began to compose at 14. When the family moved to New Mexico and he received the first music lesson outside his home, he discovered in short order that he loathed formal music training as repressive and constricting. It was an antipathy that colored the rest of his life. He struck out on his own, and, in the years that followed, wrote a piano concerto, a symphonic poem, a string quartet, all in the conventional mold. To keep body and soul together, he became a proof-reader, a sometime piano player, a grape picker, while he continued to compose and to search for a way to express his music. Then, at age 28, in New Orleans, he burned the whole body of his musical work of 14 years, determined to start anew, to develop for himself music that would transcend the conventions of musical composition. Its basis was the multi-tones he found in the space of the octave. It enabled him to make the first transitions ever from the human voice to the musical instrument. During the Depression, Partch traveled throughout America by rail as a hobo, writing of his experiences in his music. Although he had received a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant in 1934, it wasn't until 1943 that he received the first of the more substantial grants that made it possible for him to work and travel and to give the 1931-34 and 1943-45 performances that started to make his work known.

To this day, the difficulties surrounding a performance of Partch's music - the complexities of training musicians to play his music on his instruments and then to transport those large and delicate objects that cannot function properly without his personal attention - inhibit managers and impresarios."

The following excerpted article from the October 4, 1987 New York Times by John Rockwell gives a pure, rich and brief account of Partch's life and work.

"Proud and improbable, the Watts Towers thrust out of a slum neighborhood in Los Angeles. Constructed by a poor, Italian-born laborer, Simon Rodia, they are classic examples of ritualistic folk art, spires pieced together by hand from Coke bottles, seashells and every sort of found object - also known as junk - that Mr. Rodia could lay his hands on. They are airy and fanciful, yet built as solid as a modern skyscraper. When he had finally finished his towers, after decades of labor, Mr. Rodia simply moved on.

Harry Partch, . . . who also came from California, made a musical equivalent of the Watts Towers, bolstered by an idiosyncratic but formidable tuning theory that he set down in his book, "Genesis of a Music." Partch's theories of just intonation and a 43-note octave, his arsenal of extravagant, self-designed and self-built instruments and his body of compositions have proven enormously influential among American experimental composers. But, except for a handful of mostly out-of-print recordings, few mainstream music-lovers have actually heard his work. And since his mature work consists largely of lavish musical-theatrical spectacles, meant to be played on his own instruments - which created a unique, resonating sound when heard live - few people can actually claim to have really heard his work at all. . . .

(Partch) was a major figure in the loner-eccentric tradition of American composition, and major productions of his works come few and far between.

What is this "loner-eccentric tradition?" It means a constellation of composers from the 18th century onward who defied genteel, European-derived notions of what serious music should be and struck out, instead, in the individualistic American pioneering spirit, to make their own rules. Since each man, from William Billings and Anthony Philip Heinrich in the 18th and 19th centuries to Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, John Cage and many more in the 20th, pursued his own path, their music hardly sounds alike. But it shares a fiesty, defiant streak, a determination to seek out the truth independently of received opinion. And many of these loners knew of and admired their predecessors and contemporaries.

Partch's parents were missionaries in China who lost their faith during the Boxer Rebellion and moved back to the United States; their son Harry was born in Oakland, California but reared in Arizona and New Mexico, where he grew up enamored of stark desert space and the fading legends of the outlaw Old West.

As a child, he played several instruments, and began composing in his mid-teens. But he lived far from centers of musical education, and remained largely self-taught. By his 20s, he had grown dissatisfied with conventional ideas of what music should be, either in compositional form or in basic structure. Having composed a whole raft of classical scores (including string quartets, a piano concerto, a symphonic poem), he destroyed them all. "When I was 28 (I think) I crammed all of this into a big pot-bellied stove in New Orleans," he later recalled.

Instead, he began actively to compose and perform in a brand-new style. This style was built on two basic pillars: the idea that all music should derive from the spoken word, and his system of "just intonation" (eventually refined to the 43-tone octave), wherein everything was theoretically in the purest of harmony, compared with the compromises built into the equal temperament system that has prevailed in Western music since the 18th century, and which is designed to facilitate easy modulations from key to key.

His first works in this style, composed in the early 1930s, were settings of ancient Chinese poetry by Li Po, for himself as singer-speaker accompanying himself on his first self-designed instrument, the "adapted viola." No doubt through the influence of his parents, Partch was deeply indebted to the Orient for both his musical and his dramatic ideas.

Although he won the occasional fellowship and the odd teaching job, Partch spent the late 30s mostly as a hobo, bumming around the country; his experiences formed the basis for a number of subsequent works.

In the meantime, however, he was refining his theoretical ideas, first set down in 1927 and eventually published as "Genesis of a Music" in 1949 (revised, expanded and republished in 1974). Here Partch sets up a historical antithesis between what he calls "corporeal" and "abstract" music, the former being the moribund tradition of classical Greek chanting as well as various kinds of Oriental singing, the latter the Western edifice of contrapuntal instrumental music. Partch blamed the Catholic Church and Western civilization in general for the decline of the corporeal: "It was gone because the ancient, lovely and fearless attitude toward the human body was gone," he wrote (D.H. Lawrence and Oswald Spengler were intellectual influences). In his book, Partch also laid out in gnarled detail his ideas about just intonation, microtonality and the 43-tone scale.

He also continued to design and build new instruments to play in this tuning system. After he gave up his hobo wandering, he settled fitfully into a succession of residencies and teaching positions in the 40s, 50s, 60s, and 70s - mostly in the Midwest (especially the University of Illinois a Champaign-Urbana) and in California.

His instruments tend to be extravagantly designed (with a strong Chinese influence, full of twisting shapes and kitschy ornamentation) and named (surrogate kithara, diamond marimba, cloud chamber bowls, boo, spoils of war, marimba eroica, crychord, zymo-xyl, bloboy, quadrangularis reversum, etc.).

As he matured, Partch's music moved from solo songs to increasingly grandiose theatrical spectacles. These works were "in the tradition of worldwide ritual theater," as Partch wrote, and often had Greek inspirations - "Oedipus," "The Bewitched," "Delusion of the Fury" and "Revelation in the Courthouse Park," which is derived from Euripides's "Bacchae." The stark settings included the Partch instruments at the center of the visual focus, as well as singers and dancers. The vocal lines were still half spoken, half sung, but the principal musical attention was now seized by the lavish timbral effects of the instrumental music, slithery and sour in intonation, herky-jerky in forward motion, abruptly sectional in form, dazzling in its bizarre aural colors.

But the results were ultimately convincing on a primordial, totemistic level, quite apart from the earnest theorizing Partch applied in retrospect ("for better or worse," he conceded of his jettisoning of Western tradition, "it was an emotional decision"). Late in life, he added: "The work I have been doing these many years parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found sound-magic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he involved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend great meaning to his life. This is my Trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience ritual."

One hopes Partch's disciples and posterity itself will unite to preserve and propagate his legacy. For he was a true American original, a Romantic adrift in the modern world. At the end of his preface to the second edition of "Genesis of a Music," finished in 1972, Partch wrote:

"One can be eminently creative in any medium, of course, but the more I see of fashions the more I discern, with infinite clarity, another path - that of Man, the bright adventurer, the magic-maker. When I feel optimistic, it holds brilliant promise, like an Arizona morning before dawn, with its cardboard stage set and dark eastern silhouette in honor of the sun's holy rising.