"I am Harry
Partch, a composer. My compositions,
a few of which are here recorded,
employ a scale, instruments and manner
of performance different from that
of current musical practice."
Thus, with what must be the Understatement
of the Century, does Partch’s own
dark-brown voice, sounding mildly
uncomfortable in front of a microphone,
introduce the original recording
of Intrusions. Although
he couldn’t have known it at the time,
he also neatly introduces this Enclosure
2. The recording of the subsequent
short snippet of the music is horribly
distorted, forcefully reminding us
that we are lucky to be able to hear
much of this music at all. Yet, as
we shall discover, the causing of
aural discomfort is not the sole prerogative
of dire recording quality.
Many of us might
imagine that a "radical"
is someone who wakes up one morning
in a fit of inspired decisiveness
and tells the World something like,
"OK, I’m sick of the entire tradition
of Western Music. Today I’m going
to ditch the lot of it, and build
a Music of my own – the
whole shooting match, from scratch!"
Well, Harry Partch was just such a
radical, but, strange as it might
seem, he didn’t just sit up and declare
his "life-goal" quite so
emphatically. Quite the contrary,
in fact; he rather drifted into it,
the hapless victim of circumstance.
Although most of
us probably go through life like that,
I’m sure that very few of us end up
in such strange places with strange-sounding
names. For that matter, neither do
we find ourselves negotiating such
twisted and tortuous trails en
route. They do say that, "Some
are born great, some achieve greatness,
and some have greatness thrust upon
them." Well, in Partch’s case,
it would seem to have been not wholly
one or another, but a little bit of
each.
This "Enclosure
2" illustrates the formative
early stages of Partch’s curious career.
In the substantial booklet (all in
English, by the way) Philip Blackburn,
producer of the series, contributes
an absorbing six-page essay, illuminating
the whys and wherefores that determined
the road Partch was, because of his
nature and fate, bound to follow.
Let me try to give you something of
the flavour of it.
As a lad, Partch
played keyboards in a silent movie
theatre band, which gave him a feeling
for the many dramatic devices inherent
in music. Even outside the "kinema",
he was steeped in music-hall entertainment,
including the then-popular melodramas
(recitations with musical interludes
and backgrounds). His childhood exposure
to aspects of Chinese culture acquired
by his parents, who’d been missionaries
in China before Harry was born, probably
explained why, in his early twenties,
he gravitated towards the San Francisco
Mandarin Theatre. There, the way the
Chinese fitted their music to the
rhythms and tonality of their speech,
rather than the other way round, wormed
its way into his mind.
Although he took
a "normal" job (newspaper
proof-reader), music saturated his
soul. Other than mundane schooling
and a few fitful, unfruitful terms
of formal study, he was self-taught.
Untrammelled by any curriculum, he
just followed wherever his nose led
him. This was far and wide, but he
was hooked in particular on Greek
mythology and the history of musical
theory. It’s likely that his burgeoning
expertise in the latter triggered
his discontent with current musicology.
Similarly, his experiences of other
musical and dramatic cultures were
fomenting in his mind his rebellion
against the Western "concert
tradition", whilst his growing
awareness of the history of word-setting
in music conspired with the Mandarin
Theatre experience to turn him against
both the way in which the West subordinates
words to music, and indeed the very
basis of Western music – the
tonal system itself.
Yet it was not cataclysmic,
but a slow, gradual process. Even
as he started experimenting with just
intonation, he continued to write
conventional music. Inevitably, it
all came to a head: in 1933 his settings
of Li Po for intoning voice and Adapted
Viola were the first major result
of his researches and experiments
into the proper way to mate words
with music. That "proper way"
necessarily required microtonal
just intonation. The implications
were far-reaching.
Almost incidentally,
Partch had convinced himself that
the European tradition’s abandonment
of just intonation, in favour of the
various mean-tone temperaments that
finally congealed into the immutable
"grey" of 12-tone equal
temperament, was just plain wrong.
In passing, it’s worth underlining
the fact that, contrary to received
wisdom (and quite a few learned references),
"12ET" had not been king
of the castle for all that long: in
fact, it finally established its arm-lock
on Western music only as recently
as 1917. As luck would have it, this
was around the time that the young
Partch was at his most impressionable.
Now, what do we have
on this four-CD set? It’s quite a
mixture. Just like Partch himself,
it tends to defeat simple categorisation.
Even the titular "Historic Speech-Music
Recordings" doesn’t cover the
ground. For example, While My Heart
Keeps Beating Time is a song,
plain and simple; the extracts from
Bitter Music, which fill the
third disc, were recorded as recently
as 1992; some of the tracks do not
contain any speech, and some do not
contain any music. So, what can
we say? Well, I suppose, we can say
that these are all "recordings"!
I agree with you
entirely: that’s not at all helpful.
Rather more usefully, though, we can
observe that virtually the entire
production revolves around
Partch’s "speech-music",
and as such it incorporates examples
of the proof of this particular pudding.
Most of the music is "chamber-sized",
whilst some of the music – and,
be warned, some of the speech for
that matter! - is decidedly
not for the faint-hearted.
By comparison Partch’s large-scale
theatre works, most notably Delusion
of the Fury, are much easier meat
to chew and swallow. Of course, this
is nothing at all unusual, but simply
another instance – the classic
case being Bartók - of
comfortable upholstery cushioning
an unfamiliar idiom.
However, there is
a second, parallel thread woven into
the fabric of this Enclosure. It is
concerned with not just the "speech-music"
of Partch, but speech both by and
about Partch. These parts are both
fascinating and tantalising because,
whilst they tell you interesting things
about Partch, clearly they cannot – even
if they had filled the entire set
of CDs - tell you anything even
remotely approaching the whole story.
For something approaching that whole
story, a good starting-point would
be Bob Gilmore’s book, Harry Partch
– A Biography (Yale Univ. Press,
ISBN 0-300-06521-3), closely followed
by as much as you can reasonably digest
of Partch’s own Genesis of a Music
(Da Capo Press, ISBN 0-306-80106-X).
I could even argue
for a third strand! There have
been rich composers and poor composers,
but I’ll bet there haven’t been many
who were reduced to drifting the length
and breadth of the land in a forlorn
attempt to eke out some sort – any
sort - of a living. Partch
was. Caught in the jaws of the American
Depression, he endured all the attendant,
horrendous privations and indignities:
homelessness, poverty, hunger, "begging"
for work, State Relief Centres, and
incarceration. For the most part,
these were leavened only by the occasional
comradeship of his fellow hobos and
a certain solace courtesy of Mother
Nature.
Yet, throughout,
he remained a true artist, noting
down his first-hand experiences of
those terrible times, and absorbing
them into his being. As is the way
with such seminal influences, they
inevitably "flavoured" his
subsequent works, but significantly
they also furnished actual materials.
Partch’s "hobo products"
introduced into art a red-raw vernacular
that can take the skin off your ear-drums.
Even today it can leave the most potent
verismo, of whatever colour,
gasping in its wake, and therein lies
the meaning of my cryptic comment
at the end of the opening paragraph
of this review.
There is so darned
much in this Enclosure that it’s difficult
to know just where, or even how, to
begin. So, as I’ve been advised that
it’s a very good place to start, let’s
start at the beginning! Seeing as
the subject in hand is Partch’s "speech-music",
let’s winkle out the pieces that could
be said to trace the development of
this style. In order of composition,
these are: While My Heart Keeps
Beating Time (1929), By the
Rivers of Babylon (1931, rev.
1943), the Li Po Lyrics (1930-33),
Dark Brother (1942-43), Barstow
(1943, June 28), San Francisco
(1943, July 1), U.S. Highball
(1943, October), Y.D. Fantasy
(1944, March), Finnegans Wake
(1944, May), Ring Around the Moon
(1949-53), O Frabjous Day!
(1954), and Bless This Home
(1961).
The contrast between
the first two is nothing short of
alarming! My Heart is a pretty
but penny-plain popular song for voice
and piano, one of a dozen or so Partch
wrote for the simple purpose of raising
cash. It’s hardly Earth-shattering,
but of interest because it illustrates
Partch’s incipient concern for word-setting – and
also because it is sung by Philip
Blackburn himself, who I’m sure won’t
mind when I say that, pleasantly as
he sings, he isn’t likely to adversely
affect Frank Sinatra’s standing as
a singer!
But, turn to Babylon
and be prepared for a shock, especially
if you’re familiar only with settings
of the words by the likes of (say)
William Walton or Boney M. Like so
much that was to follow, it is gritty
and uncompromising, and for that reason
alone constitutes a dramatic response
more truthful than most to the desperation
of the Biblical text. Partch, whose
43-tone Monophony was as yet still
work in progress, "tracked"
the speech inflections using a justly-intoned
diatonic scale. Even thus constrained,
there are still some 17 notes to the
octave, and by definition most of
these are not present on the pianoforte
keyboard. Consequently, there is indeed
a "strange sound" to complement
Psalm 137’s "strange land".
Although the sounds
of Partch’s Chromelodeon, Kithara
and Adapted Viola are remarkable,
more remarkable still is his use of
the voice: he meticulously segregates
the vocal functions of words and melody.
Real words are always spoken (or "intoned"),
the music emerging from the natural
pitches and rhythms of the words,
which in this piece follow the speech-patterns
of a cantor whom Partch once heard
reciting the Psalm. I should emphasise
that Partch’s speech-music has nothing
in common with Schoenberg’s sprechgesäng.
This latter is simply a method of
accommodating speech in music, which
is a far cry from drawing out the
music inherent in speech. In contrast,
where Partch requires the voice to
"sing", it always does so
wordlessly, quite properly operating
as a purely musical instrument. Guess
what? Partch is dead right: by comparison,
the words in a conventional aria are
as clear as mud.
Moving on to the
Li Po Lyrics we find another
step-change: the emergence of his
microtonal Monophony. By its very
design, this enables the music to
interpret speech inflections with
optimal fidelity. However - I
suspect by accident rather than design! – to
most of us listeners, certainly those
not blessed with tonally razor-sharp
hearing, it poses a problem. This
problem happens to be crucial, so
please bear with me whilst I digress
in order to mull it over.
Apart from any who
were born well before 1917, most of
us in the West have grown up accustomed
to hearing music only in 12-tone equal
temperament, or at best we have been
dimly aware of the justly-intoned
diatonicism of strings-only ensembles
and a cappella choirs. So,
how are we to apprehend, let alone
comprehend, the subtleties of Partch’s
microtonal Monophony? Whilst I have
been listening my wife, whose tastes
in music (shall we say?) differ
from mine, has occasionally overheard
bits of this Enclosure. Her typical
comment has been something on the
lines of, "How can you call that
‘music’?" Gradually, I’ve learnt
that it’s best to not even attempt
an answer, especially since the time
I replied, perhaps rashly, "Look,
I just open my mouth and tell it,
‘You’re Music, OK?’"
But, it’s a very
fair question. It could be answered
in two ways - neither of
which, by the way, appears to be satisfactory
to an impatient and unsympathetic
spouse. The first is the "scientific"
approach, to demonstrate that the
sounds being created actually conform
to all the criteria that distinguish
"music" from "noise".
Can we take that one as read? The
second is the "practical"
approach, which hinges on the fact
that our ears are physically and inescapably
geared to just intonation. Regardless
of the microtonality involved, Partch’s
Monophony is to our ears what water
is to a duck. I can vouch for this.
My own ears are not so much "razor-sharp"
as just plain "blunt" yet,
the more I listen, the more "natural"
does Monophony sound to my ears. In
a sense, it’s simply a matter of re-awakening
the ear’s "racial memory".
Like me, you may feel that you will
never lift that seventh veil, but
the simple act of listening will surely
shift at a good three or four of them,
and from my experience that’s enough
to give you a fair sight of the wood
through the intervening trees.
The settings of the
Li Po Lyrics adhere rigorously
to the precepts of ancient cultures:
the inherent musicality of the poetic
voice is sacrosanct, whilst the accompanying
instrument, here the Adapted Viola,
provides complementary harmonisations
and commentaries, serving to underline
and expand the poetic meaning. However,
this is no mere reverential act of
"reconstruction" in the
manner of "authentic performance
practice" – the music
and its manners are entirely Partch’s
own, taking in "new" elements
of, amongst others, rhythmic violence,
humour both bluff and sly, and even
the odd vulgar ditty. Partch’s treatment
lifts the lyrics from ancient China
and deposits them, with a resounding
"bump", right into the USA
of the mid-Twentieth Century.
A further ten years
down the line, the all-important "hobo"
angle surfaces, represented here by
Dark Brother, Barstow
and U.S. Highball. In these
works, Partch did something which
strikes me as utterly unprecedented.
Folk like Puccini had viewed life
in the raw through the rose-tinted
glasses of a luxuriant symphony orchestra,
and chaps like the Gershwins had dolled
up the vernacular in sophisticated
Broadway garb. Don’t ask me what arcane
artistic chemistry was at work, because
I haven’t yet figured it out, but
somehow everything that Partch had
developed – his radical
approach to word-setting, his microtonal
Monophony, his exotic instruments
and his unique style – seemed
to come together and ignite, catalysed
by the unfiltered candour with which
Partch had written down his hobo experience.
This is not to say
that the texts are all original. In
Dark Brother Partch set the
singularly resonant words of Thomas
Wolfe, words taken from a sort of
paean to loneliness first published
during Partch’s own wanderings. The
entire text of Barstow comprises
quotations, whilst U.S. Highball
combines quotations with Partch’s
own musings. What is original
is that Partch had hit on a means
not just to incorporate, or perhaps
elevate, the vernacular into
"high" art, but to make
"high" art out of the lowliest
vernacular. This might sound picky,
but a moment’s reflection will confirm
that the difference between the two
is actually enormous. I’m sure that,
if Partch’s words had been cast into
conventional operatic or cantata moulds,
they wouldn’t have had anything like
the same searing dramatic impact.
They might even, through no fault
of theirs, have sounded ridiculous.
In setting the San
Francisco Newsboy Cries, Partch
has applied the identical compositional
method to the thoroughly mundane.
This is actually quite a neat idea.
Come to think of it, it’s not that
long ago that street news-vendors
and their cries used to be commonplace.
Certainly, I can remember several
from my youthful forays into my local
towns in the West Riding of Yorkshire,
and it’s still impressed on my memory
how each one had a cry as individual
as his face, and that these cries,
whilst savagely mutilating the words
they contained, always had the ring
of a musical motive about them.
Partch’s original
version, for intoning voice, Adapted
Viola, Chromelodion and Kithara, gives
a surreal impression of the cries,
along with sundry trams and other
traffic, emerging from the soggy,
foggy, street-lit night. Unfortunately
this is one of the grottiest of the
recordings, sounding like a particularly
badly cared-for acetate. However,
a few tracks further on comes San
Francisco II – the same
piece arranged by Mark Eslin for guitars,
cello and flute. This is a double
blessing. Firstly, it was recorded
in thoroughly modern sound in 1990,
so you don’t have to listen to it
through clenched ears. Secondly, being
arranged for conventional instruments,
albeit unconventionally played, it
gives us the chance to assess the
contribution of Partch’s instruments
to his musical landscapes. The difference
is, to say the least, illuminating.
O Frabjous Day!
is another bit of surrealism, this
time with a bizarre edge to it. Lewis
Carroll’s famous nonsense poem, The
Jabberwocky, could almost have
been written specially for Partch:
in his gleeful, half-menacing, half-comical
march-like setting, the "far
out" sounds of the Harmonic Canon
and Bass Marimba fit the fantastical
verse like a glove does a hand. I
do just wonder what the audience made
of it at the 1954 première,
given at a Mill Valley Outdoor Club
young people’s concert! From my experience
of "young people", in all
likelihood they lapped it up without
so much as batting an eyelid.
The two settings
from James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake
and the Y.D. (i.e. "Yankee
Doodle") Fantasy were
both written not long after the "hobo"
works. Both show significant stylistic
departures. Firstly, Partch admits
conventional instruments. In view
of his venomous antipathy to conventional
musical culture, that might seem surprising.
I’m not sure why – maybe
he felt some twinge of sympathy for
the instruments, as "innocent
victims" of the atrocity? – but
clearly he had no practical problem
integrating them into his musical
universe. This of course provides
folk with all the justification they
need to attempt arrangements of his
music for conventional instruments – as
in San Francisco II, or the
Ben Johnson version of U.S. Highball
(see my review).
Secondly, Partch seemed to be relaxing
his rigorous speech-music "rules"
as, presumably, he probed the possibilities
and boundaries of the form.
To my mind, the Y.D.
Fantasy isn’t really speech-music
at all, but hovers in the grey area
between speech and song, now dropping
into speech, now veering into song,
occasionally lapsing into out-and-out,
high-spirited vocal gymnastics. The
reason for all this is simple: written
for an imaginatively outlandish combination
of soprano, two Tin Whistles, Oboe,
Flexatone and Chromelodion, it is
a zany skit, something of a musical
Monty Python sketch, or what some
of us these days might describe as
a "fun" piece. In the previous
track (Yankee Doodle Birds)
its amusing inspiration appears to
be described, with an almost audibly
wry smile, by Partch himself. That
this description actually refers to
another use of the Y.D. theme - some
years later in Water! Water! - does
not detract one iota from the aptness
of the sentiment.
In the Finnegans
Wake settings, Partch seems to
be experimenting in earnest. He varies
the speech-pitch rule by letting the
voice sing some of the words, but
without violating the natural word-rhythms
rule. Isobel, the first of
the two settings, appears to approach
dangerously close to the conventional
in reflecting its subject in the waters
of a whimsical waltz – or
maybe it’s a ländler?
Although only nine
minutes long, Ring Around the Moon
feels like a large-scale work, largely,
in the context of this Enclosure,
on account of its large instrumental
forces: Adapted Guitar II, Kithara,
Harmonic Canon, Chromelodion I, Chromelodion
Sub-bass, Cloud Chamber Bowls, Diamond
Marimba, Bass Marimba and Marimba
Eroica. Actually, there’s more. It
may not be listed in the booklet,
but my ears insist that they can hear
a cymbal! According to Partch, this
piece is supposed to be, amongst other
things, "a satire on the world
of singers and singing, music and
dance; on concerts and concert audiences,
where the perception of an understandable
American word is an odd kind of shock".
As such, it doesn’t
come across all that strongly, presumably
because this is more of a theatre
piece, depending rather more on Partch’s
concept of "corporeality"
than do the more intimate, chamber-scale
speech-music pieces. It earns its
place here because, amongst all the
instrumental shenanigans there is
an intoning voice providing the "odd
kinds of shock". It follows that
the final section must have caused
a few major palpitations, featuring
as it does a dizzying patter-song
of rhyming word-pairs like "mumbo-jumbo",
"hoity-toity", and "harum-scarum".
At one point, it all winds down onto
a muted "teeny-weeny", then
a sly "itsy-bitsy", causing
a ripple of mild mirth to run around
the audience. Lacking the visual aspect,
I am left wondering: was the comic
song Itsy-bitsy, Teeny-weeny, Yellow
Polka-dot Bikini doing the rounds
in the USA as early as 1953?
The text of Bless
This Home was written by Vincenzo
Prockelo for a couple who were expecting
their first child. Although, because
Prockelo is one of the performers,
we may suspect it, the notes do not
make it clear whether Partch’s speech-music
setting was part of the gift. For,
in truth, this is a very strange piece.
Partch’s obbligato oboe elaborately
decorates a dark processional, made
all the darker by the composer’s own
bass voice. It strikes me as a deliberate
emulation of the style of a Handelian
lament. Having said that, the second
time I listened, I found it much more
warmly attractive, though I still
can’t figure out what the Mazda Marimba
thinks it’s doing in such surroundings,
other than emulating a sore thumb.
Although the whole
of disc C is given over to extracts
from Bitter Music, for several
reasons I haven’t included it in the
above discussion of the "hobo"
speech-music works. It’s a complicated
business, requiring a whole booklet
page of explanation. Basically, Partch
had created a lengthy performance
work out of his hobo journals, but
for one or more of several reasons – ranging
from matters of principle through
artistic to personal - at
first just kept it to himself, then
later tried to destroy it altogether.
Yet, even the finality of this act
was indecisive: a microfilm copy of
the entire text survived, along with
some manuscript materials in his archive
that he could have burnt, but didn’t.
A huge question mark hangs over Bitter
Music: did Partch want us to hear
it, or not? According to Philip Blackburn,
in a 1970 interview with Jean Cutler
Partch made it clear that he did,
saying that, "At that time I
thought it didn’t represent me. Now,
I’m sorry - it does
represent me, or at least part of
me." A case of "the follies
of youth becoming the wisdom of old
age", perhaps?
The abridged version
in this Enclosure was put together
by Warren Burt, who is also the vocalist
in this recording. Vast tracts of
Bitter Music are plain, straightforward
recitation. At first, the piano – one
of Partch’s possible reasons for withholding
the work! – joins in only
sporadically. As the piece progresses,
the proportion of speech-music increases
and, correspondingly, the voice gradually
moves from objective detachment to
subjective involvement, the whole
thing culminating in what is described
in the booklet - with considerable
justification - as a "mad-song".
In the early stages,
the discourse is sufficiently mundane
for the listener to get bored and
switch off. This would be a grave
mistake. Almost imperceptibly, first
your attention is captured then, inexorably,
you are drawn into the world of those
wandering in the Depression wilderness,
until finally your mind becomes embroiled
by the experiences and feelings expressed.
It may not be quite what the old slogan
of the News of the World boasted,
"All human life is here",
but this one small corner of human
life is all there, its humour and
hope, its bitterness and hopelessness.
Here more than anywhere it’s significant
that Partch considered his speech-music
works to be "as much literary
explorations as musical ones"
because, even taken as a purely literary
achievement, Bitter Music is
extremely moving. However, the power
of speech-music to amplify emotional
expression is undeniable, because
its progressive invasion renders Bitter
Music nothing short of devastating.
That covers all the
speech-music in the Enclosure. However,
the Enclosure also encloses a few
other items. As Bitter Music
gives us one insight into what made
Harry Partch tick, so Harrys Wake
gives us another angle. Intended as
an "audio bio-drama", this
is compounded from two tape recordings.
One, which gives the track its title,
was made at a memorial meeting in
1974. The other, made covertly in
1966 by Danlee Mitchell, features
Partch himself both in conversation
and playing the piano. As Philip Blackburn’s
notes point out, "Much of his
public life was devoted to condemning
the piano and all it stood for, yet
here he is, in a fit of nostalgia,
revisiting the scene of the crime" – and
moreover conspiring, quite off the
top of his head, with known criminals
like Brahms and Chopin!
This is fascinating
stuff, but it makes vaguely uncomfortable
listening, largely because you feel
like an eavesdropper. As I see it,
the problem is one of presentation - or
rather lack of it. At any one moment
it’s hard to know just who out of
a "cast" of over a dozen
is talking, or even sometimes which
tape you’re hearing. I can’t help
feeling that with a little more effort
it could have been done so much better:
the two events could have been on
separate CD tracks, and then some
sort of "compere" could
have helped us to keep tabs on what
we are hearing. Hopefully, though,
with further hearings things will
start dropping nicely into place.
Of particular interest
to those with tonally razor-sharp
hearing, there is A Quarter-Saw
Section of Motivations and Intonations,
a presentation done in 1967 by Partch
himself. It’s a rather dry and dusty,
"bare-bones" style of delivery,
but even so there’s nothing quite
like getting it straight from the
horse’s mouth, is there?! So, if you’ve
ever wondered how justly-intoned scales - such
as the Scale of Olympos, the
Pythagorean, the Ptolemaic
Intense Diatonic or Terpander’s
Hexatonic – sound, then
this will be right up your street.
I find a real sense of wonder in hearing
these ancient scales. To think that,
strange as most of them sound to our
modern ears, these were the very foundations
of the earliest of all tonal music,
and then, by virtue of the physics
of JI, they are all contained within
Partch’s thoroughly modern 43-tone
Monophony. However, there’s much more
to go at: examples are also given
of JI resolutions, tonal fluxes, multiple
tonal senses and instrumental tunings.
Especially fascinating is Partch’s
illustrated account of the famous
objection raised to JI by Fox-Strangways,
along with Partch’s practical refutation - an
invaluable appendix to the discussion
in Genesis of a Music.
Another interjection!
I believe that it was Partch himself
who warned folk against getting too
hung up on the "43 tones"
thing, so it’s only fair that I should
mention it here. He was equally interested
in the expressive capabilities of
continuously varying pitch. For Partch,
slurs went way beyond the mere, fashion-conscious
use of portamento or, for that
matter, Varèse’s wailing sirens.
It’s not simply the curvaceous journey,
but the departing and the arriving:
there is something special
about a huge, soupy glide from one
precisely-determined pitch to another,
just as precisely-determined but remote
pitch.
There are also interjections
on the CDs – disc C apart,
the main events are punctuated by
short (extracts from) recorded introductions
and interviews. These provide fascinating
and sometimes amusing snapshots. A
couple I’ve already mentioned, but
the one entitled Texts and Music:
A Wagnerian Wrestling Match is
an absolute classic, in which Partch
slyly describes a Wagner opera as
a bout between, in the red corner,
Wagner’s symphony orchestra and, in
the blue corner, Wagner’s idea of
music-drama.
Others are more purely
thought-provoking, for example The
Use of English in Serious Music,
which has a crucial bearing on the
whole concept of speech-music. Partch’s
delivery varies, apparently according
to whether he is reading from a script
(when he sounds awkward) or caught
on the wing (when he sounds enthused
and emphatic). But, even when it’s
the former, there is always a special
frisson in hearing the voice of one
of the great musical minds of the
Twentieth Century speaking, as it
were, directly to us.
It is almost unnecessary
to say anything about the quality
of the performances and recordings,
because virtually all of these items
are unique. That’s only "virtually",
though, not "all". Here’s
a brief summary of the available alternatives
of which I’m aware:
By the Rivers
of Babylon:
1955 revised version,
recorded 1961 (monaural), originally
released on Partch’s own Gate 5
label. Currently available on Enclosure
5 (Innova 405).
Barstow:
1968 revised version
(by which time the voluntarily censored
"f" word and its containing
phrase had been reinstated!), recorded
1982 (stereo, live performance, some
audience noise). Available on New
World Records (80662-2).
U.S. Highball:
(1) 1955 revised
version, filmed by Madeline Tourtelot
(1958, completed 1968, b/w, monaural).
Available on Enclosure 1 (Innova 400,
VHS tape, see review)
(2) 1955 revised
version, recorded 1958 (stereo). Available
on New World Records (80662-2).
(3) Arr. Ben Johnson,
for Voice and String Quartet, recorded
2000 (stereo). Available on Nonesuch
(7559-79697-2, see review).
San Francisco:
1955 revised version,
recorded 1958 (stereo). Available
on New World Records (80662-2).
Tourtelot’s film,
which includes the visual element
that was always an essential part
of Partch’s corporeal philosophy,
hardly constitutes a comparative recording,
but should be acquired in its own
right by anyone with an interest in
this particular work. With the exception
of Babylon the revised versions
of 1955 are generally re-scorings
to take advantage of the larger instrumental
palette that Partch had developed.
Because Partch recordings
have always been relatively rare events,
you don’t tend to get contemporaneous
alternatives. Hence, generally speaking,
the more recent the recording the
better it sounds, regardless of whether
it’s in this Enclosure or one of the
listed comparisons.
The earliest recordings
in Enclosure 2, of Babylon,
Li Po, Barstow, San
Francisco, U.S. Highball,
Finnegan, Dark Brother,
and Y.D. Fantasy, were all
made by Warren Gilson between 1945
and 1947. Sadly, the originals must
be in a bit of a state – the
remastered tracks all sound dog-rough,
rather like 78s that have seen extended
service as beer-mats in a dockside
pub. Apparently, in the archive there
are only two sets of the original
acetates, both incomplete. Using the
"better" set and all the
digital reprocessing technology as
was available in 1996, Innova’s engineers
have rescued them as best they can.
In a sense, it seems that these recordings
have made it onto this Enclosure,
and into the welcoming arms of maternal
Posterity, by the skin of their teeth.
Moreover, they sound
to have been informally recorded using
a single microphone, because the balance
is often less than ideal, with some
parts recessed, and others over-prominent.
Although it was recorded more recently
(1954), O Frabjous Day! also
sounds on the ropey side – but
with very good reason: it was an opportunistic
effort by Danlee Mitchell, who used
a Silvertone toy tape recorder!
With that in mind, I suppose it’s
really quite good. Then again, both
San Francisco II and Bitter
Music sound wholly admirable – and
so they should, being modern stereo
recordings.
Performances? I hope
that you’ll forgive me for not commenting
on these individually; there are so
many that I could easily double the
length of this review if I tried to
cover them all. It would in any case
be less than useful where so many
of the recordings are unique, so I
must perforce restrict myself to generality.
So, what "generality" can
I suggest? Well, the performances
tend to obey the same rule: the more
recent the recording, the more technically
accomplished the performance.
That might sound
surprising, but only if you think
about it with the "mind-set"
of the conventional Western European
tradition. When instruments and performance
skills have been continually refined
over a span of centuries, performances
twenty or thirty years apart can be
compared as if they were contemporary.
Contrariwise, Partch’s entire "Music" - principles,
scale, notation, instruments and practitioners - didn’t
even exist before the 1930s.
Consequently, the period covered by
these recordings is entirely within
the steep, initial "learning
curve" for all concerned.
It follows that,
if you’re interested just in Partch’s
music, then simply give precedence
to the later recordings. By way of
considerable compensation, Enclosure
2’s grotty early recordings do have
a certain, often intense feeling of
"pioneering zeal" and, most
importantly, all feature the composer
himself as performer, either vocalist,
or instrumentalist, or both. So, if
you’re a seeker after pioneering zeal
and interested in Partch, then
first and foremost make a beeline
for the earlier recordings, then
grit your teeth - and prepare
to be amazed.
I must say, this
is one incredible set of CDs. Innova,
and their driving force Philip Blackburn,
deserve our everlasting gratitude
for putting this together, and for
wrapping it up so attractively – even
the individual CD label designs are
delightful. A mixed bag it may be
but, as I hope I’ve shown, it is also
very well designed and executed. It
gives us an historical overview of
Partch’s development that is both
thoughtful and thought-provoking.
Yet, there is even more to it than
that: it is also a celebration - of
Partch, his remarkable life, and his
even more remarkable achievements.
Let the party begin.
Paul Serotsky
see also Harry
Partch - A Just Cause by Paul
Serotsky
Arun Chandra (guitar) [A/20], Christine Charnstrom
(chromelodion) [A/2, A/15, A/16, A/18, B/4],
Contributors: Harry Partch, Betty Freeman, Danlee
Mitchell, Lou Harrison, Stephen Pouliot, Francis
Crawford, Phil Keeney, Jack Larson, Lynn Ludlow,
Bill Colvig, Jack and Patty Wright, Charles
[?], unknown others [D/7], Danlee Mitchell (bass
marimba) [D/3], Danlee Mitchell (harmonic canon)
[D/6] 
