Harry Partch, "Barstow"

Continued Notes from 'The World of Harry Partch'

BARSTOW
Conducted by Danlee Mitchell Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions
under the supervision from a Highway Railing
of the composer i.1 Barstow, California (9:20)
Produced by John McClure Harry Partch and John Stannard.
Voices; John McAllister,

A change is in the wind. Western music is a little tired and wants to sit down. By electronic synthesis, prominent practitioners have diagnosed its ailment as an acute case of serialism with side effects attributed to aleatoritis. Rock now having reached a harmonic and contrapuntal respectability, we are ready for a breath of fresh air a new season! Is Harry Partch just around the corner?

The musical world of Harry Partch is new and strange. His instruments, all hand-made by himself, have rarely been seen, and the sounds they produce have seldom been heard, at least not on this planet. Forty years ago, Partch realized that American music wasn't really American but was only a facsimile of European convention and fashion. Serialism was, only another step along this path, a path Partch wasn't interested in taking. In an attempt to retrace his steps, he found it was necessary to completely reinvestigate the nature of sound as music, and, for his point of departure, he chose to use the inherent musicality of the American language. Partch's early compositions, dating from the 1930's, are all vocal, with small instrumental accompaniments. They are masterpieces of Americana, employing the language in a natural style uninfluenced by European traditions.

BARSTOW comes from this period. Although based on his earlier music in vocal style and structure, the more recent music of Partch provides a striking contrast. It is integrated theater on a grand scale. Partch calls his esthetic position Corporeal, a music that is essentially "tactile." Not a believer in concert music, Partch mounts theater pieces that combine the senses of sound and sight. His instruments are part of the stage set; the musicians are in costume and sometimes involved in the stage action. Partch describes this dramatic staging as ritual, illuminating life and its psychological forces. At times, story line is communicated by the spoken word; at other times, by mime movement. Sight and sound, each complementing and intensifying the other, transport the viewer to a plane of catharsis. The particular personal level from which Partch begins his works can be seen in this recent statement:

"The work that 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 greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experienceritual."

The bulk of Partch's work dates from the past thirty years. THE WAYWARD, a collective title for four compositions-BARSTOW; THE LETTER; SAN FRANCISCO (newsboy cries); and, U. S. HIGHBALL-was finished in 1943. It is a setting of Americana, much of it coming out of the hobo experiences of Partch during the Depression, exploiting the natural rhythm and melodic contour of the American language. His first large-scale theater work, OEDIPUS (1951), is the definitive musical setting of this drama. Out of this, the Partch theater style emerges. PLECTRA & PERCUSSION DANCES (1952), a dance-theater work, is comprised of three compositions-CASTOR & POLLUX; EVEN WILD HORSES; and, RING AROUND THE MOON.

Another dance-theater work, THE BEWITCHED (1956), was performed in New York in 1959. REVELATION IN THE COURTHOUSE PARK (1960), billed as an "extravaganza," is a music-theater work of large proportions, employing not only a large cast of actors, dancers, and on-stage musicians, but also a marching brass band, acrobats, gymnasts on apparatus, and a filmed fireworks display. WATER! WATER! (1961) saw his instruments moving on stage as participants.

In 1963, Partch started a study, work. AND ON THE SEVENTH DAY PETALS FELL IN PETALUMA, In preparation for his latest work, DELUSION OF THE FURY (1966). DELUSION has the potential of establishing a new style in Western music theater. Partch has always wished for a more diversified, less specialized type of performer; the type of performer who not only plays instruments, but who can also sing, act, and dance. In DELUSION, the musicians do sing (as was done in THE BEWITCHED), but their instrumental passages are so arranged that they could dance also, if such people were available. Such concepts are quite ancient, Partch acknowledges, but he feels that in present practice this has all been abandoned. It is his purpose to reunite the intellectual with the sensual, in his Corporeal concept.

As the basis for his music, and the tuning of his instruments, he has formulated a 43 (or more) tones-to-the-octave scale tuned in just intonation, with each tone being a frequency ratio to a fundamental 1/1 (392 cycles per second). Partch describes his theories in his book GENESIS OF A MUSIC (University of Wisconsin Press, 1949; now out of print but tentatively scheduled to be reprinted by Da Capo Press):

“the major contribution of Monophony [Partch's name for his system] as an intonational system is its realization of a subtle and acoustically precise interrelation of tonalities, all stemming or expanding from unity, 111. This interrelation is not capable of manifold modulations to "dominants" or to any other common scale degrees; it is not capable of parallel transpositions of intricate musical structures; it does not present any tone as any specific tonality identity. Conversely, it is capable of both ordinary and hitherto unheard modulations to the natural limits imposed by Just Intonation and the arbitrary limit of 11 ; it is capable of an expanded sense of tonality, from Identities 1-3-5 to identities 1-3-5-7-9-1 1 ; it is capable of great variety in that expanded sense; it does offer twenty-eight possible tonalities, more than are inherent in Equal Temperament, and therefore a greater total of tonality identities; or assumable senses, that does Equal Temperament."