being of man. In its place “We are reduced to specialisms—a theatre of dialogue, for example, and a concert of music without drama—basic mutilations of ancient concept. My music is visual—it is corporeal, aural and visual …”42 The development of polyphony, of tonal harmony, and of the large abstract forms based on them, he sees as a distortion of the essential reality of music, which is the making of magic; and the principal bearer of that magic, as he sees it, is the human voice bringing the word.
So his music is composed around the human voice and the word—which of course means the theatre. His works are almost exclusively large music dramas, a theatre of mime, of farce and dance, of shouting and vocalizing, relating clearly to the great traditional dramas of Japan, of Ancient Greece, of Java and Bali—wherever in fact men have not forgotten how to act out ritually the myths that sustain their lives. Were this all, Partch would have little claim to uniqueness; many western musicians have looked in this direction for fresh inspiration. But he has gone further. Wishing to transcend the, to him, wholly artificial and unacceptable tempered scale, with its twelve equal out-of-tune intervals to the octave, he developed a different scale based on just intonation with natural acoustic intervals, comprising no less than forty-three tones to the octave, all of whose intervals are derived from the perfect fifth and perfect third, permitting not only an enriched concept of harmony owing little to European tonal-harmonic music but also a tremendously enriched source of melody which can approach the subtlety of speech inflection. As Peter Yates says:
With a scale of intervals so finely divided, one is able to speak to exact pitches as easily as to sing. The artificiality of recitative is done away with … Instead there is by the use of the forty-three-tone scale a continuous field of melodic and harmonic relationship among the degree of spoken, intoned, chanted, sung, melismatic and shouted vocal utterance, a tonal spectrum filling the gap between the vocal coloration of opera and the spoken drama. Spoken drama can be taken over by the instruments and translated back into change and song.43
But how can spoken melody of forty-three tones to the octave—feasible for sensitive singers—be taken over by instruments, when all the instruments of the western tradition are built to a specification of only twelve? This was the problem Partch faced and solved with the simplicity of genius; he invented and built his own instruments. Over a period of more than forty years he designed and built nearly thirty new instruments, with an eye no less for visual than an ear for aural beauty, not to mention a considerable verbal flair in naming them. He has been responsible for inventing possibly more new instruments than Adolph Sax, yet he described himself modestly as “not an instrument builder but a philosophical music-man seduced into carpentry.”44 The instruments are mainly plucked and plectrum stringed instruments, often with the strings arranged three-dimensionally, as well as variations of the marimba and xylophone, with adaptations of more conventional instruments such as harmonium and viola (he was later to find wind players who could realize his scale on their instruments), and, apart from the beauty and expressiveness of their sounds, they represent as important a conceptual challenge as does the music itself. In the first place, they are hand-built by the composer to his own purposes, not mass-produced to a conventional specification; there is in existence only one set of instruments, and if one wants to hear Partch’s music and see his dramas one has to go to them. Secondly, the instruments are as important a part of the musico-dramatic work as the actors; Partch specified that they be placed in full view of the spectators as part of the set, and that the musicians playing them take a full part in the dramatic action.
And, further, the construction of the instruments is regarded, not as a necessary task to be carried out before the real job of music making can be got on with, but as an essential part of the musical process, just as with any African musician; his music requires his instruments. While many of the instruments, built in that most beautiful of all materials, wood, are triumphs of the woodworker’s skill, being beautiful and dramatic in appearance as well as sound, others equally are triumphs of bricolage, being made from old shell cases (“Better to have them here than shredding young boys’ skins on the battlefield”45), light bulbs, Pyrex glass jars, hub caps and other cast-offs of technological society, materials available to anyone with the imagination to perceive their possibilities. Partch was not anti-technology; years of working with his own hands made him too wise to fall into that trap. His attitude towards the instruments of music resembles that of Robert Persig towards the art of motorcycle maintenance: He says,
Musicians who are generally awkward with common tools, nevertheless expect faultless perfection from their instruments. These are mechanical contrivances, however, and it would be salutary if musicians developed the elementary skills needed to maintain them. In particular, the elementary skill of tuning is of supreme importance to musicianship, and a deeper understanding would certainly ensue if it were developed … The instruments do not maintain themselves, especially under the wear and tear and sometimes violent treatment (which I myself stipulate) of daily playing. And not a small part of the element of good condition is the visual; the instruments must be kept looking well, since they are almost always on stage as part of the set.46
In Partch’s music, writings, and above all in his instruments, we see a vision of a communal musical art, and of a technology made human by the element of commitment, of care. Here the composer—or any other maker—is not merely the producer of a commodity for others to consume but the leader and pacemaker in the common activity. From the music of Partch, western music could learn to take a large step towards rejoining the musical community of the human race.
He was fond of quoting some lines written by a child:
Once upon a time There was a little boy And he went outside.47
This childlike (not to be confused with childish) ability to “go outside” has been a recurring feature of American music, indeed of American culture, since the earliest days, and it remains no less a feature, despite recent disasters and betrayals, of the contemporary scene. This is not to deny that there flows, and has always flowed, a strong counter-current in the direction of Europe and of conformity to European rules, a music of academic formalism as strict as or stricter than anything practiced in Europe. That this is so should not be surprising; America has always been a country of extremes of conformism and non-conformism. Of the latter group no one, not even Cage, has shown such integrity, such humor, such staying power, and such sheer, beautiful musicality as has Partch, such ability to “go outside” (where, as far as the American and European musical establishments are concerned he still largely remains), and, naturally and unselfconsciously, to propose new relationships in society as in music, to work untrammelled by “all the hard, dry, studied rules that ever was prescribed.” If American music contains within it the possibility of becoming a force for the regeneration of western music in its society, a state which, however long heralded on both sides of the Atlantic, and however wished for, is still to come about, the music and the simple, complex, eloquent, and loving personality of Harry Partch will prove an important factor in bringing about such an event.
NOTES
1. Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), 37.
2. Quoted in Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, 2nd edn. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 23–24.
3. Ibid.
4. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) (Everyman Edition, n.d.), 287.
5. Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 132.
6. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 20.
7. Quoted in Gilbert Chase, op. cit., pp. 129–30.
8. Ibid.
9.
