by Alex Ross
The New Yorker, April 18, 2005.
Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have
roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out
as the composer Harry Partch. His exit from civilization has assumed
the status of legend, and it’s all true. The turning point in Partch’s
life came in 1935, after he spent six months travelling through Europe
on a grant. He was thirty-four years old; his explorations of new
tunings and instruments had aroused smatterings of interest. In the
hope of making an opera from William Butler Yeats’s adaptation of
Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex,” he had met with the poet in Ireland, and had
received his blessing. But few others grasped what Partch was after,
and when he returned to the United States he couldn’t summon the will
to beg for more money. Instead, he decided to drop out, and it wasn’t
your feel-good hippie kind of dropping out. He spent much of the next
eight years living as a hobo—riding trains, doing manual labor,
sleeping in shelters or in the wild, contracting syphilis, working
occasionally as a proofreader, and, all the while, rethinking every
parameter of music. One day in 1940, while passing through Barstow,
California, Partch found some graffiti along a highway, and he saw in
it what no one else could have seen, material for a rasping, pugnacious
song: “It’s January 26. I’m freezing. / Ed Fitzgerald. Age 19. Five
feet ten inches. / Black hair, brown eyes. / . . . I wish I was dead. /
But today I am a man.”
Partch, whose “Oedipus” recently
had a run of performances in Montclair, New Jersey, was destined to be
different. He was born in Oakland in 1901, and spent much of his
childhood in the lonely railway outpost of Benson, Arizona. At the age
of eighteen, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music at U.S.C.
One pivotal early experience was his romance with the actor Ramón
Samaniego, whom he met when both were ushers at the L.A. Philharmonic.
Samaniego ended the affair shortly after becoming Ramon Novarro, the
silent-screen idol. That disappointment helped cement Partch’s
determination to reject the mainstream. He could be difficult, and,
with enough alcohol in his system, impossible. But there was something
incorrigibly pure about him. Yeats said he was “very simple,” and did
not mean it as an insult.
Early on, Partch started asking
himself why there were twelve notes in the Western scale. Reading the
history of tuning, he paid special attention to the theories of
Pythagoras and other ancient Greeks, who codified the relationship
between elemental harmonies and vibrating strings. (If you pinch the
midpoint of a rubber band tuned to C and then pluck it, the tone goes
up to the next higher C. At a third of the length, the tone rises to a
G. With fractions of a fourth and a fifth, you get another C, then an
E. Together, these notes spell a lovely major chord.) Since the early
nineteenth century, Western music has been tuned according to the
equal-temperament system, which adjusts the neat Greek ratios in order
to create a standardized scale. Partch wanted to restore the eerie
“rightness” of the old tunings. At the same time, he added minute
gradations, or microtones, until he had a forty-three-tone scale, each
interval controlled by ratios of integers.
He summarized
his thinking in a 1949 book entitled “Genesis of a Music,” which begins
with the most startling forty-five-page history of music ever written.
The art really began to go downhill, we’re told, when Johann Sebastian
Bach got his grubby fingers on it. Partch held Bach responsible for two
trends: (1) the movement toward equal-tempered tuning, which meant that
composers could not absorb the scales of other world traditions; and
(2) the urge to make music ever more instrumental and abstract.
Although Bach advocated neither of these things, Partch’s critique of
the long-term denaturing of music still packs a punch.
The
irony is that Partch himself was sometimes suspected of being a
professional originator, a paper genius who tried to write his way into
history with outré gestures. In fact, he invented his forty-three-tone
scale not to inflict another system on the world but to allow for a new
style of vocal setting that followed the contours of the speaking
voice. In his insistence on reuniting song and word, he mirrored
another outlying genius of twentieth-century music, Leos Janácek, whose
notations of the music of speech bear a fascinating resemblance to
Partch’s hobo travelogue “Bitter Music,” minus the nude drawings. If
Partch wanted “to find a way outside,” as
he once said, he also wanted to find his way back, to a ritualistic,
bardic art. On this point, he and Yeats—not the gay-hobo
type—understood each other perfectly.
Perhaps
the most impractical, and charmingly quixotic, aspect of Partch’s
project was that it could be realized only on instruments that he
himself had constructed. Starting in the thirties, he hammered together
an orchestra of strings, keyboards, and percussion. After Partch’s death, in 1974, the instruments were housed for some years at San Diego State University. Then, in a development that remains controversial in the small but avid circles of Partch enthusiasts, they were moved to Montclair State
University, under the care of the composer Dean Drummond. The
collection includes adaptations of familiar instruments—viola, guitar,
reed organ—along with resonating objects that double as dramatic
sculpture: the Cloud-Chamber Bowls, which consist of Pyrex carboys that
Partch obtained from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory; the Kithara,
modelled on a harplike instrument seen on Greek vases; and the Marimba
Eroica, whose lowest notes are produced by five-foot-high blocks that
the percussionist must stand on a riser in order to play. Made of
redwood, spruce, bamboo, and rosewood, the instruments look as awesome
as they sound.
The stylish new Kasser Theatre, on the Montclair campus, hopes to become a center for next-wave programming, a bam
West. With this production of “Oedipus,” it succeeds. The staging was
by members of New York’s Ridge Theatre group: the director Bob McGrath,
the filmmaker Bill Morrison, and the visual designer Laurie Olinder.
The action is split between the mythic world and the sitting room of
Sigmund Freud, who is psychoanalyzing the title character. Morrison’s
films draw on old Austrian newsreels, including slow-motion shots of
the funeral of Chancellor Dollfuss. As in other Ridge productions, such
as “Everyday Newt Burman” and “Decasia,” the images summon an
atmosphere of worlds in decline, of ancient terrors surfacing. The
superb cast included Robert Osborne, as Oedipus; Beth Griffith, as
Jocasta; and David Ronis, as the Spokesman (a.k.a. Freud). Daniel
Keeling made Tiresias a mad preacher, with a bit of Ray Charles thrown
in. Drummond led the Newband ensemble in a virtuosic performance.
What
of the music itself? It is staggeringly strange, but also achingly
beautiful. Partch said that his “Oedipus” should achieve “emotional
saturation, or transcendence,” and, by gods, it does. It begins slowly,
with the bigger instruments held in reserve and long stretches of the
play delivered as straight dialogue—in ersatz Yeats, because the poet’s
estate stupidly withheld permission for Partch to use the original.
Then the screws begin to turn. The chorus of women sings winding
laments that devolve into wordless cries; the cello unfolds fragments
of another long, dark song; the Marimba Eroica emits its mind-bending
basement tones; tribalistic dances and sonic rave-ups take over; and,
amid the fog of microtones, pure Pythagorean consonances appear like
ghosts. The climax is Oedipus’ interrogation of the Herdsman, during
which he discovers the awful truth. The simplicity of Partch’s
method—sending words into the listener’s brain along all musical
channels—creates hair-raising tension, an aria of the uncanny.
At
one point, I wondered why Oedipus’ voice kept swooping up and down in
singsong patterns. Had Partch really stayed true to his philosophy of
speechlike song? Then I remembered what I’d read in Bob Gilmore’s
biography of the composer—that the model for the music was Yeats’s
voice, chanting lines like “For death is all the fashion now, till even
Death be dead."
