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BOOK REVIEW
Harry Partch's "Bitter Music"
May 29, 2001
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By Heuwell Tircuit
If ever there were a more original or impractical composer than Harry Partch, I know nothing of him. Partch's music sprang from nowhere and, alas, leads nowhere — or at least, hasn't yet. The simple truth is that few musicians have the ears to deal adequately with playing Partch, even if they could locate enough of his unprecedented microtonal instruments — or "contraptions" as he called them — to make that possible.
However, there have been a few recent performances devoted to Partch's music, thanks to the dedication of devotees and foundation grants, most recently Dean Drummond leading the Newband last September at the Yerba Buena Center. A 12-hour exhibit of Partch including performance was produced at UCLA last Saturday in anticipation of the centennial of Partch's birth on June 24 (see Alan Rich's lead essay in this issue).
Fortunately, Partch was as brilliant a craftsman with words as with composition and instrument making. His only book per se, Genesis of a Music, was first published in 1952, and reissued shortly before his death in 1974. That, however, is a rather tough, often very technical read. For the average music lover, one should turn to Bitter Music, a collection of Partch's various writings, recently reissued in paperback by the University of Illinois Press, edited by Thomas McGeary. When first issued in 1991, Bitter Music won the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award.
The book is divided into four sections covering the period from the 1930s through the very early 1970s. Part 1 centers on two of the composer's journals: "Bitter Music" (his thoughts and observation in 1935), and "End Littoral: The Journal of a Hiking Trip" (covering September 9 to 23, 1947). Part 2 is devoted to eleven essays and lectures, Part 3 to a dozen of the introductions or prefaces to his compositions. By far the largest section of he book is Part 4, which contains six librettos or scenarios to Partch's theater works: U.S. Highball — A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip, Oedipus — Dance-Drama, The Bewitched — a Dance Satire, Revelation in a Courthouse Park — After ‘The Bacchae' of Euripides, Water! Water! — An Intermission with Prologues and Epilogues, and Delusion of the Fury — A Ritual of Dream and Delusion.
As a scholarly undertaking, the 479-paged text comes with a wonderfully detailed introduction by McGeary, a list of sources and an index. The introduction virtually bursts with detailed biographical information, like the fact that Partch was born in Oakland of Chinese Missionary parents, grew up mostly in Albuquerque, had first become interested in acoustical possibilities in 1923 while working as a proof reader Sacramento State Printing Office, etc. McGeary's dry-eyed history, like the composer's work, avoids any hint of sentimentality. He mentions, for example, that Partch led a hobo life during the Depression as a matter of financial necessity. No Romantic motivations were involved. Partch had about him the air of an unpretentious sage, a man of obviously high intellect who refused to pose. He was neither bitter nor particularly humorous when one spoke with him. Instead of a sense of humor, he virtually exuded a grand appreciation of irony — which made his conversational style tremendously entertaining. One senses much of that in his writings, wisdom as well as knowledge. Partly due to his missionary background, Partch also possessed a kind of restrained appreciation of naughtiness. Thus, the preface to his 1941 Barstow, based on hobo and hitchhikers's graffiti outside Barstow, CA, quotes passages as diverse as, "Gentlemen: Go to 530 East Lemon Avenue, Monrovia, California, for and easy handout," to "All you have to do is find me, you lucky women. Name's George," or "Jesus was God in the Flesh."
Irony One: Although in his sustained effort to escape all European influence ,many of Partch's early works draw on Americana, he was to become increasingly absorbed with the culture, philosophies and dramas of ancient Greece as he grew older. Both journals contain scribbled melodic ideas — for Partch was essentially a melodist — amid written observations. Those are ideas, not "works." The texts can be quite matter of fact, or as often, poignant. An entry marked "New York, July 1934", for instance, chronicles a meeting with the president of a foundation from whom he had been seeking a grant. The officer advised Partch he should, "...find a place for yourself in this country's economic system." (A rather quaint variation on "Get a job!") When Partch confirmed that he'd tried that, the president noted that it was, "Just a warning. We don't want to do to you what we did to Roger Sessions. He kept winning award after award, scholarship after scholarship, until we had to throw him of the pier." Irony Two: Nothing succeeds in the foundation world like failure. The sheer oddity of the sounds Partch invented for his outlandish looking instruments opened him to constant ridicule. Most "respectable" musicians regards him as a mere eccentric kook. After all, the materials of his instruments were often garnered from junkyards... shell casings and bottles, old car horns, bellows, airplane fuel tanks, etc. But the truth is that Partch was a well educated, very well read, widely traveled and generally sophisticated musician. The three 1941 essays, for example included interests as diverse as "Bach and Temperament" , "W.B. Yates" — whom he had met in Dublin — and "The Kithara". (The latter includes illustration of the classic Greek lyre-like instrument plus a photo of Partch's highly expanded form of it.) And there's your Irony Three. The misunderstood composer is, of course, something of cliché. But Partch's refusal to give an inch crowned him king if not emperor of the field. At his death, for instance, there was a mad rush to buy up his instruments, but by museums who regarded them more as art objects than art producing "contraptions".
Some of the texts are similarly strange, particularly in the librettos. Whole section or even entire scenes may be devoted to repeated words or non-words. From a chorus in "Revelation in a Courthouse Park", the text reads: "b bu a, b bu -- a, b bu a, b bu a, bu — a winds — Oh --- Oh --Oh--Oh– b bu a, b bu a, b bu a N no — n no — a" Following a bit more of this, there's the stage direction, "Mom begins to move to the beat, the triple figure, in a very limited way." Clearly, Partch had something in mind, but what, is anyone's guess. Along with their ability to entrance audiences, which I have seen happen again and again over the past 35 years, Partch's works can as often as not be obtuse in the extreme. On the other and, having been accused of pulling our legs for so long, it is also possible that he just might have enjoyed doing that, once in a while. In any case, the book is a treasury of fascinating thoughts documenting some elements from an ultimately heroic life. As he noted in 1952 introduction for Castor and Pollux, when asked if he wrote classical or popular music, Partch answered, "Neither, I write my own music." (Heuwell Tircuit, composer, performer and writer, was chief writer for Gramophone Japan and for 21 years a music reviewer for the SF Chronicle, previously for the Chicago American and Asahi Evening News.) ©2001 Heuwell Tircuit, all rights reserved |