why the hell did you come?
by Douglas Messerli
Harry Partch Partch Dark, Partch Light, performed by the group Partch at Redcat
(Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater) in the Walt Disney Concert Hall on May
29, 2009
He attended the University of Southern California in Los Angeles with
the intention of a musical career; but in 1925 he discovered the book On the Sensations of Tone by the German
physician and physicist Hermann Helmholtz, a study of the psychological effects
of musical tones, and soon after dropped out of school to study by himself,
exploring the musicality of speech and constructing his own instruments that
"underscored the intoning voice." As Partch wrote:
I came to the realization that the
spoken word was the distinctive expression my
constitutional makeup was best fitted for, and that I needed other scales and
other instruments. This was the positive result of self-examination—call it
intuitive, for it was not the result of any intellectual desire to pick up lost or
obscure historical threads. For better or for worse, it was an emotional decision.
His first instrument was the
"Monotone," an "adapted viola," which later joined with
numerous others including The Diamond Marimba, The Quadrangularis Reversum, the
11-key Bass Marimba, Bamboo Marimbas (nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo
II"), Cloud Chamber Bowls, an instrument he called "The Spoils of
War" (which included Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal
whang-guns, and wooden piecings), The Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs, an xylophone
augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps (The Zymo-Xyl), Kitharas, and
Harmonic Canons (played with fingers, picks or mallets).
Receiving a Carnegie grant in the early 1930s, Partch traveled to
London, meeting the great Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who gave him
permission to set his translation of Sophocles' Oedipus as an opera. Transcribing the inflections of the Abbey
Theatre actors, Partch performed his piece on monophone, intoning "By the
Rivers of Babylon." Yeats was delighted by the effects.
Yet the grant soon ran out, and the following year, 1935, Partch
returned to the US at the height of the Great Depression, and lived for nine
years wandering as a hobo, doing odd jobs and designing his instruments.
Important works of this period were "Dark Brother," performed
at the concert I saw by the Partch group, a piece from Thomas Wolfe's
"God's Lonely Man," which reiterates Partch's own sense of isolation
and separateness. Most of Partch's relationships were with males, and his
feelings of disengagement with the whole of society were obviously intense.
Yet
many of the works of this period are brilliantly comical, including the
"Yankee Doodle Fantasy," sung in accompaniment with tin oboes and
other instruments, that satirizes patriotism, serious club women, and even his
43-tone note system. Similarly lighter Partch pieces, two based on James
Joyce's Finnegan's Wake,
"Isobel" of 1944 and "Annah the Allmaziful" of the same
year, were, along with his utterly charming tribute to Lewis Carroll's
"Jabberwocky," ("O Frabjous Day!"), highlights of the
evening.
One of Partch's most strange but yet arresting works is his
"Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions," based on messages left by
hitchhikers just outside the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow:
The scribbling is in pencil. It is on
one of the white highway railings just outside
the Mojave Desert junction of Barstow, California. I am walking along the
highway and sit down on the railing to rest.
Idly I notice the scratches where I happen to drop. I have seen many
hitchhiker's writings. they are usually just names and addresses—there are
literally millions of them, or meaningless obscenities, on the highway signs,
railings, walls.
But this—why, it's music. It's
both weak and strong, like unedited human
expressions always are. It's eloquent in what it fails to express in words. And
it's epic. Definitely, it is music....
Indeed, upon first hearing each of
these numbered pieces, presented in a kind of sprechstimme-like performance by guitarist John Schneider, the
words are almost laughable. But Patrch allows us after the original statement
to hear the echoes of those words, by repeating them with emotionally-charged
after tones and dramatic additions ("ha-ha-ha,"
"dum-de-dum," etc) that transforms them into haunting expressions of
fear and joy. The first one, for example, begins with a young man returning to
Boston, Massachusetts, wishing he were dead, yet oddly adding "Today I am
a Man." Is his manhood defined by his desire for death or for some sexual
encounter that he has recently had? There is no one answer; but the echo of the
two, filled in by Partch's joyful exclamations, alter the whole, and suddenly
what might have been simple banality is awash with glorious possibilities.
Similarly, the young girl of "Considered Pretty," whose name
and Las Vegas address appears merely to be a sexual invitation, is transformed
by the final statement: "objective matrimony," while the sly
admission that she is "considered pretty," pulls at our hearts when
connected with her obvious desires.
"Jesus Was God in the Flesh" begins as a simple announcement
of belief, repeated over and over like a prayerful charm song instead a
statement of faith. "You Lucky Woman" recounts the self-described
charms of a passing man, whose braggadocio might be completely disgusting were
it not for his final challenge to the opposite sex that "all you have to
do is find me." And the final piece "Why in Hell Did You Come?"
is shouted out almost in irritation for those hitchhiking complaints of the
writer and others suffering the itinerant life. Yet in that ironic cry we hear
the numerous echoes of drifters catalogued by John Steinbeck, Woody Guthrie,
and others.
The evening began with Eleven Intrusions of 1950, written while
Partch was staying in Gualala, on California's northern coast, at a ranch owned
by pianist Gunnar Johansen. There, among the redwoods, Partch created many of
his instruments and worked in relative splendor in comparison to his earlier
days. But the isolation apparently became oppressive, and the darkness of these
Japanese-inspired works, almost haiku-like studies—each piece generally
performed by two instruments that present a sequence of microtonal
dissonances—of a rose, a crane, a waterfall, the wind, the street, the lover,
soldiers, and other concerns reveal the darkness of a life that formerly seemed
to be able to survive great depredations.
This was, I am sorry to say, my first encounter with the music of Harry
Partch, a man who, as I describe above, was rescued later in his life by my
friend Betty Freeman. It will not, however, be my last Partch concert. And the
day after this event I listened with wonderment to Partch's "Two Studies
on Ancient Greek Scales" and, again, to "Barstow" on the record Just West Coast with great pleasure.
Los Angeles, May 31, 2009
Reprinted from USTheater, Opera, and Performance (June 2009).
