In the story of modern music, the figure of the great American maverick looms large. There have been several, and their story goes something like this... The maverick is born somewhere off the beaten track, usually the wilds of California. He (or she; one of these mavericks is actually a woman, Ruth Crawford Seeger) soon shows outstanding musical talent.
He’s put through the mill of a European-style musical education, but this comes too late. His ears are already too full of native American music heard in those wild hills, or jazz, or the sounds of nature. So he reacts against the training. He finds a totally new way of making music, innocent as nature and entirely unconnected to European high art, although it may have deep links to ancient cultures.
He then learns the hard way that the American public is much more hidebound than the European. He struggles and goes unheard and even hungry for decades. Then, just as he reaches retirement age, he’s rediscovered, and showered with foundation grants, performances and profiles on television. After his death, in a nice twist, the Europeans fall in love with the American maverick. Thanks to their state-subsidised arts sector, they can lavish even more attention on him than he gets at home.
That, in a nutshell, is the story of Harry Partch (1901-74), whose largest work, Delusion of the Fury, is being performed at the Edinburgh International Festival this weekend. Partch is the last of the American mavericks to be rediscovered, the reason being that he’s even more demanding than the others.
Which isn’t to say he’s more complex or “difficult”, the two words most often yoked to contemporary music. On the contrary, Partch’s music can sometimes sound almost embarrassingly gauche and simple. If your first encounter with Partch was with US Highball, which recounts his experiences as a hobo living in federal work camps during the Great Depression, you might think you’d stumbled across a folk singer with a strangely out-of-tune guitar.
Listen to Partch’s later works, though, such as Castor and Pollux, and that impression of out-of-tuneness dissolves into a feeling that you’ve entered a strange and somehow ancient-seeming musical world, with its own laws. Partch laboured to create new tuning systems based on the pure intervals of the ancient Greeks.
These would replace the impure intervals of our equal-tempered system, which he hated with an ethical fervour because they cheated the ear of real beauty. Better to have the true pure colours of nature than the artificial rouge and powder of Western harmony, was his view.
Harry Partch at work, circa 1970
Simplicity was the key for Partch, a fact that has become obscured by the complexity of his tuning systems, and the appearance of the many instruments he invented to embody them. These have wonderful names: diamond marimba, surrogate kithara, chromelodeon, Spoils of War, cloud-chamber bowls. There’s a misconception that Partch was obsessed with ancient Greeks, and wanted to install Plato’s ideal, purified form of music.
It’s true that Partch took many things from Greek musical theorists and, like Plato, he believed music should be rooted in the rhythms and melody of human speech. But in his own imagination, he was reaching further back even than Plato. In his essay The Ancient Magic, he declared: “Traditions in music do not begin with the recent European centuries. They begin with the human race, in the deepest wells of wisdom.” His aim was to recreate what he thought was the primitive’s threefold view of music.
First comes the creation of aural magic, through the discovery of natural resonance and harmony (“The people who first stretched a piece of gut over two bridges, or found tones in wood suspended at the nodes, discovered magic just as certainly as the people who found tones in electronic tubes,” he wrote). Next, this sound has to be conjured from a beautiful or grand-looking instrument. A functional-looking box won’t do. Finally, these sounds have to be incorporated in a ritual or a dramatic setting that tells a simple, mythical narrative.
Taken together, these three things make up what Partch called his corporeal ideal of music. It is hostile to the neutral ambience of the concert, and inclines towards ceremonial, or very formalised forms of theatre such as Japanese Noh drama.
One half of Delusion of the Fury is actually an adaptation of a Noh drama, the other a story from an African folk source. They’ll be performed in Edinburgh by Ensemble musikFabrik, on their own recreation of Partch’s wonderful orchestra. The director is Heiner Goebbels, whose view of music as something inherently theatrical and magical is not so far from Partch’s.
Until now, we’ve had only glimpses of the strange, visionary talent of Harry Partch; now, finally, we can see it whole.
Harry Partch’s 'Delusion of the Fury' is at Edinburgh International Festival on Aug 29 and 30; www.eif.co.uk 0131 473 2000
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