Harry Partch: A Biography

0 Comments | Insight on the News, Sept 28, 1998 | by Jay Nordlinger

An eccentric musician led his life to a unique soundtrack of his own creation.

Harry Partch may not be the most important figure in American musical history, but he is probably the strangest. His music is seldom performed today; indeed, it cannot be. It has its own special notation, and it requires its own special instruments, only a handful of which exist. Recordings of his music are few; only three of his scores have been published, in obscure places.

Partch spent much of his life as a hobo: dirty, hungry, penniless. He was primarily a composer, but he also was a writer, inventor, sculptor, musicologist, illustrator and dramatist. He avoided steady employment and went out of his way to alienate himself from respectable society. Yet he was a man of astounding ability.

Now, 14 years after the composer's death, there is Harry Partch: A Biography (Yale University Press, 468 pp) --a superb work by Bob Gilmore, a British academic. Not that Partch would have had much patience for such a book. "Biography" he wrote. "It is so trivial. The larger world [the one outside Partch's own head] is trivial beyond belief." Nevertheless, Gilmore has unearthed everything worth knowing about this vexing character, even if he still finds him inexplicable.

Partch was born in 1902, the youngest child of ex-missionaries. The family lived in the Arizona desert, whose climate was thought necessary to Mrs. Partch's health. Both parents were social activists, "free thinkers": He would bring home vagrants; she would bring home prostitutes. Their boy was intensely musical. The house was full of instruments, and Harry would play anything he could get his hands on.

He soon grasped that none of the standard instruments suited his budding idea of music. If he wanted to reproduce the sounds he imagined, he would have to fashion his own instruments. In fact, he would have to create his own musical language.

Harry began to compose seriously when he was 14, by which time his mind was crowded with "microtones" the numerous gradations of pitch that lie between the intervals of the conventional scale. While the rest of us might hear 12 tones in an octave, Harry heard 30, 40 or 50. He connected music to the intonations of speech, as he believed the ancients did. He was not so much part of the avant-garde as a one-man ultra-conservative sect, peering into a past so distant that others could not fathom it. To the mystified, he would always quote one of the few people he openly admired, the poet W.B. Yeats: "I hear with older ears than the musician."

At 18, Partch moved to Los Angeles. He attended orchestra concerts there but was unimpressed. He especially disdained the "blue-haired ladies" who populated the audience, with their "concert chit-chat," "backwardness" and "sterility." He studied music off and on at the University of Southern California but soon quit altogether, unable to accept his teachers' instruction. Rejecting "both the intonational system of modern Europe and its concert system" Partch believed that he had to "die" musically, and "find still another womb to emerge from."

In the mid-1920s, Partch moved to San Francisco, where a new musical environment was in ferment. He began toying with string instruments, having renounced the piano as "twelve black and white bars in front of musical freedom." At first, he supported himself as a proofreader, but in 1928 he took to the road for his first serious spell as a hobo. As he would explain it, "I rebelled. I'd lived outdoors so much of my early life, and I resented this adventureless existence."

Initially, the life was relatively easy, with food and work within reach. But it got harder. Death, deprivation and violence surrounded him. When he returned to San Francisco, he begged in the streets or mooched off the odd arts patron. If he "couldn't make $10 giving a demonstration of my philosophies at a women's club" he looked for a bread line or went door to door. Over the years, he lurched about the country, encountering a parade of American grotesques--"other derelicts," he would call them--and contracted syphilis. Through it all, he kept an exquisitely written journal, which became the basis for his works Bitter Music and U.S. Highball.

And yet he always had a small band of followers who would give him money, put him up for a night or a week or a year and store his sizable collection of homemade instruments--a constant problem. When he died in 1974, he was honored as an elder statesman of "hippie classical music," but he left scarcely left a legacy.

He belonged to no school of composition. He cultivated few disciples. And his music was largely unperformable.

Partch is an engrossing figure, if a maddening one. But he's no longer a mystery. Gilmore has taken him off the road.

Jay Nordlinger is associate editor and music critic of the Weekly Standard.