Odd men in

Musical Times, Spring 2005 by Mellers, Wilfrid

Even so, silence is also an evasion, with which Broyles's or anyone's book might be reluctant to conclude. So he follows his Cage chapter with one on Harry Partch, giving him rather more weight than he can carry. If Partch doesn't, like Cage, start from and arrive at nothingness, he evokes the nothing of the Arizona and Mexican deserts whence he sprang, and where he unsurprisingly received no formal education in conservatory music. He had, however, an able brain which used its freedom from orthodoxy to seek the unknown future of music, and collaterally of civilisation in a rebirth of the springs of creation. This 'beginning again' called for a renewal of the media through which 'spirit' had been , and might again be, manifest.

In his substantial book Genesis of a music (1947) Partch defined his case with verbal lucidity and even elegance, recounting his views on the religious and social effects of musical intervals, and on the corporeal rather than abstract relation between the spoken word and the dancing body. As a child of the American deserts Partch (a pertinently allegorical name) returns to the basic equation between musical sound and fortuitous noise; his music has to be monophonie and in just intonation because it is a corporeal theatre ritual as were classical Greek drama and Japanese Noh plays. His works - like, if a long way 'after', Aristophanes and Kabuki - use monophonie chant, dance, mime, juggling and knockabout farce to social and religious ends. Partch celebrates the outsider and, indeed, lived for eight years as a bum riding the rails, identified with the Beat Generation'. The first of the theatre-pieces he produced during these years is called US Highball, and was written in 1943, at the height of the war that might have ended civilisation and by some was expected to do so, thereby rendering a new start inevitable. Partch described the piece as a 'musical comedy', covering this crucial phase of his career, with his Partch-invented instruments not only emitting musical sounds but also acting, in this case, as ponderous presences in the form of railway trains laden with hoboes riding on the journey east from San Francisco. Snatches of hill-billies, pop-songs and bar-tunes float out of the hoboes' journey-tono-end; naive pentatonic cries wail wistfully against the corny seventh and ninth chords of the vamping guitar bass.

Later theatre-pieces are satyrs (Partch's clever pun) on the deceits of modern industrial life. The best of them is The bewitched (1956): which eventually dissipates into slapstick-dadaism that leads to a moment of truth, linking contemporary social clichés to values so old that they seem eternal. Human beings who microtonally groan, growl and grunt in jazzy hysteria may become indistinguishable from hooting owls, barking foxes and the wild cats of the woods. Where this takes us, except back into the wilderness, I'm not sure: though one has to admit that the whining pentatonic chant at the end of the prologue evokes an age-old quietude pregnant with a painful longing that strikes home in us, though it is based on a chant of the Cahunilla Indians who still precariously survive in the emptiness of the Southern California desert, where Partch grew up. Did he mean that we are, or ought to be, identifiable with these enlightened savages?