by Doug Nufer

Harry Partch: a biography
by Bob Gilmore (Yale), 488 pages

"The walls were collapsing around me," the late Harry Partch reported on the occasion of the sort of disaster which often beset his career. As he rushed to finish And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, the bulldozers evicted him. A few months earlier he had rewired an old chicken ranch so he could stay in what had seemed to be a good location for him and all of his musical instruments. Partch custom-built his instruments because only they could play the pieces he composed -- using the scale and notation he also invented -- and he needed to play them as he composed. Although he had earned a considerable reputation (and some Time magazine-caliber notoriety), his work was neither commercially viable nor academically prized, and so at the age of 53 the man who was perhaps America's greatest avant-garde composer had to stop everything and, for about the tenth time in as many years, move again. Instead of enjoying the accolades that are supposed to be lavished upon a mature artist in his prime, "Partch was despondent, burdened by uncertainties, with Petals still unfinished and his professional future a complete blank."

Thanks to this fine critical biography and a paperback reissue of Partch's juggernaut of music theory, Genesis of a Music (Da Capo), his professional future is slightly more promising. Nevertheless, as Gilmore points out, many hindrances prevent him from reaching a wider audience. Recordings exist along with a couple of films, but Partch essentially wrote for performance. His pieces were meant to be seen as they are performed by musicians who also act and dance. The Boo, Diamond Marimba, Chromelodeon, Bloboy, Koto, Kithara, Harmonic Canon, and other sonic wonders ideally comprise a stage set; realistically, they sit in storage while devoted admirers try in vain to assemble people to play them or squabble among themselves. Despite heroic efforts of his followers (someone even spent months translating the notation into a form musicians could read), the best representation of Partch's work faces extinction.

Partch was neither crazy nor coy in his sense of artistic direction. Presented by Gilmore, his choices seem eminently sensible. He grew frustrated with traditional music. Its rigid, formulaic reliance on the diatonic scale thwarted him from composing for the full range of sound. To capture sound more fully -- to render more precisely the range of the human voice -- he devised a scale based on microtones. He found each octave to contain 43 tones instead of 12 tones of full and half steps. As esoteric as his approach may seem, it's based on the physics of vibration and backed by an impressive body of work.

Partch spent a lifetime fighting for the legitimacy of his art. Gilmore is particularly good at exploring the composer's complex relationship with academia, and, by extension, with various granting foundations. Partch had to rein in his hilariously spirited disrespect for traditional music in order to apply for grants and university positions. By his early thirties he assembled a dazzling array of endorsements as he went for a Guggenheim fellowship to support setting a W.B. Yeats poem to music, topped by a recommendation from Yeats himself; the Guggenheim declined. One of its administrators, however, secured him a Carnegie grant on the strength of this application (and ten years later Guggenheim came across). Grants of $1,000-2,000 popped up from time to time, often in conjunction with research posts at universities where, typically, he and his instruments were shunted around from basement to storage shed, and folks in the physics department showed more interest in his work than did the stuffed shirts in Music.

This sort of professional vagrancy followed more than a decade of life as a vagabond. Well before the Depression forced people to live that way, Partch hit the road. Partly to escape a humdrum job as a newspaper proofreader, partly because he often had no job and no choice, and partly because he liked the life, Partch spent long periods as a hobo. Although Gilmore whines about the gaps this sort of biography creates for the biographer, Partch's life on the road produced remarkable music (such as Barstow and American Highball), some stunning photographs, and pieces of a memoir, Bitter Music. No other composer and few serious artists had the experience or the ability to tackle the Depression as a subject.

After a somewhat shaky start, plagued by conjecture over whether Partch's testicles ever descended and complaints about a lack of information on Partch's childhood (thank god), Gilmore adroitly relates what is known about the composer and provides a solid critical introduction to his compositions and theories. Compared to most artists, Partch is an articulate advocate for his work. Excerpts from the composer's audacious writing tend to upstage Gilmore's necessarily more reasoned prose, but, as Gilmore warns, Genesis of a Music has been gelded of the wild humor and anti-establishment rancor which Partch's 1940s U. of Wisconsin Press editor deemed unsuitable for such a work of scholarship. Still, it's an essential (and cheap, at $17.95) text for anyone interested in Partch, and much of the author's idiosyncratic discourse reigns supreme over the 60 pages of introductory chapters preceding 400 pages of rocket science.

Whatever fate the music faces as his instruments deteriorate and his disciples die, the story of Harry Partch's life stands as a parable of the artist in America. He repudiated European tradition while availing himself of an esoteric range of influences (Okie folk songs, Yaqui chants, Chinese poetry, to name a few); taking nothing for granted, he reinvented the basic structure of music and with it, an orchestra of instruments and system of notation; he undertook incredibly ambitious projects and achieved more than some measure of success in executing them; he went hat in hand to foundations and got scraps of compliments from critics and peers; he was ridiculed in Time as a crackpot and, almost as an afterthought, recognized in time as a genius.

by Wally Shoup

A recent trip East afforded me the opportunity to play Normal's "Red Room" in Baltimore, a near-perfect room to practice free improvisation, on this occasion in duo with drummer Toshi Makihara. Whatever made this room feel so "right" got me to thinking about the nature of free improvisation, in general, and about the necessary confluence of events, in particular, that make a venue conducive to that practice.

Free improvisation, when you get right down to it, is about freedom -- what you actually do (or fail to do) when a situation implicity says "you're free to express your freest self." Despite all the palaver about 'freedom' in this country, precious few opportunities avail themselves to express this option fully; fewer still the people who can mine the opportunity properly, and, fewer still, the people who will allow such liberties to be taken, at their expense.

Freedom is a daunting thing, in fact, frightening, and rules and regulations are necessary parts of maintaining "order" and "structure" for the vast majority of human activities. And music, to the degree that it gives voice to deep human needs, generally mirrors this desire for structure and rules. However, Music (with a capital M) and Freedom (with a capital F) are not restricted in and of themselves, as anyone who explores them freely will discover. It is our limitations, not Theirs, we eventually confront.

Long before this eventuality is met (much less dealt with), limitations are imposed from outside forces. In the music world, this usually takes the form of accepting convention, delivering what potentially "sells" and what keeps the bar tabs running. Most musicians accept these limitations as givens and work within them -- occasionally taking whatever liberties the particular genre may offer, though rarely challenging the game itself. Some have even been known to call this confined zone "real music", confusing their acceptance of 'real-world' limitations with the larger realities that music potentially decodes.

Things began to change when brave black musicians asserted their freedom in the "free jazz" era, and things really changed when the Europeans (particularly the British) took freedom as a given and started developing languages to explore it fully²when the advent of "non-idiomatic free improvisation" took shape. (These cultural differences help explain why some find free jazz more compelling than free improvisation²lifting the yoke of oppression requires considerably more force than expressing the Void which comes in its aftermath.)

Thirty years (or so) hence, this is still an ongoing challenge -- to take a stage and explore, with conviction, the numerous possibilities free music offers. Although the musician's responsibility is to discipline the forces of sound, imparting shape and meaning, the audience is nonetheless an integral part in what ultimately turns out to be a two-way street. The musician explores, the audience reacts, and a reciprocal relationship develops -- one truly needs the other for the experience to transcend the potential narcissism or hero worship inherent in a free environment.

Engendering an astute audience willing to embark on this "freedom journey" is no mean feat, but the folks at the Red Room have succeeded remarkably in doing just that. The Red Room is adjacent to a large, rambling cooperative bookstore called Normals (where amongst the books, thousands of vinyl-era LPs are for sale), and consists mainly of chairs and an odd array of clown portraits adorning the red walls. That's about it. It's comfortable and non-threatening, inviting in an unpretentious way.

The bookstore staff is friendly and has obviously accepted the audience for the Red Room's offerings as "good people". (I mention this because staff at clubs in Seattle where the off night of "weird music" happens are generally condescending to that audience -- one reason, among many, that exploratory, unfettered music doesn't "work" in most clubs, cultural 'good-intentions' notwithstanding.)

Additionally, and significantly, the bookstore doesn't depend on the Red Room's revenue for income; consequently, the "door" goes to the musicians, as it should, and financial concerns don't influence and lessen musical ones.

But, most importantly, the audience has come to expect (and, therefore, implicitly demands) the music to go "outside" the conventions laid down by bars and the recording "industry" and has been adequately rewarded for that decision. Any audience willing to explore must have its risk-taking compensated, or else it will necessarily settle for the less adventurous, more 'guaranteed' forms which constitute the "norm".

The Red Room presents a broad spectrum of musicians, including some Knitting Factory "stars," but I sense the audience doesn't care so much who you "are," but what you have to offer. A distinct feeling that freedom is there for the taking permeates the room, creating an air of heightened expectations. We're willing, they seem to say, what about you?

It is this atmosphere which free improvisation seeks, and to which it offers a clear alternative to the norm. Music can, in this environment, take wings and assert its freedom. It is Music, not the musician, which is free. Whenever a setting lays the groundwork for this occurrence, spontaneous pleasures (the best kind?) and epiphanies (the only kind) can be mutually discovered, and at Normal's Red Room, I can personally attest to this phenomenon. The fact that these settings are rare in no way diminishes their value.