Composers: Harry Isn’t Kidding

Harry Partch spent all day moving his homemade orchestra from his home in an abandoned chicken hatchery in Petaluma to the ballroom of San Francisco’s Sheraton-Palace Hotel. Not until evening, when delegates to the Ameri can Symphony Orchestra League’s convention began drifting into the room, were all the instruments ready. There stood the “Spoils of War,” the “Sur rogate Kithara,” the “Harmonic Canons I and II,” the “Chromelodeon” —and there stood Harry Partch, quietly examining the tolerant smiles that have confronted him all his life. “This re minds me of an old Chinese proverb ” Partch told his 400 listeners. ” ‘I agree.

I am what you accuse me of being.’ ” Having pleasantly confessed to whatever musical eccentricities his audience had already convicted him of, Partch sat down at Harmonic Canon II and began to play, aided by a disciple who had flown down from Tacoma, Wash., for the occasion. “You exclamation-point Jim,” Partch chanted to the rhythm of the Surrogate Kithara’s ponderous clucks, “get your semicolon asterisk out o this yard.” It was music the likes of which few in the audience had heard before, but it forced upon everyone in the Palace a new and respectful opinion of Harry Partch: Harry may be nuts but Harry isn’t kidding.

Scratching Mice. Partch grew up on the Mexican border, where his father, an ex-missionary who thought of himself as an “aggressive atheist,” had gone to work for the Immigration Service. By the time he was 22, Harry had composed a scholastically pleasing string quartet, a symphonic poem and a piano concerto, but he set fire to them all a few years later when he was struck by the revelation that the spaces between the keys hold more fascination than the keys themselves. Eventually he arrived at a 43-tone octave and brought the good news to the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, who had caught his ear by laying down a doctrine of music for the voice: music must be written so that no word will have an intonation or accentuation it could not have in passionate speech.

Alive with his mission, Partch was soon busy building instruments to play his special music; he was, he said, “a philosophic musicman seduced into carpentry.” He put a long neck on a viola to give it “microtonal capabilities”-then he built his Surrogate Kithara, a two-deck, 16-string zither that looks like a pair of overgrown abacuses without the beads. Next came the “Bamboo Marimba” (which Partch affectionately calls “the Boo”), a 64-piece, six-tiered assembly of bamboo rods to be struck by sticks padded with felt. Rising to the grandeur of his tasks, he finally produced the Spoils of War—a big and ugly one-man band strung up on a gallows and made from artillery shell casings, cloud-chamber bowls (from the Radiation Laboratories at Berkeley), a blow-boy (composed of bellows, a 1912-auto-exhaust horn and three organ pipes), a whang gun (“WHANG-OOOO,” it hoots when struck), and a raspidor that sounds like mice scratching inside a wall.

Galloping Whimsy. Though much of Partch’s “corporeal music” is pleasing and oddly moving, the clucks, gurgles, thumps and thunders of his instruments sound like the score to Yojimbo, an effect that is reinforced by a recurrent and highly menacing meeeEEEOOOW! from his strings and an occasional unspecific crash that sounds like a Boo player collapsing.

Partch’s galloping whimsy—the very thing that has made him an admirably tireless pioneer—has also kept him a hopeless, penniless outsider all his life He conjures up such titles as Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball 1 earn in the Shower Room and Happy Birthday to You! (Afro-Chinese Minuet), and when he talks about his work he makes it desperately clear that he is working beyond the reach of his vocab-ary. People may smile when he sits town to play, but the trouble with his misic is less the fault of the composer than the carpenter: imperfections in his instruments slur the microtonic scheming—and all his years spent with little ore than Chinese proverbs to comfort him are lost and drowned in a chorus of whangs.