The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
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sense of the word, and having heard the piece, one frequently has no real desire to hear it again; the point has been made, the idea got across, and there seems no need to repeat the experience.
There is perhaps a parallel here with the modern movement in American painting, discussed wittily in a recent magazine article by Tom Wolfe, who sees it not as the consequence of an aesthetic impulse but as a response to a theory of art, usually propounded by a critic. He says, “Frankly, these days, without a theory to go with it I can’t see a painting,”38 and suggests, tongue only half in cheek, that when the final great retrospective exhibition of American art 1945–75 is presented at the Museum of Modern Art in the year 2000 the exhibits will consist of blow-ups of the writings of critics with, by way of illustration, tiny reproductions of the paintings themselves. Cage does not always avoid the trap of the piece written to illustrate a point about perception, sound, silence or society. If music is to be alive, however, Art, to parody Billings, must go first and strike out the work, then Theory comes after and polishes it over.
For this reason, it could be that despite the power of Cage’s ideas to shock and disturb our preconceptions, a much more seminal figure will in time prove to be Harry Partch, who, born in 1901, was vouchsafed a mere four lines in a recently published history of music in the United States; his death at the end of 1974 passed almost unnoticed in the musical, not to say the general, press. If we compare Cage with the African and Balinese musicians discussed in chapter 2 [Music, Society, Education], it will be clear that he remains, for all his invaluable study of non-European ways, very much tied to western urban culture, and that his discourse is still carried on within the conditions of the western concert tradition. It is Partch, more than any other twentieth-century western musician, who represents a real challenge to that tradition, a challenge which stems not from the “Tomorrow’s World” optimism of Cage, who is still, it seems, hung up on the engaging technological lunacy of Buckminster Fuller and the behaviorist nightmares of B. F. Skinner, but from the old, universal and forever new ways of ritual theatre. “The work that I have been doing these many years,” says Partch, “parallels much in the attitudes and actions of primitive man. He found soundmagic in the common materials around him. He then proceeded to make the vehicle, the instrument, as visually beautiful as he could. Finally, he evolved the sound-magic and the visual beauty in his everyday words and experiences, his ritual and drama, in order to lend greater meaning to his life. This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.”39
Partch, in fact, may be the first musician of the west to have transcended the limitations of its concert tradition—or at least to have pointed a way in which this can be done. He is unique, not only in the thoroughness and explicitness of his rejection of European classical music, a rejection more complete than that of Cage or indeed of anyone since Billings and the New England tunesmiths, but also in the fact that he has succeeded in erecting a living alternative to it, growing not out of theory (though well supported by theory, coming after the creative fact) but out of “an acoustical ardor and a conceptual fervor”40—out of the fundamental creative impulse. In a single robustly-written chapter in his book Genesis of a Music, he surveys the whole of western music from Terpander in 700 BC to the present and finds it wanting in what he calls corporeality, that quality of being “vital to a time and a place, a here and now,”41 of being “emotionally tactile.” To him, the overwhelming majority of western musical compositions, including almost all of the post-Renaissance tradition (he has an interesting list of honorable exceptions, which includes the Florentine Camerata and Monteverdi, Berlioz, Mussorgski, the Mahler of Das Lied von der Erde, Debussy’s Pelléas et Mélisande, the Pierrot Lunaire of Schoenberg—but nothing else by him—and Satie) is irretrievably lost in abstraction, in the denial of the physical being of man. In its place “We are reduced to specialisms—a theatre of dialogue, for example, and a concert of music without drama—basic mutilations of ancient concept. My music is visual—it is corporeal, aural and visual …”42 The development of polyphony, of tonal harmony, and of the large abstract forms based on them, he sees as a distortion of the essential reality of music, which is the making of magic; and the principal bearer of that magic, as he sees it, is the human voice bringing the word.
So his music is composed around the human voice and the word—which of course means the theatre. His works are almost exclusively large music dramas, a theatre of mime, of farce and dance, of shouting and vocalizing, relating clearly to the great traditional dramas of Japan, of Ancient Greece, of Java and Bali—wherever in fact men have not forgotten how to act out ritually the myths that sustain their lives. Were this all, Partch would have little claim to uniqueness; many western musicians have looked in this direction for fresh inspiration. But he has gone further. Wishing to transcend the, to him, wholly artificial and unacceptable tempered scale, with its twelve equal out-of-tune intervals to the octave, he developed a different scale based on just intonation with natural acoustic intervals, comprising no less than forty-three tones to the octave, all of whose intervals are derived from the perfect fifth and perfect third, permitting not only an enriched concept of harmony owing little to European tonal-harmonic music but also a tremendously enriched source of melody which can approach the subtlety of speech inflection. As Peter Yates says:
With a scale of intervals so finely divided, one is able to speak to exact pitches as easily as to sing. The artificiality of recitative is done away with … Instead there is by the use of the forty-three-tone scale a continuous field of melodic and harmonic relationship among the degree of spoken, intoned, chanted, sung, melismatic and shouted vocal utterance, a tonal spectrum filling the gap between the vocal coloration of opera and the spoken drama. Spoken drama can be taken over by the instruments and translated back into change and song.43
But how can spoken melody of forty-three tones to the octave—feasible for sensitive singers—be taken over by instruments, when all the instruments of the western tradition are built to a specification of only twelve? This was the problem Partch faced and solved with the simplicity of genius; he invented and built his own instruments. Over a period of more than forty years he designed and built nearly thirty new instruments, with an eye no less for visual than an ear for aural beauty, not to mention a considerable verbal flair in naming them. He has been responsible for inventing possibly more new instruments than Adolph Sax, yet he described himself modestly as “not an instrument builder but a philosophical music-man seduced into carpentry.”44 The instruments are mainly plucked and plectrum stringed instruments, often with the strings arranged three-dimensionally, as well as variations of the marimba and xylophone, with adaptations of more conventional instruments such as harmonium and viola (he was later to find wind players who could realize his scale on their instruments), and, apart from the beauty and expressiveness of their sounds, they represent as important a conceptual challenge as does the music itself. In the first place, they are hand-built by the composer to his own purposes, not mass-produced to a conventional specification; there is in existence only one set of instruments, and if one wants to hear Partch’s music and see his dramas one has to go to them. Secondly, the instruments are as important a part of the musico-dramatic work as the actors; Partch specified that they be placed in full view of the spectators as part of the set, and that the musicians playing them take a full part in the dramatic action.
And, further, the construction of the instruments is regarded, not as a necessary task to be carried out before the real job of music making can be got on with, but as an essential part of the musical process, just as with any African musician; his music requires his instruments. While many of the instruments, built in that most beautiful of all materials, wood, are triumphs of the woodworker’s skill, being beautiful and dramatic in appearance as well as sound, others equally are triumphs of bricolage, being made from old shell cases (“Better to have them here than shredding young boys’ skins on the battlefield”45), light bulbs, Pyrex glass jars, hub caps and other cast-offs of technological society, materials available to anyone with the imagination to perceive their possibilities. Partch was not anti-technology; years of working with his own hands made him too wise to fall into that trap. His attitude towards the instruments of music resembles that of Robert Persig towards the art of motorcycle maintenance: He says,
Musicians