Harry Partch – Enclosure Two (4 CDs) - Innova 401: “I am Harry Partch” (rec. 1951) / “By the Rivers of Babylon” (rec. 1945) / “A Wagnerian Wrestling Match” (rec. 1954) / “Ten Li Po Lyrics” (rec. 1947) / “The Use of English in Serious Music” (rec. 1970) / “Barstow – Eight Hitch-hikers’ Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California” (rec. 1945) / “San Francisco – A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Street Corner on a Foggy Night in the Twenties” (rec. 1945) / “Life is Too Precious to Spend it With Important People” (rec. 1970) / “U.S. Highball – A Musical Account of Slim’s Transcontinental Hobo Trip” (rec. 1946) / “While My Heart Keeps Beating Time” (rec. 1995) / “San Francisco II” (rec. 1990) / “I’m Going to Starts Right Off by Giving You Some Sounds” (rec. 1966) / “Two Settings from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake” (rec. 1945) / “Dark Brother – Final Two Paragraphs from Thomas Wolfe’s ‘God’s Lonely Man’ “ (rec. 1945) / “A Quarter-Saw Section of Motivations and Intonations” (rec. 1967) / “Extracts from Bitter Music” (rec. 1992) / “Yankee Doodle Birds” (rec. 1970) / “Y. D. Fantasy – On the Words of an Early American Tune” (rec. 1945) / “O Frabjous Day – The Second of Two Settings from Lewis Carroll: The Jabberwocky, from Through the Looking Glass” (rec. 1954) “You are Charged with Being Guilty: Are You Drunk or Not Drunk?” (rec. 1953) / “Ring Around the Moon – A Dance Fantasm for Here and Now” (rec. 1953) / “Bless this Home” (rec. 1961) / “Harrys Wake” (rec. 1966 & 1974)

Harry Partch – Enclosure Five (3 CDs) - Innova 405: “Ulysses Departs from the Edge of the World” (rec. 1971) / “Revelation in the Courthouse Park” (as excerpted by Partch) (rec. 1961) / “Introduction to King Oedipus” (rec. 1954) / “King Oedipus” (rec. 1952) / Johann Philipp Krieger (1649-1725): “Menuet from Partita in G” (rec. 1950) / Douglas Moore: “Come Away, Death” (rec. 1942) / Douglas Moore: “Come Away, Death” (rec. 1997) / “By the Rivers of Babylon” (rec. 1961) / “Introduction to The Bewitched” (rec. 1959) / “The Bewitched” (rec. 1980)

Harry Partch – Enclosure Six (1 CD) - Innova 406: “Delusion of the Fury” (rec. 1969)

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Innova’s Partch-effort is on the grand scale, with truly luxurious releases, containing all of what you might have hoped for, and probably more than you could have envisioned, musically and documentary! Innova’s releases of Partch material so far amounts to six issues. The first one is a VHS, the third one a book and the fourth one a VHS, but here I’ll just deal with the CD issues, three in all, with eight individual CDs!

Harry Partch (1901 – 1974) was a true American original; a stubborn free-thinker and inventor, who considered any kind of limitation – not only in music or the other arts– to be the ultimate deadly sin. He just couldn’t bear pettiness or limited thinking. He is to be ranked among the finest examples of American ingenuity, alongside characters like Conlon Nancarrow, John Cage and Kenneth Gaburo.

In 1930 Harry Partch ceremonially set fire to all the traditional musical scores he’d written, and ventured into un-traveled territory, as he started developing and building his own instruments. He also left the traditional system of tuning used in the Western world since Bach; the Equal Temperament. Of the four major tunings systems – Equal Temperament, Pythagorean, Meantone Temperament and Just Intonation – Partch preferred Just Intonation, and used it through-out his life. Later the minimalists, like LaMonte Young and Terry Riley, would do the same. If we look to so called popular music we find Joni Mitchell, who has invented a was to play her guitar in innumerable tunings, quickly switching between tunings by way of a pedal-controlled computer.

Harry Partch actually built his first instrument in 1928; the Adapted Viola, with an extended fingerboard. In 1934 he altered a guitar the same way. In 1934 he also constructed a large reed organ, called the Ptolemy.
He later built the Chromelodeon; an adapted harmonium. It is a pedal-pumped reed organ with sub-bass, adapted top play all the 43-tone per octave source scale that Partch adopted.
Between 1949 and 1974 Partch built about twenty-five string and percussion instruments. Between 1944 and 1947 he was in residence as a research assistant at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, where he, in addition to the building of his instruments, also wrote the important book “Genesis of Music”.

Among the instruments he built were giant Kitharas; modified replicas of Greek kitharas. He named the different kitharas Kithara I, Kithara II and Surrogate Kithara. One of them is so big it stands six feet tall and requires two players to play the seventy-two strings. The instrument sounds like a cross between a bottleneck guitar and a harp.
Partch’s music utilizes a lot of percussion, so it’s not surprising that he engaged himself deeply in the building (or sometimes finding) of percussive instruments. The most spectacular type of percussive instruments he used, were in my view the Cloud-Chamber Bowls. They sound like liquid gongs. Partch got them from a glass shop at UC Berkeley in 1950, and they were originally used in a radiation laboratory there. They are actually brittle twelve-gallon Pyrex containers. The Cloud-Chamber Bowls were used to trace the paths of sub-atomic particles. These instruments are naturally irreplaceable. In their instrumental existence they are hung from ropes connected to a redwood frame.

Some of Partch’s percussive instruments were made from bamboo; Boo, Mbira Bass Dyad, the Diamond Marimba and Eucal Blossom. The Boo (the Bamboo Marimba) originally had sixty-four tuned bamboo tubes arranged in six rows, but it was later refitted with tubes of resinated plastic.
The Diamond Marimba is made of Brazilian rosewood and pernambuco resonating over tubes of bamboo, and it was built as early as 1946.
The Bass Marimba spans six feet. It’s made from huge Sitka spruce blocks, resonating over organ pipes.
Other marimbas are Quadrangularis Reversum and Marimba Eroica. The Marimba Eroica consists of four Sitka spruce bars attached to the tops of four long, box-like resonators. This instrument rumbles and vibrates in the very low register, more felt than heard.

Some percussion instruments were made out of metallic stuff that Partch found, like metal bowls, bells and artillery shell casings. One instrument is named Spoils of War, and in its full outfit it consists of a block of pernambuco, a wood-block, a guiro, a small Cloud-Chamber Bowl, three sheets of spring steel controlled by pedals and seven brass shell casings.
The Zymo-Xyl, on the other hand, was constructed from empty sherry and gin bottles.
This account of instruments is not at all complete, and isn’t meant to be. Explore the CDs! There are many more examples of Partch’s instrument building in those sound documents!

It is easy to realize, contemplating the arsenal of original instruments, that Partch was an institution all to himself. However, it was hard to move the instruments around for performances, and the tuning process was also a problem. Each instrument requires about half an hour of expertise tuning, and the instruments can hold the tuning only about ten minutes. (Partch turned this inadequacy into an advantage, though, considering the hard-to-arrive-at initial tunings only as points of departure, allowing the tunings to eventually deteriorate into unpredictable colors of tone)

All these circumstances and the awkwardness of the whole artistic idea (as it appeared to most people) resulted in few appearances, and only in his late years was Partch recognized as the original genius he really was. He shared that fate with composers like Conlon Nancarrow and Giacinto Scelsi. As the CD releases from Innova and CRI shows, though, the Partch revival is in full swing, and has been so for a few years now, as has, incidentally, been the case with the other two mentioned composers too!

The problem now is mostly the conservation of the instruments, and their up-keep.

During his earlier life Partch survived on odd jobs, washing dishes, picking fruit and proofreading. He rambled the land as a hobo for the good part of ten years during the Depression. For most of his adult years Partch lived off of University grants, fellowships and such, but he didn’t conform to anything that came out of the Establishment. He never conformed to anything. He was his own man to the fullest extent.

Through much of his work, and especially in his works of a grander scale, Harry Partch connected to the ancient Greek culture, fusing music, theater, dance, spoken word and drama into amazing demonstrations of 20th Century rituals, in an ambition to arrive at the wholeness of the theatrical music of ancient Greeks.

The first CD issue of Partch material from Innova (Innova Recordings 401) is called “Historic Speech Music from the Harry Partch Archives”. It is an extremely interesting and revealing 4-CD-set, opening up the world of Harry Partch in one single creek of the barn door!

Partch remarked before his death that he considered his work to be a kind of letter to the world, and his final composition would be an enclosure, an after-thought, a gift to the world to complete the message. Innova Recordings states that their Partch series “Enclosure” is a kind of substitute for that envisioned last composition that never surfaced. In that case must be said that these releases constitute a brilliant substitute!

This first set – “Historic Speech Music” – presents early works by Partch, pulled up from under layers of dust in forlorn archives, and here they appear, fresh as they were when they were recorded. It is almost shocking to directly hear Harry P. himself appear as the first track starts, stating: “I am Harry Partch”. Then follows olden recordings of for example “Ten Li Po Lyrics”, composed as early as 1930 – 33 and recorded 1947. Amongst these fantastic old 78 rpm transfers are inserted more recent interviews with, or statements by, Harry Partch, for instance parts of a conversation with Eugene Paul in 1970.
The documentary value of these sets can never be over-estimated, but the musical value is irrepressible too, especially these days when we’re used to all the re-issues of early von Sauer, Casals and Busch et consortes, which have taught us to overlook – not even hear – the surface noise of old 78s.

The originality of the speech-music of Partch strikes me again, as I listen through these releases. How could this have happened way back in those years? What was going on in music then anyway? Partch must have been looked at as a true madman then, as were the sound experimenters in Europe and Russia; the Lettrists, the brute musicians (Marinetti, Russolo) the sound poets (Schwitters, Hausmann), the constructors of early electronic musical devices (Trautwein, Theremin), pre-musique-concrète Walter Ruttman – and in the late 1940s Pierre Schaeffer who triggered musique concrète which in turn led to electroacoustic music and developments up to this very day. In America maybe John Cage and Lou Harrison, and in a sense Charles Ives, represented free thinking along with Partch.

However, the speech-music herein presented, is a very original venture, and especially when you consider the funky sounds of the Partch instruments. Those instruments produce sounds you might expect to hear today, from modern studios and computers, but to listen to them from old worn 78 rpms almost freaks you out! This guy had got to be very very lonely in those days!
In the more popular venue of American music I can only compare Partch’s oeuvre – in a traversed sense – to the adventures of Spike Jones and his City Slickers, who actually were true experimentalists, which their humor shouldn’t conceal!
Maybe the style and manner of the monologues on these Partch discs have something in common with the many radio plays that were broadcast in America before television. I think, for example, of John Cage’s and Kenneth Patchen’s “The City Wears a Slouch Hat” (recently released on a CD from Cortical Foundation) and “War of the Worlds” with Orson Welles and the Mercury Theater. The studio guys used quite a bit of makeshift whatnot to arrive at sonic illustrations.

Entries 5 – 23 on CD 2 of the Historic Speech-Music set is a very interesting introduction to just intonation, with examples. Great stuff to dig in to! Sort of reminds me of Herbert Eimert’s LP “Einführung in die elektronische Musik” on Wergo Schallplatten.

Some parts here are not early recordings, but latter-day re-enactments, like “Bitter Music” on CD 3, which was recorded in 1992 in Melbourne.

Next CD-set, containing three CDs, is Enclosure Five, containing some old, some new. Here we hear some of the bigger works, like “Revelation in the Courthouse Park”, which Partch based on Euripides’ “Bacchae”. This is an abridged, or “excerpted” Gate 5 version from 1961. There is a more recent recording of a full-scale version available on Tomato, recorded 1989 by the American Music Theater on two CDs. It must be pointed out again that Partch had a strong predilection for ancient Greece and its culture, and he let that permeate his whole life, really, from the design of his instruments to his dramatic ideals and even to the tuning systems he advocated. Partch took that Greek ancient legacy, and made it work in a present-day American setting. This is the heart of his cultural deed, and that which he should be especially hailed for. Partch said in an interview with Studs Terkel: “I’m attracted to Greek mythology. There’s so much basic in it. I can’t work with trivial material, unless it’s sarcastic or satirical”.

Enclosure Five also harbors “King Oedipus” – long work based, of course, on Sophocles – as well as “The Bewitched” in a version by Kenneth Gaburo from 1980. “The Bewitched” is, in Partch’s own words, “in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre. In spirit, if not wholly in content, it’s a satyr-play. It is a seeking for release – through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry – from the catharsis of tragedy. It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity, in the feeling that the modern spirit might thereby find some ancient and magical sense of rebirth”.
For comparison we might listen to “The Bewitched” in the recording of its first performance in 1957. It can be found on a CD from CRI; Composer’s Recordings, who has also released a line of very important Partch works. Innova and CRI, and also Tomato, are the labels we are especially indebted to, for their passionate and eager Harry Partch ventures. Thank you all!
Newband has done some good work with “Daphne on the Dunes” on a CD from Mode, too. They should, too, because they have the entire Partch instrument collection on permanent loan since 1991! Get on with it, boys and girls!

The last – or is it just the latest? – release with Partch material on Innova Recordings is Enclosure Six; “Delusion of the Fury”, on one CD. It was recorded in 1969. The events take place in an olden time of no precise definition. It has to do with the release from the wheel of life and death, and is based on a legend of a princely warrior who falls in battle at the hands of a young rival. Act II is based on an Ethiopian folk tale. The titles of some of the sections may cast some light on the character of the work: “”Chorus of Shadows”, “The Pilgrimage”, Emergence of the Spirit”, “A Son in Search of his Father’s Face”, “The Quiet Hobo Meal”, “Time of Fun Together” etcetera… It strikes me that this kind of naming is very similar to the naming that Terry Riley uses for his string quartets. Maybe Riley was inspired in this by Partch.

All in all, these three releases, these three “Enclosures” from Innova Recordings, are very interesting, very enjoyable, and well worth looking into for anyone the slightest interested in American ingenuity, American innovative spirit – and of course, American 20th Century music, theatre and drama, through the compositional life’s work of one of the most peculiar, stubborn and talented cultural personalities of modern America, Mr. Harry Partch!

For further information on Harry Partch, please check in at Corporeal Meadows!