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An eclectic 'Oedipus' opera comes to life in Montclair

Sunday, March 27, 2005
BY WILLA J. CONRAD
*Star-Ledger Staff*

Babies, scientists now know, are born universal linguists, meaning they have the capacity to hear and imitate minute intonations and sounds of speech in any language. Unfortunately, by about 8 months old, they've honed into the patterns they most hear around them, which is why Westerners, for instance, have such trouble discerning subtle shadings of vowels in, say, Mandarin Chinese.

Maybe this explains why the 20th-century California composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) was at such odds with the musical establishment. Born to missionary parents who spent time in China and exposed their young son to Mandarin culture, he had an unusually keen discernment of pitch and vocal placement. When he listened to people talk, he mentally noted the range of pitches and inflections of tone. Where Western culture centuries ago settled on 13 tones in an octave scale, Partch heard 43, and spent a long time waging a lonely war against the tyranny of even temperament.

As a young man, he traveled to Dublin to ask the poet W.B. Yeats for permission to use his translation of Sophocles' "King Oedipus." Partch made notations of the speech inflections of Yeats reading his own text, which made their way into the 1952 premiere of his microtonal opera, "Oedipus," at Mills College in Oakland, Calif.

That's why this week's unusual, staged production of Partch's "Oedipus" at Montclair State University comes from elaborate and ages-old origins. The result, its producers hope, will be a de-mystified, intelligible rendering of the ancient Greek tale in modern language. Ridge Theater of Manhattan will stage the professional, multimedia production with projected images and a cast of 13.

Partch was not the first composer to update the classic: Stravinsky's 1926 version, "Oedipus Rex," is better known, though not widely regarded as the Russian composer's best work.

"There's no doubt in my mind that Partch's 'Oedipus' is more powerful as drama than Stravinsky's," says Dean Drummond, director of the musical ensemble Newband, the Harry Partch Institute and the Harry Partch Instrumentarium. (Partch's collection of instruments, designed to play his microtonal works, is housed at MSU.) "I'm a Stravinsky fan, but he used obscure language and a singerly technique. For the average person, Partch's 'Oedipus' is by far the more moving work."

Producing a fully staged version of "Oedipus" has been a 30-year dream for Drummond. As a teenager who apprenticed himself to Partch at the composer's funky Laundromat-turned-instrument-studio in Venice, Calif., Drummond recalls listening to a reel-to-reel recording of Partch's opera.

"Tuning-wise, I think Harry thought Western music went astray a couple thousand years ago, but his view of the voice was more complicated," says Drummond. "Harry started out as a composer for voice -- over half his music uses vocals. He wanted truthfulness of text, singing speech that could be clearly understood by audiences. He wanted no interference between the singer and audiences.

"This is the antithesis, in a way, of text presented in standard opera in a language audiences can't understand and sung in a distorted manner. He thought of traditional opera singing, with the excessive vibrato and obscuring of consonants, as basically shouting with a nice voice."

Instead, Partch crafted a score that uses sing-songy speech as a way of accentuating natural speech without obscuring it. "My intention is to bring human drama, made of words, movement and music, to a level that a mind with average capacity for sensitivity and logic can understand and therefore evaluate," Partch wrote in program notes for the 1952 production.

As always with Newband's concerts of Partch's music, Drummond will conduct musicians playing Partch's menagerie: large, architecturally interesting instruments with names like chromelodeon, the Boo, Cloud Chamber Bowls, gourd tree, Eucal Blossom and the Spoils of War. A mix of professional musicians and MSU students, trained for four years by Drummond, will be the orchestra.

Because microtonality only began to seep back into Western culture with the rise of jazz, says bass-baritone Robert Osborne, who will sing the role of Oedipus, it's still difficult for classically trained musicians to enter Partch's lush sound world.

"It's about opening the mind to more colorful options of tone," says Osborne, a Yale-trained singer who has made several Partch recordings with Newband. "You have to learn a new notational system, and there's a learning curve. But I think singers are more adaptable, have an easier time with tuning than other instruments -- they have an instinctive way of blending into what they hear around them."

Partch understood this, Osborne says. "He was also a very practical composer. Before you have to sing, he always gives clues in the orchestra, and there's often an instrument paralleling your line."

MSU's "Oedipus" is actually the third version written by Partch. The composer hadn't thought to obtain Yeats' approval in writing, and when he returned to the U.S. in 1935, the Depression turned him into a wandering hobo who rode the rails for eight years. By the '50s, when he was ready to record the work, Yeats was long deceased and the estate, lacking records, denied permission to use the text.

In entrepreneurial fashion, Partch rewrote the text, using translations from the public domain and rewriting the music where it joined the dialogue. He also had previously updated his orchestration to use new instruments he had created in the intervening decades.

"I think it was actually a good thing that Harry had to rewrite it, because he cleared out some of Yeats' more flowery text, the extra characters he had added, and things that would make no sense to American audiences," Drummond says.

Bob McGrath, an avant-garde theater director who has collaborated with composers John Adams and Bang on a Can, has an interesting take on the Oedipus tale.

Banking on the fact that most audiences don't know or won't remember the tragic outcome of Oedipus' desire to know his lineage, but will remember Freud's coining of the term "Oedipal complex," McGrath opted to set the endeavor in an analyst's office, with Oedipus literally on the couch.

"It's like this big detective piece, in which (Oedipus) is exploring his own origins," says Osborne.

Projection designer Laurie Olinder will create still-image projections that reflect this 1920s Viennese spin, while newspaper clips of the era will also be part of the visual mix.

"Harry would think this is cool," says Drummond, who believes that Mussorgsky, whose 19th-century operas Partch admired, was a subconscious role model for Partch when he set more opera-like works, such as "Oedipus."

"Before modern jazz and more natural singing patterns of rock in the last century, Mussorgsky was probably the composer who most naturally set text to music (in opera)," Drummond says.

Nowadays, microtonality is routinely incorporated into contemporary scores, but Partch died in terrible poverty, never getting a chance to see his music treated as a legitimate branch of contemporary composition.

"By the end of his life, he was bitter, so bitter it was hard to take," Drummond recalls. "He compromised when he had to get a piece played, but it was often with inferior players or singers who didn't understand. But I'm not into his music because I feel guilty about his bitterness. I'm into it because it is really, really exciting, and I'm interested in working with the most exciting music available."

Complex 'Oedipus' defies analysis

Friday, April 01, 2005
BY WILLA J. CONRAD
*Star-Ledger Staff*

To ears that spend 99.98 percent of their time listening to the standard 12-tone scale, the late Harry Partch's microtonal music, which uses 43 tones to a typical octave, sounds exotic and fluid, a liquid stream of shimmering notes that slither silkily around the ear.

It's not a bad sensation, this prism-like splintering of pitch. It emanated from Newband, the Montclair State-based ensemble led by Partch disciple Dean Drummond, at Wednesday's premiere of the composer's intense music-drama, "Oedipus."

Partch died sad and poor in California in 1974, but on Wednesday his forgotten score was resurrected by 13 singers and 16 instrumentalists, many of them MSU students trained by Drummond to play Partch's self-made instruments, large, sculpturally interesting marimbas and adapted keyboards and percussion trees.

An earlier version of "Oedipus" was last staged in the '50s. Drummond believes this production is the first time Partch's third and final version of the psychodrama has been professionally staged, in this case by the experimental New York theater-opera company Ridge Theater and Ridge director Bob McGrath.

Funded by MSU's new performing arts fee tagged to each student's tuition, this "Oedipus" is curious, intriguing and ultimately benign in spite of the famously dark subject matter and the bleak updated setting in an early 20th-century Viennese lunatic asylum.

Great works can withstand uneven directorial concepts, and Partch's score -- but more importantly, his excellent libretto -- are the strongest elements in this staging, which runs through Sunday.

Partch believed in reuniting movement, speech and music in the manner of ancient drama. His remake of Sophocles' "Oedipus" is warmly human, beautifully concise and clothed in ephemeral instrumental accompaniment. The score is weighted so that instruments double or lightly support the actors, who both speak and half-sing the text until rising emotions require more aria-like singing and fuller orchestra involvement. When Oedipus discovers he has killed his father and married his mother, the instruments take over completely.

Musically, this production is a success, in part because of Drummond's swooping exactness on the podium, in part because the cast, mostly Equity performers hired out of New York, are surprisingly adept at Partch's sliding vocalisms. Bass-baritone Robert Osborne as Oedipus has the vocal skill and large, resonating voice to bring the character across. Yet his performance Wednesday was emotionally one-toned and stagnant. Soprano Beth Griffith was a magnificent Jocasta, passionate and believably unstable.

McGrath puts Oedipus, literally, on the psychiatrist's couch, a play on the Freudian oedipal complex, turning the tragedy into self-analysis of Oedipus' origins. The director also turns a relatively minor character, The Spokesman (David Ronis), who acts as commentator, into Freud himself, complete with therapist's notebook and Viennese accent. Seers, priests and herdsmen come and go, but they are either inhabitants of or adjunct professionals in an insane asylum. Even the orchestra is dressed in surgical scrubs.

There is so much that almost works: the three-tiered set design, the use of static projected visuals by Laurie Olinder to add architectural elements like trees and columns. The choice to freeze actors and leave motion to a second layer of projections, Bill Morrison's frenetic newsreel excerpts taken from World War I-era Vienna, doesn't balance. The newsreels are distracting and peripheral, and one fails to emotionally connect to the central drama.

Still, Partch himself would likely be pleased with the detailed effort evident in this "Oedipus," which is by far MSU's most ambitious presentation of his works since Drummond and the Partch instruments arrived five years ago.

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* David Beardsley
* microtonal guitar
* http://biink.com/db

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