NY Times review of Oedipus

April 26, 1997

'Oedipus,' With Tears and Chimes

By PAUL GRIFFITHS

Harry Partch's vision of total musical theater surely did not
include singer-actors reading from the book and decorous
wafts of ritual. He wanted vividness. He wanted intoxication.
His one-man dispute with Western culture was rooted in a
dismissal of anything learned or abstract. He looked to the
musical cultures of ancient China and Greece, in which sound,
display, word and gesture were welded and magically potent.
He spoke of the "emotional saturation, or transcendence,
that it is the particular province of dramatic music to achieve."
He was a hobo Antonin Artaud.

But if Thursday night's performance of his "Oedipus" failed
to live up to his ideals, the faults were at least as much in
the piece as in the mildness and rehearsal quality of the
theatrical presentation at the Metropolitan Museum. Quite
simply, there isn't much music in this score. Partch insisted
on one thing at a time (this was another quarrel he had with
the Western musical tradition) and he largely avoided having
his singer-actors accompanied by instrumental music of any
great elaboration.

Much of his "Oedipus" consists of declamation, whether
spoken or chanted, with chimes, stationary backgrounds
and cadences. Only toward the end, when we come to Jocasta's
suicide and Oedipus's self-blinding, does the array of specially
built instruments begin to wake up. At this point on Thursday
one could begin to feel the heartbeat Partch was looking for,
as an embracing percussion ostinato was joined by a shrill,
trilling clarinet in mounting exhilaration.

Partch was obliged to make his own instruments because he
needed a new tuning system, more on course with natural vibration.
But he turned necessity into opportunity and created things as
beautiful as their names: cloud chamber bowls, made from Pyrex
carboys, or marimba eroica, with huge wooden slabs and
resonators. He wanted his shows to look good, with his
instruments set around the stage, though unfortunately in
the cramped space at the museum they all had to be
bunched together.

Still, opportunities to experience the Partch instrumentarium
are rare, and it was excellent to be hearing live the authentic
sonorities of the composer's aged recordings: the reed-organ
wheezes, the deep-bass thumps, the arpeggios from the
zitherlike harmonic canon that sound like cast jewels. Dean
Drummond, whose ensemble, Newband, has the care of the
Partch instruments, was conducting a group of professional
and student musicians.

Among the vocal performers, Joe Garcia commandingly
brought before us an Oedipus speaking out of a snarl of
contempt. Gregory Sims, a vital actor, made Creon's part
passionately important, and Robert Osborne, as Tiresias,
was able to convey the special qualities of Partchian
incantation, which often seems to imitate the sick drone of
someone on illicit substances.

Copyright 1997 The New York Times



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