AW.: Re: Re: the "canon"

I<<
[Rosati:]
>I don't think he really had any sensitivity to the subtleties of the
intervals he was using, especially vertically. Too much of it sounds
random and jangly.
[Stearns:]
I've always thought that this was one of the most curious twists of
fate in the whole contemporary tuning narrative; that Harry Partch --
literately the voice of a tuning reform based squarely on aural
causation -- would end up creating a music that the majority of folks
of a similar (tuning reform based on aural causation, and some innate
teleological righteousness) persuasion would probably find acutely
unpalatable. >>

Since tuning is an issue that _can_ be considered without regard to a
particular genre or repertoire, this list can have friendly and productive
exchanges in spite of the fact that musical tastes may have precious little
else in common. I recall one list contributor for whom barbershop quartet
music was most sublime musical expression, others come from the early music
world, or music ethnology, or from some vernacular contemporary music. Many
on the list find music from the experimental tradition within which I grew up
to be anything but music in the first place.

After twenty years of working with his scores and 25 years of listening to
recordings (the first was the quadraphonic "World of Harry Partch", bought
with paper route money after seeing the public TV documentary), I find Partch
to have been an amazing yet extremely uneven and contradictory composer. His
music does not sit well in any of the established genres. His microtonal
melodic recitation of lyric poetry exists somewhere between an edwardian
parlor entertainment and balkan epic singing, yet is really close to neither.
The impulse for his harmonic language was a thick (hexadic) harmonic texture
that belongs to the earliest part of the century*. He thought of himself as a
man of the theatre and a contemporary of composers like Douglas Moore or Otto
Leuning. The experimentalists, who were, in principle, the most supportive,
were rejected outright by Partch, until Lou Harrison's late conversion to
Just Intonation. Tuning theory was a central concern for Partch through the
writing of the first edition of his book, and then became a side concern to
actual composition where his use of tonal materials was often quite free.
The resources of the diamond were basically exhausted for Partch with _Dark
Brother_, _Ring Around the Moon_, and the _Intrusions_. His earliest work is
summed up in _Oedipus_ where recitation is at its most developed and the
choruses use ostinati based on the "tonal flux" progressions found at extreme
distances on the diamond. With _Castor & Pollux_, the emphasis was now on
rhythm and percussion -- especially superimposed ostinati in compund metres
-- and the pitches chosen were described by Partch himself as "atonal".
"Random and jangly" wrote Rosati; that's exactly where Partch had gone. The
large stage productions which followed fell often into intended as well as
unconcious self parody, and a balance between Partch's tonal and atonal
practices is not really to be found until _Petals_ where sublime stands
unashamededly next to the ridiculous while suburban domesticity mingles with
the exotic. (If anyone wants to go into any detail about Partch's tonal
practice, we might do this in another thread...).

If Partch has a place into any of our canons, it will not be because of any
normative standards of quality or virtue, but rather because of his
exceptionality. Machaut, Ockeghem, Josquin, Monteverdi, Bach, Mozart,
Beethoven, Wagner, Ives, Sibelius, Schoenberg, Partch, Cage... works by all
those dead white guys have survived and will thrive because they are
exceptional. Sometimes someone will be rediscovered -- Hans Rott is the best
recent example -- and the whole deck will have to be reshuffled (i.e. with
Rott in, what happens to early Mahler?).

_____
* It's still amazing to think that Partch, after the apparent failure of the
intial tuning for the Kithara with its complete representation of the
diamond, still contemplated an extension of the diamond through the
identities 13, 15, and 17.