Partch, Johnston, and Nancarrow

Harry Partch is probably the most purely radical composer, and person, that we have discussed so far. All of the distinguishing elements of the previous composers are present in Partch, but taken to the extreme. He disliked Western culture and high society, so he spent a significant amount of time as a vagabond, living the low life with other wanderers on the edge of daily sustainability. I love one of the passages from Ben Johnston's profile "The Corporealism of Harry Partch: "...after his hobo years he just had no fear of society or its opinions. It had done its worst to him, yet he was still going; so in a large part he had won his freedom." I really admire this quest, in a detached sort of way, since I strongly desire a similarly enlightening experience but would never be able to do it myself. After doing this, he must have felt even more disconnected from the manners of concert music. In his own words: "'The presumptions that lie behind the art of this culture are no good for me. I'm going to start all over and make something I can live with.'"

Amen, brother.

Partch even rejected the avant-garde circles of the time, thinking them too much a product of overcivilized minds. That's about as independent as a composer can get. And of course he famously created his own instruments in different tuning systems. I admit I have never listened to his music, but it's never too late to start.

One other comment that ties Partch back to the avant-garde discussion: he remarked that perhaps preserving recordings of his music would represent the definitive form of his art, since it would be nearly impossible (and inauthentic) for someone else to recreate his painstakingly handmade instruments. This is the complete opposite of our initial discussion about the avant-garde and experimentalism; for Partch, building the instruments was the experiment, and the part that could not be replicated. The music itself was meant to be played in a definitive way.

Listening to Barstow for the first time was a somewhat disappointing experience. I was expecting a mind-expanding homemade instrument, but I only heard a guitar, albeit in an interesting alternate tuning. This piece seems to belong more to a folk tradition than anything. The musical material is pretty conservative and repetitive. The concept of the piece is nice, though: drawing attention to the stories of the types of people society forgets, but that Partch must have been intimately involved with. The closing movement is sort of a dramatic peak, since the text is the most desperate and it covers several psychological moods.

I highly enjoyed the website where one can "play" Partch's instruments. I felt like I understood him much more after hearing the quirky tones of different marimbas and kitharas.

Next I listened to Ben Johnston's String Quartet No. 4, specifically the Amazing Grace movement. This was also harmonically conservative - but only for the first half. Then is devolved into a glorious exploration of timbres, rhythmic development, and it took on an epic scope. There was definitely an element of Ivesian transcendentalism in this piece, in taking the most familiar hymn tune and finding something new and noble to do with it.

Johnston's Suite for Microtonal Piano didn't make a huge impact on me. I heard evidence of great craft, and the alternate tuning did allow for more expressive timbres than a normal piano, especially in higher registers (and particularly in movement 4). But I don't think these devices were used as creatively as Ives in his Three Quarter-Tone Pieces, which include effects like glissandi between two pianos. That said, the Suite for Microtonal Piano is still a very appealing piece.

Conlon Nancarrow's music is usually a fun listen. He parallels Cowell in his exploitation of the piano. I had heard some of the player piano studies before and got familiar with their dense textures and rhythmic complexity that are clearly unplayable by a human. In these two studies though, I heard some new effects. No. 25 is full of super-fast arpeggiated chords that become quite annoying after a while, but are redeemed by the wonderfully insane ending. The piece ends in a flash of colors.

I had to take a deep breath at the beginning of No. 36, which contains basically the same arpeggiated chords. Maybe this music caught me on a bad day, but it was just tiresome to me. The cross-rhythms were fascinating, though, and I enjoyed the complete liberation of the piano from traditional timbres. It ended up sounding semi-electronic and full of sound effects, almost like an arcade game. Seriously. I think Nancarrow had a prophetic vision of kids in the 1980's playing Space Invaders. Or Asteroids. Maybe?