Partch’s Bewitched
Harry Partch (1901-1974) is an American composer and staunch supporter of microtonality. Partch grew up in Arizona and New Mexico and listened to songs in multiple languages, including Mandarin, Spanish, and some American Indian dialects. Displeased with early compositions and the equal-tempered tuning system, Partch burned all his early work and began his fascination with other tuning systems. In many ways, Partch’s dance-satire The Bewitched is a fusion of his exposure to various cultures, his instrumental creations, and his microtonal scales.
This particular recording was done by the University of Illinois Musical Ensemble with John Garvey conducting. The lead character is a witch and the rest of the company makes up the chorus. Partch was a strong advocate of using the instrumentalists as visual performers as well. Therefore, the whole cast and orchestra are placed on stage, and the instrumentalists have just as much effect on the drama, visually, as do the vocalists.
Partch’s works with the idea of corporeality throughout The Bewitched. He wanted music to be a total expression of bodily actions. He was after a fusion of dance, song, and speech. He explored the idea of ancient Greek monophony in correlation with music that closely imitated speech patterns and contours. In order to achieve this resemblance, Partch devised a microtonal scale based on specific ratios, an idea reminiscent of Pythagoras and his monochord proportions. The result was the creation of a perfectly-tuned forty-three note scale based on the 11th partial of the overtone series.
The piece blends many aspects of Greek, African, Chinese theater and opera together. Partch’s demonstrates his understanding of the Chinese art music tradition throughout many of his melodic lines in his orchestra, particularly in the strings. These lines utilize many glissandos and tend to avoid Western ideas like exact repetition and motific development, and to follow the continuous melody traditions of Chinese music. However, not all of Partch’s musical ideas are come from outside the Western tradition. There is what seems to be a direct quote from an American children’s song played by the clarinet in the seventh scene.
Partch uses an interesting combination of instruments for his orchestra. It features many of Partch’s unique instruments including the Chromelodeon, the Harmonic Canon, the Spoils of War, and the Marimba Eroica, as well as a few traditional instruments like flute, clarinet, viola, and the Japanese koto. Partch’s own creations were constructed for the sole purpose of playing within his microtonal language. The Chromelodeon, for example, contains all the pitches in Partch’s notorious forty-three note scale. But his choice in more standardized instruments is even more interesting. The viola and the koto, both stringed instruments, can easily adjust to play microtonal intervals. The flute and clarinet cannot quite achieve the theorically infinite number of pitches as their stringed counterparts, yet in the woodwind family, these two instruments have the best, and easiest, ability to manipulate pitches. By using these four instruments, in addition to his own creations, Partch allowed himself to create sustained pitches and add contour to longer notes that could not be achieved by his own percussive instruments without forgoing his microtonal language.
The vocal parts are settings of nonsense syllables, but how Partch treated his setting of them gives the implication of an actual text. The lines are set in his monophony-style of writing which gives the impression of spoken dialogue. Using nonsense syllables, allowed Partch’s audiences to focus on the fusion and interaction of bodily actions (like dance, mime and song) without the pressure of following a specific textual plot. The musicians and performers were also free to be, as Partch put it, “constituents of the moment.”
Partch’s views and uses of microtonality have paved the way for younger generations of composers including Ben Johnston and La Monte Young. He pioneered the creation of sounds and instruments outside of the ones in the standardized Western orchestra. His music, although not as well known as it should be, has changed much of the contemporary music scene of twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. Bewitched is an excellent example of all of Partch’s ideas unifying within the context of a solitary piece, and for that reason alone it should be in the Canon. Here is one of the first examples of acoustic music pushing successfully against the blockade of the established twelve-tone system. Partch’s work deserves much more play within the repertoire, but he hindered that possibility greatly for himself. His instruments are uniquely his and are not mass-produced, so his music might never make the impact upon the musical society that it definitely could have done.
Thursday, May 1, 2008
Listening Journal No. 4a
Ran’s Excursions
Shulamit Ran (b. 1949) is an Israeli-American composer, who currently holds the position of Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and studied composition at the Mannes College of Music in New York, where she taught by noted composers Nadia Reisenberg and Norman Dello Joio.
Ran’s Excursions is a three movement work scored for piano trio (piano, violin and violoncello). The movements lack formal titles and are, rather, characterized with descriptions of their desired temperament. The movements are to be played “Broad and Extremely Passionate,” “Very Lyrical, Gentle,” and “With Breadth and Passion.”
The first oddity of the piece is its lop-sidedness. The first two movements, combined, are about two minutes shy in duration than the whole of the third movement. But this lop-sidedness is not uncommon (especially in twentieth-century music). In Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the first and fifth movements are each about twice the length of the other three movements. Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, and others throughout the history of Western art music have a similar disproportion in the lengths of their movements. There could be an explanation of the duration of the third movement. There is an extensive violin cadenza (starting around 6’15” and lasting until 8’15”).
Ran uses a distinct, descending line that rhythmically accelerates forward in the violoncello as the opening material for both the first and the third movements. The line has a mathematical approach to its construction, taking on the shape of a parabolic curve expressed through music. But Ran’s approach to this melodic figure is different at each occurrence. At the opening of the first movement, the violoncello plays this line unaccompanied (with the exception of a few isolated chords in the piano). This idea then returns towards the end of the first movement, but contained in the piano with a soft sustained accompaniment in the strings. The opening third movement is similar to the first in that the violoncello once again plays the original melodic material. This time though, the piano is given a much more prominent role and the violin picks up on the material much sooner than it did in the first movement. The final obvious occurrence of this motive appears in the violoncello towards the end of the third movement, right after the violin cadenza. The violin and piano have such an imperative part during this repetition that the violoncello is unable to complete the motive before being over-powered by the other two instruments. Each time this motive is played, it remains in its original form, without transposition.
Much of Ran’s material for the outer movements comes from the opening motive. This is most clearly displayed in the opening few seconds of the third movement. Once the violoncello has landed on the lowest pitch of the line, the violin plays a similar passage in inversion. This inverted line is also presented in diminution. Ran’s facility to integrate her initial idea into so many facets of the work not only shows her understanding of her motives and motivic development, it allows for a greater continuity within the piece. These connections might not be initially made by the listener, but on some subconscious level an association is made that affirms that the piece is an unified whole.
While there are all of these repeated ideas within the piece, Ran’s abilities and creativity keep the recurrences sounding fresh and exciting. One additional reason for this freshness is attributed to her orchestration. The piece has extended solo, duet and full trio passages that utilize all seven possible combinations of the instruments. For example, the extended violin cadenza in the third movement and the prominence of the piano in the second movement are examples of her solo writing. Her orchestrational techniques are shown in the hand-offs of material from one instrument to another. They are seamless and allow for slight color shadings that give each new occurrence of Ran’s motifs a new and fresh quality.
Excursions is an great example of unifying a multi-movement piece for a standard ensemble. The piano trio repertoire is vast and much of this music is firmly set within the Canon. This ensemble and others, like the string quartet and the violin-piano duo, are often difficult groups for modern composers to write for and still make a memorable impression upon the listener, due to the substantial number of works already in existence. But Ran took on this difficulty and effectively succeeded. Despite all of the positives about this work, its hard to determine its place within (or outside of ) the Canon. This is due, primarily, to the fact that this piece is still new, and enough time has not passed since its conception and the present-day. Works in the Canon need to have a chance to age, and be assimilated into the musical world. Although an exceptional piece, in many regards, Ran’s Excursions is just too new, and is written for a musically-saturated ensemble. More time must pass before a truly accurate assessment of its Canonic place can be determined.
Shulamit Ran (b. 1949) is an Israeli-American composer, who currently holds the position of Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor of Music at the University of Chicago. She won the Pulitzer Prize in 1991 and studied composition at the Mannes College of Music in New York, where she taught by noted composers Nadia Reisenberg and Norman Dello Joio.
Ran’s Excursions is a three movement work scored for piano trio (piano, violin and violoncello). The movements lack formal titles and are, rather, characterized with descriptions of their desired temperament. The movements are to be played “Broad and Extremely Passionate,” “Very Lyrical, Gentle,” and “With Breadth and Passion.”
The first oddity of the piece is its lop-sidedness. The first two movements, combined, are about two minutes shy in duration than the whole of the third movement. But this lop-sidedness is not uncommon (especially in twentieth-century music). In Mahler’s Symphony No. 2, the first and fifth movements are each about twice the length of the other three movements. Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, Corigliano’s Symphony No. 1, and others throughout the history of Western art music have a similar disproportion in the lengths of their movements. There could be an explanation of the duration of the third movement. There is an extensive violin cadenza (starting around 6’15” and lasting until 8’15”).
Ran uses a distinct, descending line that rhythmically accelerates forward in the violoncello as the opening material for both the first and the third movements. The line has a mathematical approach to its construction, taking on the shape of a parabolic curve expressed through music. But Ran’s approach to this melodic figure is different at each occurrence. At the opening of the first movement, the violoncello plays this line unaccompanied (with the exception of a few isolated chords in the piano). This idea then returns towards the end of the first movement, but contained in the piano with a soft sustained accompaniment in the strings. The opening third movement is similar to the first in that the violoncello once again plays the original melodic material. This time though, the piano is given a much more prominent role and the violin picks up on the material much sooner than it did in the first movement. The final obvious occurrence of this motive appears in the violoncello towards the end of the third movement, right after the violin cadenza. The violin and piano have such an imperative part during this repetition that the violoncello is unable to complete the motive before being over-powered by the other two instruments. Each time this motive is played, it remains in its original form, without transposition.
Much of Ran’s material for the outer movements comes from the opening motive. This is most clearly displayed in the opening few seconds of the third movement. Once the violoncello has landed on the lowest pitch of the line, the violin plays a similar passage in inversion. This inverted line is also presented in diminution. Ran’s facility to integrate her initial idea into so many facets of the work not only shows her understanding of her motives and motivic development, it allows for a greater continuity within the piece. These connections might not be initially made by the listener, but on some subconscious level an association is made that affirms that the piece is an unified whole.
While there are all of these repeated ideas within the piece, Ran’s abilities and creativity keep the recurrences sounding fresh and exciting. One additional reason for this freshness is attributed to her orchestration. The piece has extended solo, duet and full trio passages that utilize all seven possible combinations of the instruments. For example, the extended violin cadenza in the third movement and the prominence of the piano in the second movement are examples of her solo writing. Her orchestrational techniques are shown in the hand-offs of material from one instrument to another. They are seamless and allow for slight color shadings that give each new occurrence of Ran’s motifs a new and fresh quality.
Excursions is an great example of unifying a multi-movement piece for a standard ensemble. The piano trio repertoire is vast and much of this music is firmly set within the Canon. This ensemble and others, like the string quartet and the violin-piano duo, are often difficult groups for modern composers to write for and still make a memorable impression upon the listener, due to the substantial number of works already in existence. But Ran took on this difficulty and effectively succeeded. Despite all of the positives about this work, its hard to determine its place within (or outside of ) the Canon. This is due, primarily, to the fact that this piece is still new, and enough time has not passed since its conception and the present-day. Works in the Canon need to have a chance to age, and be assimilated into the musical world. Although an exceptional piece, in many regards, Ran’s Excursions is just too new, and is written for a musically-saturated ensemble. More time must pass before a truly accurate assessment of its Canonic place can be determined.
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