Listening Journal No. 4b

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.