Harry Partch's The Bewitched

If equal temperament, advanced European harmony, and serial music are ‘sliced bread,’ then the musical language of Harry Partch is ‘the greatest thing since.’ The magic of The Bewitched has truly changed my musical paradigm and the way I aurally understand the world. Let me explain the process that led to this life-changing revelation. In my search for a musical work to study, I first chose Libby Larsen’s Marimba Concerto. I love the marimba and the expanded battery of percussion instruments used in the 20th Century. Upon listening to it, I was disgusted with its trite orchestral clichés. It was the same music heard at every Percussive Arts Convention evening concert featuring a big name soloist and university wind ensemble. I needed something fresh. I remembered a colleague mentioning something about Harry Partch and his unique instruments, and thus began listening to Partch’s The Bewitched. From the first notes I was hooked; there was no turning back. This music has feeling. This music is the future. It leaves the limitations of twelve equal tones in the dust like a snake that sheds its skin. I had to know how this music came to be.

The impetus for The Bewitched came in 1952 when an undisclosed man approached Partch and asked him to “write a series of “backgrounds” for television airplane crashes, drowning, and murders in the park…” Partch was intrigued by the idea but perhaps differed in interpretation. These “backgrounds” or scenarios poke fun at the thought of doing such a thing seriously. Partch also gained inspiration from the dozens of musicians that flocked to him in search of something new. He called them “the lost musicians” and dedicated the first eighteen minutes of The Bewitched to them, their pursuit, and their subsequent discoveries. The third muse behind this magical spoof is, of course, the witch. Partch’s witch is not an evil, seventeenth century Puritanical idea of a witch. Rather, Partch goes back further to the “ancient idea of the benevolent, all-knowing witch” (Partch 334). In the album notes Partch explains that we are all under some kind of spell. We are the products of our environments, cultural conditioning, and systematic brainwashing. While it may be impossible to completely untangle ourselves from such a bewitchment, pure experience and liberation can be found by breaking free into the moment.

There is a sense of juxtaposition in Harry Partch’s music that is exemplified in The Bewitched. The tuning was the first things that stood out to my ear when I listened to the work. The implementation of just intonation allows the music to go two different directions. The use of ratios to tune intervals results in harmonies that are more in tune than they would be if tuned in equal temperament. We hear this clear consonance when “Exercises in Harmony and Counterpoint” plead their case “in a Court of Ancient Ritual.” The polyphonic clarinet and adapted viola play distinctly more harmonious lines than similar melodies would be in our standard tuning system. When the koto and crychord enter to prosecute the “counterpoint” they “speak” in what we would consider microtones. These tones are, however, included in Partch’s scales based on ratios. To ears accustomed to twelve evenly spaced tones per octave, these extra tones seem out of tune. They are actually quite in tune. With Partch, harmony becomes relative. Every tone is relative to a single “tonic” of G = 392. Consequently, Partch’s music is at once more harmonious than almost any other 20th century western art music and just as microtonal as any Indian or South Asian music.

One of the biggest aids in listening to The Bewitched is a resource on the American Mavericks website. The website allows visitors to “play” all of Partch’s invented instruments. My favorites include the boo (bamboo marimba), the diamond marimba, the mazda marimba, and the xymo-xyl. In our world of academia and western art music we are taught to create the best sounds possible and that we have to play instruments that use only the best materials and are made with the best craftsmanship. Harry Partch rejected this notion by building many of his own instruments with the materials he had around him such as California redwood and bamboo. The mazda marimba is made with old light bulbs, tuned, arranged in rows and played with rubber mallets. It sounds like nothing I have ever heard, though Partch claimed that is sounded like a coffee percolator. I actually thought the CD was skipping on first listen because I did not initially accept that sound as an instrument. I love playing pitched percussion instruments. The hearing these new inventions with their clever tuning opens up so many possibilities. It opened my ears to sounds in nature previously unclassified as music. Anything can be an instrument and most objects can be tuned. Partch was incredibly clever and industrious with regards to his original instruments.

If The Bewitched is not in the canon, I do not understand why. The music of Harry Partch is perhaps the most groundbreaking and innovative music ever created. I see this as the future of art music. Partch’s concepts should be taught in theory classes and his compositions should be analyzed. His instruments should be well maintained, reproduced, and mainstreamed. There is no reason that this music should die. If anything should pass, it should be the stale European derived forms of the concert hall that composers continue to write to please audiences and musicians that are scared to get out of their suits.

Bibliography
Partch, Harry. Genesis of a Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1979.
Ben Johnston. “Corporealism of Harry Partch.” Perspectives of New Music Vol. 13, No. 2 (Spring-
Summer, 1975): 85-97.
American Public Media. “Harry Partch’s Instruments.” American Mavericks Interactive Website,
http://musicmavericks.publicradio.org/features/feature_partch.html#
(accessed April 13 – 20, 2009)