Goblin Music?

Harry Partch is a composer who has most of his critics completely flummoxed: Does he write goblin music, or is he an advance-guard genius? Now 50, California-born Composer Partch decided some 30 years ago that twelve tones to the octave were just not enough for his purposes. He constructed a mathematically more perfect scale of 43 tones; working mostly under University of Wisconsin and Guggenheim grants and fellowships, he also invented instruments capable of playing his 43-tone music. Partch pieces, such as Barstow--Hitchhiker Inscriptions on a California Highway Railing, left the pundits bewildered.

Last week Composer Partch brought out his latest 43-tone work. An audience of 700 braved a California storm to hear his King Oedipus, based on a William Butler Yeats translation of Sophocles' play. Explained Partch: "The tone of the spoken word and the tone of an instrument are intended to combine in a compact emotional and dramatic expression, each providing its singular ingredient."

In Mills College's Lisser Hall Auditorium, the audience gaped at the Partch instruments onstage. Among them: a "harmonic canon," which looked like a Ouija board with 44 strings and movable bridges, and a "marimba eroica," with keys as large as ironing boards. From a gallows-like frame hung "cloud-chamber bowls"; Partch had salvaged them from the discards of the University of California radiation laboratory. He added an ordinary clarinet and saxophone (Partch has not yet learned how to adapt wind instruments to his scale), and a special cello and bass. An added dash of unconventionality: the student musicians (abetted by some professionals from Oakland) wore black robes and hoods.

When Oedipus got under way, however, most found it surprisingly easy to take. It was mostly what Hollywood calls "Mickey Mouse music," i.e., the tempo coinciding with movement and speech. The Partch orchestra produced cacophonous sounds sometimes reminiscent of a Hollywood sound track for a Chinese street scene, sometimes like a symphony orchestra tuning up, occasionally like a Hawaiian string trio, and once during the argument between the seer and Oedipus, the rat-a-tat-tat of one of the percussions over a loudspeaker sounded like mice in the attic. The best thing about Partch's music was that it seldom got in the way of the actors, who half-spoke, half-sang the lines. After four curtain calls for the actors, Composer Partch, in deep purple shirt and tweed jacket, came onstage to a roar of bravos.

Of three critics, one was a bit bewitched, one bothered and one bewildered. Wrote the San Francisco Chronicle's Alfred Frankenstein: "[Partch's] score--fragmentary, subdued, elusive--vastly enhanced the . . . ominous tension of the tragedy." The Oakland Tribune man found it all "rather horrendous, and Sophocles came out low man on the totem pole." Wrote the San Francisco Call-Bulletin's critic: "There is both solid merit and miscalculation . . . judge it for yourself."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.