The Christopher Small Reader. Christopher Small G.
to musicianship, and a deeper understanding would certainly ensue if it were developed … The instruments do not maintain themselves, especially under the wear and tear and sometimes violent treatment (which I myself stipulate) of daily playing. And not a small part of the element of good condition is the visual; the instruments must be kept looking well, since they are almost always on stage as part of the set.46
In Partch’s music, writings, and above all in his instruments, we see a vision of a communal musical art, and of a technology made human by the element of commitment, of care. Here the composer—or any other maker—is not merely the producer of a commodity for others to consume but the leader and pacemaker in the common activity. From the music of Partch, western music could learn to take a large step towards rejoining the musical community of the human race.
He was fond of quoting some lines written by a child:
Once upon a time There was a little boy And he went outside.47
This childlike (not to be confused with childish) ability to “go outside” has been a recurring feature of American music, indeed of American culture, since the earliest days, and it remains no less a feature, despite recent disasters and betrayals, of the contemporary scene. This is not to deny that there flows, and has always flowed, a strong counter-current in the direction of Europe and of conformity to European rules, a music of academic formalism as strict as or stricter than anything practiced in Europe. That this is so should not be surprising; America has always been a country of extremes of conformism and non-conformism. Of the latter group no one, not even Cage, has shown such integrity, such humor, such staying power, and such sheer, beautiful musicality as has Partch, such ability to “go outside” (where, as far as the American and European musical establishments are concerned he still largely remains), and, naturally and unselfconsciously, to propose new relationships in society as in music, to work untrammelled by “all the hard, dry, studied rules that ever was prescribed.” If American music contains within it the possibility of becoming a force for the regeneration of western music in its society, a state which, however long heralded on both sides of the Atlantic, and however wished for, is still to come about, the music and the simple, complex, eloquent, and loving personality of Harry Partch will prove an important factor in bringing about such an event.
NOTES
1. Irving Lowens, Music and Musicians in Early America (New York: Norton, 1964), 37.
2. Quoted in Gilbert Chase, America’s Music, 2nd edn. (New York: McGraw Hill, 1966), 23–24.
3. Ibid.
4. Henry David Thoreau, Walden, or Life in the Woods (1854) (Everyman Edition, n.d.), 287.
5. Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder & Boyars, 1973), 132.
6. H. Wiley Hitchcock, Music in the United States: A Historical Introduction 2nd ed. (New York: Prentice-Hall, 1974), 20.
7. Quoted in Gilbert Chase, op. cit., pp. 129–30.
8. Ibid.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. David Wooldridge, From the Steeples and Mountains: A Study of Charles Ives (New York: Knopf, 1974), 6.
12. Charles Keil, Urban Blues (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966), 64.
13. Gunther Schuller, Early Jazz (New York: Oxford University Press, 1968), 56ff.
14. Wilfrid Mellers, Music in a New Found Land: Themes and Developments in the History of American Music (London: Barrie & Rockliff, 1964), 283.
15. Charles E. Ives, op. cit., p. 132.
16. Charles E. Ives, Essays Before a Sonata and Other Writings, ed. Howard Boatwright (London: Calder & Boyars, 1969).
17. John Cage, “Two Statements on Ives,” A Year From Monday (London: Calder and Boyars, 1968), 40.
18. Charles E. Ives, Memos, ed. John Kirkpatrick (London: Calder & Boyars, 973), 100, 135, 44.
19. Ibid., 63–64.
20. Ibid.
21. John Cage, Silence (Wesleyan University Press, 1961) (London: Calder and Boyars), 71.
22. John Cage, op. cit., p. 261.
23. John Cage, “On Earlier Pieces,” John Cage, ed. Richard Kostelanetz, p.127 (London: Allen Lane The Penguin Press, 1971).
24. Virgil Thomson, Twentieth-Century Composers 1: American Composers Since 1910 (London: Weidenfeld & Nicholson, 1970), 76.
25. Cage, John; op. cit., p. 146.
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