Tenney’s Rigorous Balance of Chance and Choice

Those who have been following my discussion of the articles by James Tenney collected in From Scratch: Writings in Music Theory should, by this time, appreciate how much rigor can be found in Tenney’s efforts, whether they are directed toward musical composition or toward imaginative reconceptions of practices that have come to be called “music theory.” When it comes to composition, there is a good chance that Tenney was inspired by John Cage, who could also be meticulously rigorous when called upon to explain the method behind the creation of one of his compositions. What is interesting about Cage is that, while many of those methods were based on a foundation of using a chance technique (such as the ritual for selecting passages to read from the I Ching), there could be prolific diversity in how that technique would be applied. The Silence anthology has two short articles about such applications, one published in 1952 and the other in 1957; and from these we may appreciate how the creation of method was as important to Cage as the creation of the music itself.

Cage’s approach would have an impact on other composers. The best known of these is probably Pierre Boulez. In 1958 Die Reihe published an article by György Ligeti that provided a deep dive into the creation of one of Boulez’ particularly challenging compositions. The title of the article was “Pierre Boulez: Entscheidung und Automatik in der Structure Ia” (Pierre Boulez, decision and automatism in “Structure Ia”); and evidence of Cage’s impact on Boulez is not hard to find. (The article appeared in the English-language edition of Die Reihe in 1960.)

As Ligeti’s title makes clear, much of the composition process is “automatic,” although it might be better to call it “algorithmic.” The connotations of the latter adjective allow us to appreciate that one cannot have an algorithm before first identifying input data, output data, and the relations that connect them. These are the issues that Ligeti addresses in the “decision” portion of his article.

Tenney’s article “About Changes: Sixty-Four Studies for Six Harps” is very much cut from the same cloth that served Cage and Boulez. However, where Boulez was concerned with serial techniques that could be applied to the twelve pitches of the equal-tempered chromatic scale, Tenney was more interested in exploring the pitches of the natural overtone series. He decided to do this by dividing the semitone into six equal micro-intervals, providing him with an equal-tempered gamut that would enable better approximations to upper harmonics, which could be represented terms of smaller “chromatic shifts” from the traditional pitch classes. (The reader should now appreciate why Tenney’s piece was scored for six harps; each harp had a different “micro-shift” in the pitch of its strings.)

In terms of method, Tenney was far more rigorous than either Cage or Boulez. His expertise in higher mathematics allowed him to make rigorous specifications of subtle variations. This was most evident in his effort to extrapolate principles of harmony into the domain of his 72-pitch equal-tempered gamut. Nevertheless, I think it would be fair to say that almost every reader of this article will come away with absolutely no sense of what it would be like to listen to the results.

(Back when I was living in Los Angeles, I had the opportunity to listen to a tape that Tenney played of an excerpt from a performance of Changes. I had as much trouble making sense of my listening experience than I had encountered during my “first contact” with “Structure Ia!” I gather that there is now a performing version six guitars, taking the same approach to chromatic tuning; but I missed out on an opportunity to listen to that music played at the Center for New Music.)

It would be easy to dismiss Tenney’s project as “much ado about not very much.” The fact is that it is very difficult to establish the relationship between Tenney-the-composer and Tenney-the-listener. That relationship was always much clearer in Cage’s work: There was none! Cage simply created the “sonorous materials” for a listening experience; and the listener was free to make of those materials whatever (s)he wished.

Tenney, on the other hand, seems to have been motivated by a desire to explore how one could work with pitches based on the overtone series through techniques consistent with pre-existing knowledge of counterpoint and harmony. Those who have followed this site for some time know that he is far from the only composer to be so motivated. The two composers that have probably received the most attention in my writing have been Ben Johnston and, more recently, Harry Partch. Of these three, Partch has struck me as the one that gave the most thought to the sorts of listening experiences that would arise from his techniques. In that context Tenney occupies the space at the other extreme of the pendulum swing, a claim that I shall be happy to withdraw if convinced by sufficient experience in listening to Tenney’s music, rather than reading about his approaches to composition!

Early Pursuits in Just Intonation on Bridge

from the Amazon.com Web page for the album being discussed

In the course of my pursuing opportunities to listen to music composed to be performed by instruments based on just intonation tuning, my interest in the PARTCH ensemble, founded by guitarist John Schneider, has led me to a much earlier release by Bridge Records entitled Just West Coast, which was released at the end of October of 1993. The title is clearly a pun but a useful one, indicating that the compositions performed are all by composers closely associated with the West Coast. Lou Harrison frames the entire album with the opening and closing selections. Between him one encounters La Monte Young, Harry Partch, and John Cage. Cage is the one composer that did not explicitly work with just intonation; but, in his earliest piano compositions, he explored the expressiveness of a limited gamut, using tones that readily lent themselves to integer-based interval ratios, rather than equal-tempered tuning. (Schneider clearly enjoys the pun of the title, since he has more recently performed on the MicroFest albums Just Strings and Just National Guitar.)

On the earlier album “Just Strings” is the name of the performing duo of Schneider and harpist Amy Shulman. All but two of the selections were arranged by performance by Schneider, and those two selections are the two solo performances on the album. Shulman’s selection is Cage’s “In a Landscape,” which is listed in the Edition Peters catalog under both “Piano” and “Harp.” Cage explicitly stated that the piano dampers be raised for the entire performance of about eight minutes, since that performance “depends on the sustaining of resonances.” The vibrations of the harp strings, on the other hand, are naturally sustained unless explicitly damped by the performer; but the resonances that Cage required arise more “naturally” through the integer ratios of just intonation tuning.

Schneider’s solo provided the first recording of the original version of “Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California.” Partch performed the vocal line of this piece (both spoken and sung), accompanying himself on a guitar he adapted with frets that would enable intervals based on just intonation. This piece was subsequently given a variety of different versions, some of which required instruments of Partch’s own invention; but it is important to recognize that it began as something Partch could perform on his own. This makes Just West Coast a valuable resource for those interested in the chronological path leading to Partch’s more elaborate compositions.

Two other selections received their first recording on this album. One of these is the final composition, a collection of six single-movement sonatas that Harrison composed for piano or cembalo, meaning that the strings could be either struck or plucked. Schneider opts for the latter, arranging four of them for guitar and harp and the other two for solo guitar. The single-movement structure recalls the harpsichord sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti, a connection that Harrison himself acknowledges; and, for the most part, he follows the same two-section structure that one encounters in the Scarlatti sonatas.

The other first recording is of Schneider’s just-intonation arrangement of Young’s “Sarabande,” originally written as an exercise for solo piano in 1959. This predated the composer’s interest in just intonation, which would eventually emerge in his marathon The Well-Tuned Piano, which was given its world premiere performance in Rome in 1974. Nevertheless, the score for “Sarabande” lends itself to integer ratios, which were then explicitly realized through Schneider’s arrangement.

The opening selection is the other Harrison composition on the album. The title “Suite No. 2” is a bit deceptive. Harrison used the title “suite” frequently; and one has only to peruse the index of the biography by Bill Alves and Brett Campbell to appreciate that sorting out all of those instances is no easy matter. Indeed, the title would show up again in 2008 on the Mode Records release POR GITARO: Suites for Tuned Guitars, also of performances by Schneider and Just Strings. However, the movements on the Bridge recording seem to resurface on the Mode album in two numbered suites and possibly also the “Suite for National Steel Guitar.” Thus, those who know their Harrison through more recent recordings will probably find themselves on familiar ground on the Bridge album, in which the Just Strings duo is extended to include percussionist Gene Sterling.

Most interesting where sonority is concerned is probably the set of two Partch studies based on his research into Ancient Greek music. The first of these uses the pentatonic scale formed by so-called “5-limit” just intonation. More fascinating, however, is the second study based on a scale formed by the enharmonic tetrachords. No one is quite sure of just what the enharmonic intervals are other than their being smaller than a semitone. Wikipedia cites Ptolemy’s account of Archytas as specifying the very small integer ratios of 28:27 and 36:35, and Partch cites Archytas in the title of his study. The ear will quickly pick up on just how narrow these intervals are.

Far more conducive to attentive listening is Schneider’s arrangement of Cage’s “Dream,” the composer’s earliest cataloged composition for solo piano. Like “In a Landscape,” this was composed to be played with the dampers raised, again in the interest of sustaining natural resonances. Here, again, those resonances are reinforced with a performance based on integer ratios.

Those who have followed this site for a while may recall that, almost exactly two years ago, I wrote an extended “think piece” about the nature of listening to integer ratios. Since that time, my experience with such listening has grown more prodigiously that I would have anticipated. Nevertheless, to paraphrase Roger Sessions, I think I can look back on what I wrote at that time without blushing. Perhaps I would have been better informed had I already been exposed to Just West Coast; but I was working in Singapore at the time of its release, which was not the best place to try to keep up with recordings of adventurous approaches to making music. Apparently, I am still in the process of making up for my own Proustian “temps perdu” (lost time)!

“Partch by PARTCH” Anthology: First Releases

PARTCH performing Plectra and Percussion Dances (courtesy of John Schneider)

About half a month ago, I wrote about the third volume in the Music of Harry Partch series produced by the ensemble called PARTCH (capitals distinguish the name of the group from the name of the composer), founded by John Schneider and released by Bridge Records. I used the first portion of that article to reflect on my own previous experiences in listening to Partch’s compositions, none of which, sadly, involved listening to the music being played in concert on the instruments that Partch had designed. In fairness to the Schneider-Bridge project itself, I felt a need to account for the first two volumes in the series; and, thanks to both Schneider and Bridge, I now feel equipped to do so.

In order of their release, those volumes are Bitter Music (December 6, 2011) and Plectra and Percussion Dances (August 1, 2014). The former amounts to the narration of a diary with occasional musical interjections, while the latter is a reconstruction of a KPFA live broadcast concert performance (with the same name as the title of the album), which took place on November 19, 1953. These will be discussed in reverse order, reflecting a desire to prioritize music over text.

As the title suggests, Plectra and Percussion Dances is a triptych of compositions, all three of which were conceived to be performed in conjunction with dance. “Castor and Pollux” (“and” is represented by a G clef, rather than an ampersand, in Partch’s own hand) is subtitled “A Dance for the Twin Rhythms of Gemini.” “Ring Around the Moon” is subtitled “A Dance Fantasm for Here and Now;” and “Even Wild Horses” is “Dance Music for an Absent Drama.” Partch himself provided an introduction for the KPFA broadcast, which is included as the final track on the CD.

For those of my generation, the most familiar of these is likely to be “Castor and Pollux,” since it was included on the Columbia Records 1969 vinyl album The World of Harry Partch. As the subtitle suggests, the piece is in two movements named, respectively, for the two Gemini twins born of Leda. In his explanatory introduction, Partch observed that the rhythms of the two movements were identical. Furthermore, each movement was in four sections, the first three of which involved different combinations of instruments, all of which would play their parts simultaneously in the fourth section.

This was the piece that occupied most of my attention on the Columbia release, since the structural plan was not difficult to grasp. At that time, however, I had little awareness of the distinctive qualities of the instruments that Partch had created, particularly as they had been tuned with respect to his division of the octave into 43 unequal intervals. Indeed, it would not surprise me if the Columbia mixing engineers tried to smooth over the rough edges of both the sequential contours of individual polyphonic voices and the simultaneities arising from the superposition of those voices. Since the whole structure of “Castor and Pollux” is based on superposition, I would suggest that Columbia did not provide a particularly satisfactory account of this composition, while the PARTCH reconstruction allows the attentive user to appreciate just what Partch was trying to do and how he succeeded in doing it.

The other two selections both involve text as well as music. Most likely Partch himself delivered those texts when these pieces were first performed. On this new recording Partch’s voice is channeled by Paul Berkolds and T.J. Troy; and, sadly, the accompanying booklet gives no account of who is speaking when. “Ring Around the Moon” involves wordplay with a wide diversity of familiar (and frequently amusing) phrases, as well as counting off the first 21 positive integers. The texts for “Even Wild Horses,” on the other hand, are taken from “A Season in Hell,” Louise Varèse’s English translation of Arthur Rimbaud’s extended poem “Une Saison en Enfer.” (In anticipation of the inevitable question, the translator was, indeed, the wife of the composer Edgard Varèse!)

What is particularly interesting about “Even Wild Horses,” however, is that each of the eight movements is based on a rhythmic pattern, most of which are associated with familiar dance forms. In addition, as can be seen from the above photograph from the booklet, the vocal delivery of the Rimbaud text can be accompanied by tenor saxophone. Partch even suggested that the saxophonist should improvise the vocal contours of the French utterances “in a way that is fairly intelligible to cultivated Frenchmen (a dubious value).” (The text goes on with a few sarcastic digs about American and English listeners.)

Taken as a whole, Plectra and Percussion Dances makes for a highly satisfying listening experience. Those encountering Partch’s music for the first time will probably need to adjust to his unique approaches to intonation. However, between the clarity of the performances by PARTCH and the related production efforts supervised by Schneider, the “full package” definitely encourages such adjustment.

Bitter Music is another matter. This amounts to about three and a quarter hours of readings (by Schneider) from Partch’s diary entries. Since these entries are not read in chronological order, the listener should not be obliged to listen to the three CDs in this album in a single sitting. [added 7/2, 11:35 a.m.: Schneider was kind enough to point out to me that, for the most part, the entries are in chronological order. The only exception is the account of Partch’s visit to Europe, which he wrote as a reminiscence on his birthday.] Just as the performance itself (including the musical interjections) involves sampling from the source, the listener is free to sample specific excerpts. [added 7/2, 11:35 a.m.: Thus, while the recording is not a mixture of samples, the tracks are arranged in such a way that the listener can work his/her way through the full account through a sequence of listening experiences.]

Most of the entries involve the nature of hobo life. While the “full package” discloses more diversity in its episodes than one might expect, it is clear that this was a hard life. Partch’s capacity for endurance is to be admired.

At the same time one can appreciate how that capacity may have subsequently served the many ways in which his musical achievements were rejected. In this regard I have to confess that I was particularly drawn to the shift of locale to London that one encounters beginning at the end of the first CD. This was the setting that most appealed to my own theoretical background. Of particular interest was Partch’s account of a meeting with Arnold Dolmetsch, recognized in the twentieth century as a pioneer in the revival of what we now call “early music.” (When I was growing up, my parents had a recorder album of performances by Dolmetsch’s ensemble.)

Partch visited Dolmetsch to share thoughts about approaches to intonation. During the conversation Dolmetsch cited Marin Mersenne’s Harmonie universelle, one of the earliest treatises on music theory as we now tend to know it. (Mersenne was one of the first advocates of equal-tempered tuning.)

When Dolmetsch cited a particular passage, Partch asked which edition he had been reading. Dolmetsch then expostulated as some length about how he had not previously encountered anyone who had heard of Mersenne, let alone someone who knew about differences across the editions of his treatise! Dolmetsch may have been treated with a bit more respect in London than Partch had encountered during the better part of his life; but that respect masked a polite disregard for an individual recognized, for the most part, as an irrelevant novelty. At least Partch managed to live long enough to experience the realization of many of his ideas and their informed performance in public concerts before appreciative audiences.

Bridge Continues its Partch Anthology Project

There are times that I feel as if the phrase “American original” has been invoked so often across such a diversity of sources that it has become trivialized. Composers representative of that epithet on this site easily include Charles Ives, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and, for that matter, Edgard Varèse, who moved from France to the United States in December of 1915 and turned away from his traditional training in Paris almost immediately. Nevertheless, there are several ways in which Harry Partch has his own personal distinctions. One of them involves the nine years he spent as a hobo during the height of the Great Depression. Another led to his approach to just intonation that differed significantly from Harrison’s pursuits and ultimately resulted in an ensemble of invented instruments to accommodate a division of the octave into 43 unequal intervals.

I first became aware of Partch during my student days, when Columbia Records released its 1969 vinyl album The World of Harry Partch, which consisted of three compositions, “Daphne of the Dunes,” “Barstow,” and “Castor & Pollux.” Apparently, the world had to wait until October of 2013 for this material to be released by Sony Masterworks on CD; but that release included sixteen bonus tracks demonstrating the instruments Partch had invented. The performances were conducted by Danlee Mitchell under Partch’s supervision. Partch had known Mitchell since 1955, when the latter had assisted him in presenting a production of his “ballet satire” “The Bewitched” at the University of Illinois. By that time Partch had been distributing recordings of his music through his own Gate 5 Records label for about two years.

Since Partch’s death in September of 1974, there have been a variety of efforts to distribute his work through both audio and video media. The earliest of these is probably the Enclosure series edited by Philip Blackburn, which began in the late Nineties. This included CDs on the Innova label, videotapes of performances and films for which Partch had provided soundtrack scores, and a 524-page hardbound book, which may well have reproduced just about every physical document associated with Partch’s work as a musician. The video content would subsequently be reissued in DVD format.

Beginning in 2004, New World Records began to release remastered reissues of Partch recordings, many of which involved performances by his Gate 4 Ensemble. Then, at the end of 2013, Bridge Records released the first volume in its Music of Harry Partch series. These are newly-produced recordings by the ensemble that calls itself PARTCH (the capitals being part of the name), founded by John Schneider. Schneider himself is a member of this group, playing a wide variety of the instruments that Partch had invented; and he is also producer of the album series.

Cover of the album to be discussed in the remainder of this article (courtesy of Naxos of America)

A little over a week ago, Bridge released the third volume in its series. As might be expected, there is considerable overlap when it comes to the pieces being performed. Nevertheless, this series is the latest to involve a contemporary ensemble committed to providing faithful accounts of Partch’s music without the benefit of direct contact with the composer.

In spite of the wealth of archival material, there are three selections being recorded for the first time. One of these, “Sonata Dementia,” provides the title for the album. Another, “Windsong,” is the original version of what would eventually become “Daphne of the Dunes.” That original version was written for a film made by Madeline Tourtelot; and “Daphne” would later emerge as an expansion of the score for a dance-drama. Finally, there is the first release of a “bonus track” of Partch himself playing what has become one of his best-known compositions, “Barstow,” as a solo performance at the Eastman School of Music in 1942.

While the historian in me has been drawn to all of that archival material that began to emerge after Partch’s death, I definitely laud the commitment of a present-day ensemble to keep the composer’s music alive through both concert performances and recordings. I first encountered PARTCH on the Color Theory album released by the PRISM Quartet in the spring of 2017. However, the Sonata Dementia album provided my first opportunity to listen to the group perform compositions by its namesake. I have been impressed by the freshness of the groups immediacy, which interleaves with Partch’s “original spirit” without making too much of a show of itself. Perhaps it is time for me to look into the two preceding volumes!

Influence (or not) Without (or with) Anxiety

If I was at a disadvantage for hearing Sofia Gubaidulina's "The Light of the End" only once (that one time being last night at Davies Symphony Hall), that disadvantage was somewhat compensated by my hearing her "Repentance" as the first work on the program of this afternoon's Chamber Music Series concert at Davies. This work was first performed in 2007 and is very much a continuation of what I called her "exploration of the dialectic between the traditional sonorities of equal-tempered tuning and those of musical instruments' natural harmonics." In this case, however, rather than working with the rich palette of a large orchestra, she focused on a much smaller ensemble, which still had rich timbrous possibilities. The work was originally scored for a solo cello (dedicated to the cellist Ivan Monighetti) accompanied by a guitar quartet. The program notes quoted Gubaidulina's description of the work in her own words as:

… a constant striving to perceive the mystery of consonant sounds in the chords of harmonics played by the guitars [which] turns out, each time [through a series of variations], to be unattainable. And we return, against and again, to dark coloration. Only at the end—in the fifth variation, that is—the confessional expression of the cello's cantilena results in the genuinely radiant sound of harmonics in the soprano guitar. It is as if the force of this expression had rescued a spirit striving for the light from the dark of Plato's cave.

For this performance Gubaidulina rescored the work so that the cello was accompanied by three guitars and a double bass. It is hard to speculate how these sounds would have compared with those of the original scoring; but, from the way in which she received the performers at the conclusion of the work, it seemed apparent that she was more than satisfied with the sound. (Indeed, she seemed more interested in letting the performers know about her satisfaction than in turning around to acknowledge the enthusiastic audience response.)

In many ways the tension of that underlying dialectical opposition is more evident in the more transparent texture of this chamber setting than it was in the rich orchestral textures of "The Light of the End." Also, chamber music tends to give off an air of more personal commitment, since every individual voice is far more exposed; and with that commitment came an abundance of one-to-one and one-to-many communicative actions. This was particularly apparent in the relationship between lead guitarist David Tanenbaum and the other two guitars (Thomas Viloteau and Elliot Simpson) and the bass (Scott Pingel). They were all there to engage both with and against cellist Peter Wyrick's solo lines; and the resulting web of communication was one of the most fascinating I have experienced in any chamber music performance.

The score itself also inspired a rich repertoire of memories on my part, leading me to wonder which, if any, of them may have been part of Gubaidulina's own influences. Most interesting was the extent to which those chord progressions played by the guitars constituted a reflection (somewhere along the spectrum between solemn and playful) on the chorales of the "Fratres" compositions by Arvo Pärt. The writing for bass, on the other hand, led me to wonder whether or not, during her years of music education in Russia, Gubaidulina might have secreted away a stash of Charles Mingus recordings. More unlikely, but still worth speculating, is that the ensemble guitar work at its wildest displayed the same sort of abandon that I have heard only in the rhythmic energies of Harry Partch (and, as was the case with Partch's music, seeing the guitars negotiate those passages was just as satisfying as listening to them). Thus, I now seem to be creating a place for Gubaidulina in my own "memory palace" of personal listening experiences; and I hope that it will not be long before I return to that chamber of the palace.

If Gubaidulina saw pain in that dialectical opposition behind her current compositional efforts, there was another kind of pain in Bedřich Smetana's first string quartet in E minor, composed in 1876 with the descriptive title "Z mého života" (From My Life). Smetana had gone deaf in 1874; and this quartet is very much a document of both the folk music that influenced him and his own characteristic interpretations of those influences, which, in the final movement, is abruptly interrupted by a high E in the first violin. According to Smetana, that was the precise frequency of the tinnitus that preceded the onset of his deafness. When one hears this work for the first time, as I did last May at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, even if one has read a description of this work's "program," one does not know what to expect. Once one has heard it, however, the anticipation of that E haunts all the wistful nostalgia of the first three movements like a ghost. When it comes, it attacks the spirit of the listener in a manner that I, for one, find far more devastating than, for example, the hammer blows of Gustav Mahler's sixth symphony that symbolize his own personal catastrophes. There is thus a need to pace the performance of the tragic blow that will fall in the final movement; and this particular quartet of San Francisco Symphony members (violins Sarn Oliver and Mariko Smiley, viola Yun Jie Liu, and cello Margaret Tait) knew exactly what that pace should be.

After the intermission another quartet (violins Nadya Tichman and Suzanne Leon, viola Adam Smyla, and cello Michael Grebanier) performed the sixth of Ludwig van Beethoven's Opus 18 string quartets (in B-flat major). This work also has a title, "La Malinconia" (Melancholy), which refers to the Adagio that begins the final movement at later interrupts the Allegretto quasi allegro section. Thayer offers no clues as to whether or not this melancholy was grounded in a personal experience, but the spirit of this work provided an excellent complement to Gubaidulina's sense of pain in the dialectic she chose to explore and Smetana's decision to document the pain of his own personal tragedy. I should also point out that the rendering of this particular melancholy by this particular quartet was quite effective, especially coming right on the heels of the slightly off-kilter rhythms of the third Scherzo movement, which almost serves as an omen that the affability of the first two movements is about to be dispersed. Yet, if each work on the program was under the same sort of dark clouds that have been bringing rain to San Francisco for all of this day, the performances of all three of the works provided the brilliance of the sun we were not able to see. Once again, this has proved to be an exciting city for the chamber music it offers.

Learning about Harry Partch

I first learned about Harry Partch from a record that Columbia released back in my student days. I could not find a CD listing for this on either Amazon.com or Downtown Music Group, which is a source I use frequently for music I am unlikely to find anywhere else. This is just as well. The Columbia "package" was a very attractive vinyl album with lots of nice color photographs, readable notes, and three recorded selections that I would still judge to be representative of Partch's work. However, there was a polished quality to the recordings that one expected from Columbia Records; and it took me several decades to appreciate the extent to which this approach was at odds with what Partch was trying to do. Most important is that it gave the impression that this was an "abstract music" that deserved nothing less nor more than an attentive reading of its score, the sort of attentive reading one might expect, for example, from a first-rate collegium musicum.

Today I find this approach misguided on a variety of counts. Most important is that the performance is more important than the score; and, having heard multiple performances of some of Partch's music, I have a greater appreciation for the improvisatory flexibility that one can bring to the act of performing. Furthermore, much of that flexibility has to do with the instruments on which the performance takes place, many of which take up more space than the performer and some of which may even require two performers (which one could not appreciate from the way the photographs for the Columbia album were taken). Thus, performance must, of necessity, be thought through as a physical act at a much higher level than just reading notes from a score page. This brings up a third point, which is that much of the Partch canon is made up of works for film, dance, and/or theater. The music is but one element of a Gesamtkunstwerk vision, not in any Wagnerian sense of the word but still in the literal sense. Finally, there is an overall coarseness to both the music and the way it is performed, which is definitely not Wagnerian and probably has its origins in Partch's life experience as a hobo riding the rails between California and Chicago.

Fortunately, there are now better resources for learning about Harry Partch; and one of the best of them is a DVD, which I recently purchased from Downtown Music Group, entitled Enclosure 8: Harry Partch. The "Enclosures" are a collection of archival materials of text, audio, and video; and much of the material on this disc had been previously released on two VHS "Enclosures" (the first and fourth). Thus, all of the old video material is now on DVD, along with two new items, both of which are of performances that postdate Partch's death in 1974: a 1981 concert performance of "Barstow" and a 2006 choreographed performance of "Castor and Pollux" (both compositions included on the old Columbia recording).

The best part of Enclosure 8, though, is the material that had previously constituted Enclosure 1, four films by Madeline Tourtelot, the first of which, "Music Studio," is about Partch and the many instruments he invented for the performance of his music. This is, without a doubt, the best way to begin the process of getting to know Partch, his theory of dividing the octave into 43 parts, the sounds of the instruments (and the pitches of his tuning system), and all the physical issues intimately connected with performing on those instruments. Tourtelot's films are also not particularly polished, which may be one reason that I no longer have a taste for the Columbia approach to Partch's music. Nevertheless, they provide an expository account of Partch the composer and the inventor that treats the subject with a sympathetic respect that has become rare in more recent expository film. Much of the music that Partch uses to demonstrate his instruments comes from the soundtrack he composed for another Tourtelot film, "Windsong," which, conveniently enough, is the next selection on the DVD. Thus, in these two juxtaposed films, we learn about Partch in both theory and practice. The music was also turned into a suite independent of the film, which is performed as part of the KEBS-TV documentary, "The Music of Harry Partch;" so the DVD actually provides three perspectives on this one piece of music.

The real fun begins, however, with "U. S. Highball," which, along with "Barstow," is a "hobo" composition. The film alternates between the ensemble performing the composition and footage of the sorts of freight trains and railroad yards around which hobo life and transportation were based. I have now seen this film several times and have no qualms about saying how exhilarating I find each viewing.

It takes some listening to get used to Partch's tuning. He developed his system in search of a better sound for the interval of a major third, which, in its purest form is a 5:4 ratio. The approximation of twelve equal steps to the octave is not a particularly good one; but that system has an excellent perfect fifth, the 3:2 ratio. The problem is that just about every effort to improve the third make the fifth sound worse, and Partch's solution is no exception. Indeed, I had one colleague who could not stand listening to the old Columbia recording, because she could only hear it as "out of tune;" but, of course, the whole reason that Partch built his instruments the way he did was to be able to play those "out of tune" pitches!

The one problem that this creates is that Partch's music can seldom be played on instruments other than those of his own making. Perhaps the most notable exception is that Ben Johnston (who has also been interested in composing with pitches other than those of the octave divided into twelve equal parts) composed an arrangement of "Barstow" for string quartet, which was recorded by the Kronos Quartet. This is nice as far as it goes, but fidelity to Partch's pitches is still a far cry from fidelity to his sounds. The 1981 performance on the DVD is far more satisfying for the quality of those sounds.

Given the difficulties in arranging a performance of Partch's work, it is unlikely that he will ever have a large following. This makes the DVD all the more valuable, since most of us will have to make do with the "vicarious" experiences it offers. Nevertheless, I was personally glad to see that there is still at least one ensemble making an effort to arrange Partch concerts in 2006. They probably are not in a good position to do a lot of touring; but, given the right opportunity and circumstances, I would be all to happy to come to them!