Things Get Silly at Salute to a Maverick
In a magical night, Partch the ensemble performs works by Partch the musician. Things get silly -- and wonderful.
Harry Partch invented and built his own weird (and beautiful) instruments. He developed his own weird (and beautiful) micro-tonal musical scale, adding an extra 31 pitches to the normal 12. He created his own odd aesthetic that joined modern music with ancient Greece and China (with hints of Latin America) and that included his own peculiar notions of dance, theater and ritual.
A musical maverick among West Coast mavericks, Partch died in 1974 in San Diego, thumbing his nose at posterity. He left behind one set of fragile instruments (he once refused a commission from the Smithsonian Institution to build copies) and a handful of acolytes who knew how to play them and understood his ideas. The original instruments, the cloud-chamber bowls and marimbas tall as a percussionist, are now cared for in Montclair, N.J., and cost an arm and a leg to transport.
But posterity has proven impossible to deny. REDCAT was not large enough to hold all those hoping to hear the annual late-spring program by an ensemble called Partch on Friday night. And what made this program particularly heartening was that Partch, the ensemble, which is gradually building its own instruments, now has enough to begin offering some of the composer's major compositions. “Plectra and Percussion Dances" had its first complete performance Friday since its premiere in Berkeley 55 years ago.
The dances are the combination of three different works that Partch felt made a 50-minute whole and that he subtitled “Satyr-Play Music for Dance Theater." He meant the result to be the other side of tragedy, his previous large-scale work having been a setting of Yeat's version of “King Oedipus."
