The Boy Who Went Outside

For the last eight months or so, with the help of a writers' grant from the Theatre Section of the Canada Council, I've been writing the first draft of my latest piece, which will be the next production Wild Excursions undertakes. We're doing our first workshop of this piece in June of this year, and plan to present it some time in 2009, unless the world comes to an end before then.

It's based on the life and struggles of the American musical revolutionary and composer Harry Partch. WHO? Well, I'm so glad you asked:

Harry Partch (1901-1974) was one of the most individualistic artists of the last century; not only a great composer, but also an innovative theorist who broke through the centuries-long stranglehold of one tuning system for all of Western music. In the 1920’s and ‘30’s he formulated a new theory of tuning, based on ancient Greek, non-Western and pre-Classical Western musical forms. If you were to try to put it simply, which you couldn't really do, you'd say that he identified, codified and scored the audible musical material in between the twelve tones and semi-tones of the octave as we know it, and proposed a vastly expanded idea of harmony based on the use of microtones. Because no known instrument in our culture could play his music, he became of necessity an inventor and builder who created numerous remarkable and beautiful instruments. Partch was profoundly dissatisfied with both “abstract” music and its dissociation from other art forms. And so in addition he became a musical dramatist who wrote his own texts and created music-dance-theatre works based on classical stories such as those of Oedipus and the Bacchae. He may have been the first truly serious interdisciplinary artist of the 20th Century, at least in the West.

He was largely self-taught, what we call an "auto-didact." After dropping out of the University of Southern California, he began to study on his own and to question the intonational and philosophical foundations of Western music. During and after the Great Depression, he was a hobo and itinerant worker who hitchhiked and rode freight trains, mostly around the Western states, but also to the mid-West, recording both found and original text, which he later set to music.

By 1930 Partch had broken completely with Western European tradition, objecting to the hegemony of the tuning system we take for granted today—as we have for centuries—called Equal Temperament. It represents a standardized way of understanding pitch and harmony, and yet it distorts the actual acoustic truth of harmonic relationships and progressions. (As one composer said to me: “Equal temperament is a fraud!”) It was largely associated with the technical innovations that led from the first keyboard instruments to the pianoforte to the concert grand piano as we have known it since the 19th Century. As keyboard instruments evolved, it became progressively more difficult to adjust and alter their tuning; for the sake of expediency the need to fix the tuning in the actual structure of the instrument became pre-eminent. Over time the piano, music’s über-instrument, came to embody the tuning system that then determined pitch and harmony for the all the instruments in the orchestra.

Partch forged a new music, one based on a more primal, corporeal integration of the elements of speech with music, using principles of natural acoustic resonance—called just intonation—and expanded melodic and harmonic possibilities. He began first to adapt guitars and violas to play his music, and then began to build entirely original instruments in a new microtonal tuning system. He built over twenty-five of these, and became a brilliant spokesman for his ideas.

Largely ignored by the standard musical institutions during his lifetime, he criticized concert traditions, the conventional roles of performer and composer and audience, the role of music in society as a whole, and the concept of "pure" or abstract music. To explain his philosophical and intonational ideas he wrote a treatise, Genesis of a Music, which has served as a primary source of information and inspiration to many musicians for the last half century.

All this, and yet he's largely unknown, even to music aficionados, perhaps because what he proposed is too threatening to an edifice of ideas and practices that we have come to experience as a set of norms, inviolable and unquestionable. In this regard Partch is a paradigm of the rebel and the outsider, whose story offers truths about how the structures of human society and culture are established and perpetuated, and how rival discourses are ghettoized or even erased. As a teenager Partch used to play the piano in silent-film cinemas, and the working title of this piece refers to a graffito that Partch saw on the wall of a projection room: "Once upon a time/There was a little boy/And he went outside."

Partch was an outsider in every way: he felt alienated from his family, and spent much time alone; he was homosexual in a time when it was very difficult and dangerous to live as one; he was a rebel who fought relentlessly against an established order, and was frequently mocked and dismissed. Meanwhile, he went on, creating new instruments, writing music that few people could accept or understand, and living a marginal and nomadic existence. He constantly moved house—and his growing store of often very large and bulky instruments— across the west and mid-west of the United States on the strength of the occasional project or commission.

I'm both inspired by Partch's story, and feel an identification with it, as someone who feels acutely his outsider status, and who creates work that is situated on the territory between the disciplines. Somehow, the idea for this piece about him swam into view, and I decided to call it The Boy Who Went Outside. I predict it will be a piece of music-theatre, scored for actors, singers and musicians, but it may involve dancers as well! It may indeed be the most inter-disc thing I've ever attempted, and for that reason also the most difficult.

In the script as it now stands the piece takes place in some supernatural ether, after Harry's death. It's a trial presided over by one of the Greek muses, Polly Hymnia, who is responsible for such things as sacred song, oratory, lyric and singing. The point of the trial is to determine Harry's place in the artistic firmament, and therefore in the history of his art form: will he join the ranks of his illustrious composer-ancestors, or be banished to perdition, to the river of forgetfulness the ancient Greeks called the Lethe, which flows somewhere west of Surrey, BC.

An actor plays the role of Harry: funny, witty, sarcastic, acerbic, and sometimes downright nasty. The actor-singers play various roles at various times; they shift characters between them, or share the voice of one character. Partch engages in combative relationships with his parents, his music teachers, with friends and critics. He exhorts his students to do better, play his music more feelingly, with the whole body. (Partch wanted musicians to have the same commitment to performance as actors, and was regularly disgusted with their bodiless presences.) He adores his friends, but pushes them to the limits of their commitment to him. He pleads with his father to speak to him—like many men, Virgil Partch was distant, emotionally unavailable, inscrutable.

I THINK this will eventually be scored for seven performers—of whom four are primarily singers for the purposes of our upcoming workshop—The Boy Who Went Outside deals with the political and dramatic implications of music as an art form, and as a mode of cultural production. (Ahem, harrumph, jargon, jargon!) But it also addresses the way that certain bodies of knowledge become dominant, establish themselves as normal, and suppress other modes of understanding the same things, sometimes erasing the notion that an alternate way of thinking about and engaging with the world is even possible. This occurs as much in the realm of art as it does in political theory, the sciences and theology. I suppose the piece is ultimately about who is granted—or who is able to claim—the right to speak, to express him/herself in the world.

There's lots more to say about this. And look out for the public presentation of the results of our first development workshop, some time this June in Vancouver.