From the Feb 17 – Feb 23, 2005 issue

Music

The Score

by Christopher DeLaurenti

I've been catching up with several recent reissues of out-of-print CDs lately. Michael Torke's One (Ecstatic Records), a re-titled rerelease of 1991's Color Music (Argo), overflows with jubilant, minimalist- influenced orchestral music, as if Aaron Copland had come out of retirement and cribbed from Steve Reich or Philip Glass. A vivacious and masterly orchestrator, Torke endows pieces like "Green" and "Ecstatic Orange" with urgent, muscular string figurations, trenchant percussion, and broad-shouldered brass fanfaronades.

Another master orchestrator, Harry Partch (1901-1974), took the radical step of designing and building his own orchestra of instruments. Some, such as the Kithara, Harmonic Canon, and the Marimba Eroica, were derived from Asian, African, and other ancient instruments. Others craftily subverted more recent instruments (the Adapted Viola) or emerged as utterly original creations (Cloud Chamber Bowls, Spoils of War). Partch's construction of an entire orchestra boldly rejected 300 years of Western music and resoundingly declared that music and musical instruments lurk not only in history but amid the discarded objects of everyday life.

Partch's insistence on documenting his work makes him one of the first 20th-century composers to take a direct hand in recording and distributing his own music. Partch used GATE 5 to market his music through the then nontraditional channels of mail order and performances. Shepherded onto CD in 1997 by the now-defunct new music label CRI, Volumes 1, 2, and 3 (Volume 4 is due out shortly) of The Harry Partch Collection have been remastered and reissued by New World Records.

The music is driving, percussive, poetic, satirical, and charged with a vivid urgency. The Harry Partch Collection Volume 1 includes Partch's first major and perhaps most intimate work, "Eleven Intrusions" (1949-50). Championing "speech-music," Partch asserted that music resides in the act of speaking, and singing must not disfigure the sound and sense of words. In the "Intrusions," we hear the composer at his lo-fi loneliest, intoning: "I am carried by the wind as if I had nowhere to go."

Volume Two includes Partch's masterpiece, "The Wayward," a moving, aural recollection of the speech, sights, and sounds of riding the rails during the Depression. Sections like "San Francisco" convey the mercenary desperation of newsboys hawking The San Francisco Examiner. The final section, "Barstow," sets eight inscriptions carved on a highway railing by hitchhikers: ("Gentlemen / Go to 530 East Lemon Avenue / Monrovia California / For an easy handout").

Although Volume 3 contains Partch's last work, the fine "The Dreamer that Remains," the Tin Pan Alleyish "Water! Water!" dominates the disc, making it the weakest of the bunch. I recommend starting with Volume 1. Great, rebellious, American music by a rebellious, damn 'em all to hell American composer.

chris@delaurenti.net

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