Delusion 2.0;

Harry Partch and the Philosopher’s Tone

Page III

In a total art work such as this, all the components make up one whole body; this performance had at least one amputated limb. Directing the musicians, dancers, and actors on stage so they are seen to have mutually supportive interactions is hard enough, but this was a major element jettisoned. Partch was once asked what he thought about “poetry cum jazz.” He felt it needed more “cum.” It did here, too.

There are many fairly long periods where only 6 to 12 instruments are employed, and duets and trios are frequent. The tacit musicians may thus become actors and dancers, moving from instruments to acting areas as the impetus of the drama requires. For example as court attendants in Act II, bodyguards to the justice.

—Harry Partch, Scenario for Cry From Another Darkness (aka Delusion of the Fury), December 30, 1964 (Instructions ignored in this production.)

On a positive note, the instruments themselves, their staging, shapes, and materials, were as warm and fragile as ever; giving off a wooden glow, like walking down the corridors of the Queen Mary bathed in rich living wood from around the world. Jeff Nash lit the stage unobtrusively and effectively, balancing visibility of the instruments and the performers nicely.

The Moving Chorus (six dancers moving silently as a group) operates in dangerous territory and can verge off into the forbidden zone of abstract modern dance (Partch’s bugbear) at any moment. This group, though, was a model of its kind. With form-hugging tights the young men and women were sensuous, sexy, and engaged; a kind of erotic shadow play that added to the drama and flaunted their lack of Anglo Saxon body shame, which would have been much, no doubt, to Partch’s delight.

John Jeserun’s video of nature shots (web, moon, bamboo, smoke…) was cleverly projected onto the ceiling of the auditorium. This had the effect of extending the lighting across the proscenium arch and into the audience’s airspace. At times, it acted like a multi-media chorus, extending the metaphor of the stage action. The Exordium, for instance, the spinning of a web, featured a web pattern on the ceiling. Or when the hobo lights a small fire to cook his meal, the smoke through the trees is projected overhead. An elegant and appropriate touch that extended Partch’s own passion for multi-media.

The main protagonists, like the rest of the cast, were young and multi-racial. In itself, such casting is laudable; Partch was in fact a pioneer of racially blind casting (Odetta nearly played Jocasta in the 1952 Oedipus, for example). In this case, it clouded the already confusing relationships between the slayer, the ghost of the slain, and his son.

Without benefit of dialog, if you hadn’t read the program notes, you might think the story of Act I—instead of enacting the pilgrimage to Atsumori’s grave, the appearance of his ghost, the re-enactment of his death, and an act of forgiveness—was simply a white guy wandering around, picking a fight with a black guy who is joined by an Asian tomboy all around the same age, and then they stop. It is critical that the audience knows what is going on in terms of plot for the whole gestalt to work, and at least this was abundantly clear in the 1969 production.

SYNOPSIS

It is an olden time, but neither a precise time nor a precise place. The Exordium is an overture, an invocation, the beginning of a ritualistic web. Act 1, on the recurrent theme of Noh plays, is a music-theater portrayal of release from the wheel of life and death. In simplest terms it is a final enlightenment, a reconciliation with total departure from the area of mortal cravings and passions. It is based on the legend of a princely warrior who falls in battle at the hands of a young rival. The act begins with the slayer’s remorseful pilgrimage to the scene, and to the shrine. The murdered man appears as a ghost, sees first the assassin, then his young son, born after his father’s death, looking for a vision of his father’s face. Spurred to resentment by his son’s presence, he lives again through the ordeal of death, but at the end—with the supplication “Pray for me!”—he finds reconciliation.

There is nowhere, from the beginning of the Exordium to the end of Act II, a complete cessation of music. The Sanctus ties Acts I and II together; it is the Epilogue to the one, the Prologue to the other. Act II, based on an Ethiopian folk tale, involves a reconciliation with life, not as a separate mental act from that with death, but as a necessary concomitant, an accommodation toward a healthy—or at least a possible—existence. Its essence is a tongue-in-cheek understanding, attained through irony, even through farce. A young vagabond is cooking a meal over a fire in rocks when an old woman who tends a goat herd, approaches, searching for a lost kid. Later, she finds the kid, but—due to a misunderstanding caused by the hobo’s deafness—a dispute ensues. Villagers gather and, during a violent dance, force the quarreling couple to appear before the justice of the peace, who is both deaf and near-sighted.

Following the justice’s sentence, the Chorus sings in unison, “Oh, how did we ever get by without justice?” and a voice offstage reverts to the supplication at the end of Act I.

The standout performer of Act I was Mina Nishimura, who played the Son in search of his father’s face. Her shoulders moved as though by a hidden force, and she acted as if in a trance possession.

The Japanese theme was stressed as a premise for presenting Delusion at the Japan Society. Curiously, this production strayed farther from Noh and Kabuki conventions than had the UCLA one, which featured more traditional stylized motions and heavy face make-up. Partch was interested in American equivalents to world traditions (The Bewitched, for example, portrays everyday urban scenes that he thought of as American Kabuki). This Japan Society production fell somewhere in the middle of the spectrum between being exclusively Japanese or American. A clear decision one way or the other may have helped clarify the narrative and relationships of the first half. Because of the confusing characterization, the denouement was not as tragic as it needed to be. We are meant to be floored by the spiritual and emotional conflict of these family archetypes, so the resolution will be a cathartic relief and we can move on, having earned the right to the more naturalistic relief of Act II. In short, there was neither delusion nor fury.

The other problem with the casting was the mismatch between the lead actors’ youthful vocal ranges; while they negotiated the unconventional melodic lines with ease, none of them had the necessary power in their low registers to convey any gravitas. This weakness corresponded to the already lightweight choral singing from the musicians (the 1969 choral singing from the instrumentalists was comparatively butch). Partch spent a lifetime setting music to underpin words, retaining and enhancing their natural inflections and intelligibility. When he went beyond words, though, he did so for a purpose; using vocables to convey specific meanings, like some pre-verbal ancient message. He had transcribed Native American music from cylinder recordings in the 1930s and had been told that “the syllables meant something once but no-one knows exactly what any more.” Similarly, in the 1950s he was inspired by hearing the voice of Helen Keller, which was expressive even when the literal meaning was incomprehensible. Partch’s “nonsense syllables” then must be uttered as if they really meant something.

Seeing syllables written in the score next to a fixed pitch presents the singer with the challenge of how to bring them to life convincingly (without resorting to wobbly opera cliches). At best, there is an animalistic sliding, gutteral cry, as much personality as technique: a fantasy mixture of Tom Waits, Chaliapin, Odetta, Paul Robeson, Meredith Monk, Diamanda Galas, and Mei Lan Fang. Vocal maturity is one area where the UCLA recording is superior; the voices are rich and focused (though they cheated in that performance by having trained singers in the pit and the actors miming their words; they too, as it turned out, couldn’t find actors who could sing and act equally well.).

Partch lived at a time when cross-disciplinary performers were exotic and rare. The few models for such integrated abilities were typically from Asia or Africa, and few of those performers made it to U.S. shores. Partch’s experience was largely the result of attending San Francisco’s Mandarin Theater in the 1920s. We have now had many years’ more exposure to examples of hybrid arts from overseas and locally; performing academies teach multiple skills; Broadway shows, Stomp, and Cirque de Soleil all require such abilities. So why is it so hard to find such talent for Partch works? Is it just the cost and infrequent nature of the productions? Will we ever see Partch’s work routinely performed as intended or will it always be an uphill battle to find suitable vision and talent? Is that the price of being so original and demanding in every aspect of his art, that makes the challenge of producing a Partch work successfully, insurmountable? Though they were few and far between, such productions have taken place, so we wait for such a combination of talent and circumstances to manifest itself again.

Charting an appropriate course for the movement vocabulary is tricky in Partch’s works; choreographers are typically afraid to be as literal and potentially hokey as he demands; they usually fall back on abstract modern dance clichés. Partch, after all, had been an accompanist for silent movies as a teenager and was very familiar with the exaggerated gestural, miming style used in that medium to tell a story. If this production had gone further in that direction it might have clarified the motivations and relationships of Act I more convincingly.

The Sanctus, the compelling instrumental entr’acte, brought out the most spirited music-making of the evening. Even the shattering of one of the Pyrex carboys that make up the Spoils of War—a result of enthusiastic beating or Partch’s closing-night message from beyond the grave—failed to dampen the energy (and also, thankfully, to cut any of the dancers’ feet).

Because of less abstract production concepts, Act II was largely more successful in dramatic terms than the first; its humor is the counterpoint to Act I’s tragedy and shows Partch’s potential for biting satire. This was also where the vocal ejaculations of the chorus, the mimetic action to music, and the main characters played off each other most successfully.

A young vagabond is seen cooking a meal outside (he was the slayer in Act I). In appearance, he looked like a scruffy Gen X-er who just lost his job as coffee barista and is temporarily homeless. This seems an entirely fitting update of the hobo archetype: Partch, too, had been a homeless wanderer in the 1930s. An old goat woman appears looking for her lost kid. She seemed about the same age but with an extravagant club-kid hairdo, and she seemed to be hitting on the young man more than seeking her lost goat, but hey, the kid is a Lambchop hand puppet and plenty cute. The woman keeps bugging the young guy, who announces to the world (notably absent in the first recording), “I just want to be a hobo. Why doesn’t she just go away?”

Partch doesn’t miss a dig at the Establishment: the quarrel ends up in court where a deaf-blind judge assumes they are a hetero couple and the goat is their charming child. “Oh, how did we ever get by without justice?” Indeed. The fury of Act I has morphed into sarcasm by Act II. This is followed by a Zeussian thunderclap and the Chorus echoes the end of the first Act’s “Pray for me” chant. This time it is a general plea—an enlightened Coda moment—to be released from the worlds of regret, death, misunderstandings, dogooders, idiots, and bureaucrats. Amen to that.

What was gained by seeing Delusion as a theatrical production after surviving so long as a sound recording? Some people were just as happy to close their eyes and listen to the music. Perhaps if the production had worked as planned, they couldn’t have taken their eyes away from the action on stage. Apart from the fatal and telling flaws of a few, the production had much to commend it. Partch’s worth as a deeply serious creator of drama was never in doubt. And the Japan Society’s gargantuan effort to demonstrate works that bridge Japanese and American cultures was amply rewarded. Now, if we can only see annual productions of Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury and iron out the remaining production wrinkles, we can truly see what Partch’s universe is all about and why his efforts are still relevant to us all.

NIETZSCHE AND PARTCH

Partch described himself as “a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry.” Nietzsche might be called “a musical philosopher-man seduced into madness.” Despite their cultural differences they share a few traits in common (and not just the symptoms of syphilis that made their behavior seem occasionally erratic). The Apollonian and Dionysian theme recurs in both cases: Partch’s Revelation in the Courthouse Park is a contemporary commentary on the Bacchae of Euripides, with plenty of Dionysian action. Partch’s film Windsong tells of the attempted rape and transformation of Daphne and Apollo. And Delusion’s two-part form exhibits both principles, too. As an unrepressed gay man operating far from conservative mores of his day, Partch—like D.H. Lawrence—railed against prudish attitudes of Puritan body shame and advocated for more liberated instincts (such as those found in ancient Greece) wherever possible.

Both Partch and Nietzsche reviled the herd-mentality (what Partch called “termite psychology”) and created their individual works notwithstanding public incomprehension and ridicule. Each also expressed his ideas in idiosyncratic, passionate language that made academics scratch their heads and all too often dismiss the messages.

Partch’s parents had been missionaries in China prior to the Boxer Rebellion. His father returned apostate, mother a believer in every new religious fad of the day. Partch scorned the whole idea of Christianity and satirized its mumbo-jumbo in several works (such as Barstow and Revelation). Delusion of the Fury, as ritual theater, is a sincere sacred space designed to reveal ancient magic and a holistic humanitarian spirituality. Nietszche, too, sought to construct a new, more naturalistic morality.

Both men had a love-hate relationship with Richard Wagner; Partch admired the idea of the multi-disciplinary opera-theatre-Utopia at Bayreuth and the notion of bringing together all the art forms to tell a mythical story. He complained, however, that the kind of voice needed to carry over the sound of the huge orchestra destroyed all intelligibility, therefore all narrative. It was also diametrically opposed to the intimacy of one voice and a small ensemble he felt best conveyed his dramatic impulse, at least in his early works.

One way or another, both were composers, juggling and synthesizing ideas in novel ways. Nietzsche, like Partch (in Bitter Music), wrote monodramas to be spoken over piano accompaniment, and both wrote elaborate statements of faith: Nietzsche his Miserere and Partch his Delusion of the Fury.

© Philip Blackburn and The Nietzsche Circle, 2008

Performance photographs are from a 1969 UCLA production. Photos: Danlee Mitchell

(published in Hyperion: On the Future of Aesthetics, a web publication of The Nietzsche Circle: www.nietzschecircle.com, February 2008)

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