Month: October 2007

WWII Avant, Part 2/5: Harry Partch download (1941)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

The half-spoken, half-notated text that accompanies the percussion instruments in Harry Partch‘s Barstow (1941) may be a bit off-putting to folks whose primary listening more easily serves as background. But speaking of background, all that twangy percussion back there is essential to the history of homemade music. Partch created an extensive collection of instruments in his lifetime, each forged, often out of spare parts, with the intent of matching the sound in his head and in his score.

Barstow was one of three tracks included on the album The World of Harry Partch, which served for many as an introduction to his work. The full album is available for free download at avantgardeproject.org. Barstow is a set of anecdotal text set in a sing-songy format against tuned mallets and otherwise plucked and bowed accompaniment. The words, their cadences moving between hobo banter and classified advertisements, have a found quality that matches the thrift-store instrumentation.

The file is available not as an MP3 but as a FLAC, a so-called “lossless” file, which is to say it is many times the size of an average MP3, in the interest of maintaining fidelity to the original recording. More info on Partch at harrypartch.com and on the FLAC format at flac.sourceforge.net.

Tomorrow: Part 3/5, An evening with John Cage.

WWII Avant, Part 1/5: Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell et al. MP3 (1939)

/ By Marc Weidenbaum

“What did you do during the war, Daddy?” It’s a question that sums up the collective national consciousness of World War II, whether that is a matter of heroism, guilt, victimization or some combination thereof. Ken Burns’s new WWII documentary, The War, is running currently on PBS. It documents the engagement from 1939 through 1945. Seeing the names Wynton Marsalis and Gene Scheer credited with the series’s score brought to mind what music was actually being written while the Axis and Allies battled — that is, what the composers of experimental music were doing during the war.

The soundtrack album to The War includes two contemporaneous classical pieces, one by Aaron Copland (his Clarinet Concerto, written for Benny Goodman a few years after the end of the war) and the other by William Walton (his The Death of Falstaff, written shortly before the end of the war), as well as Arvo Pärt’s Variations for the Healing of Arinushka, which dates from 1977. Pärt was born in 1935, the year the Nurenberg Laws in Germany revoked the citizenship of Jews. Much of his work, with its attenuated structures and off-kilter harmonies, provides a self-evident score to mourning and remorse.

All five Disquiet.com Downstream entries this week will focus on music composed and/or performed during those seven years of global conflict. First up is an installment of Charles Amirkhanian’s Ode to Gravity radio series. The program includes percussion work by Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, John Cage, Johanna Beyer and William Russell, much of it recorded live in 1939 in a concert at the Cornish School in Seattle under Cage’s direction (MP3). Credit any surface noise to provenance: the rare acetate recordings come from Harrison’s own collection. The compositions are almost uniformly searching — note how the percussion is less tribal than meditative, and how the melodic components are kept remote and secondary to the emphasis on pulse and motion. More info at archive.org.

Tomorrow: Part 2/5, A shopworn Harry Partch.