There’s something almost monastic about the dedication of the PARTCH Ensemble. While modern music seems to have forgotten Harry Partch, an explorer of microtonality who was born in Oakland in 1901 and died in Encinitas in 1974, these musicians are dedicated to preserving the maverick composer’s idiosyncratic pieces and unique handcrafted instruments.
That impression is only magnified within the black box setting of REDCAT, which has been home to the ensemble since 2004 and again hosted the group on Sunday, June 15.
These musicians don’t live by Partch alone, however. They also perform contemporary works by those willing to learn the composer’s hieroglyphic style of notation and to familiarize themselves with his fantastical instruments. Sunday afternoon’s concert (originally scheduled for Saturday night but postponed due to the downtown Los Angeles curfew) featured a kaleidoscopic range of music, including five settings from Partch’s Summer 1955 and world premieres by Evan Ziporyn and Stephen James Taylor.
It’s a challenge to put into words the sonic effects produced by Partch’s instruments, which are tuned to a system of 43 unequal intervals to the octave. Some are strummed, bowed, and plucked. Others are struck with every kind of mallet imaginable, including a whisk.
Among these instruments are the chromelodeon (a modified double-keyboard pump organ), the harmonic canon (a 44-string instrument with a moving bridge), the gourd tree (12 temple bells bolted to gourd resonators on a tree branch), the kithara (an upright 72-stringed instrument tuned by sliding rods under the strings), the cloud chamber bowls (a set of 12-gallon Pyrex bowls cut from carboys and suspended from a frame), the marimba eroica (a big marimba), the zymo-xyl (an oak-plank xylophone augmented with tuned bottles and hubcaps), and so many more.
The concert opened with two of Partch’s settings inspired by Lewis Carrol’s Alice novels: “The Mock Turtle’s Song” and “O Frabjous Day!” Paced by Musical Director John Schneider’s congenial, offbeat recitation, the compositions clip-clopped along in an irregular rhythm. There was an especially wondrous color and dramatic flair to the latter dragon-slaying tale.
There is nothing nonsensical about Partch’s intensely dramatic 1931 setting of the “Potion Scene” from Romeo and Juliet, presented here in a 1955 version for larger ensemble. From the first moments, vocalist Joanna Wallfisch’s performance was galvanic, a tour de force that ranged from flights of giddy passion to soul-wrenching panic — all leading up to Juliet’s commitment to face death for love.
Ziporyn, a mainstay of the New York new-music scene as clarinetist, composer, and conductor, created Earth Studies for the ensemble. Composed in five movements (“Earth,” “Water,” “Air,” “Fire,” and “Aether”), the work skillfully blends the tonal spectrum and rhythmic diversity of the Partch instruments with passages that evoke whale song and a forest of harmonic reverberations, ending with rumbling tones from the marimba eroica that root the music deep in terra firma.
Taylor’s six-movement Afrofuturist ode to human perseverance, HEAVE HO, was the concert’s multimedia finale. Threaded with humor, the work is a tapestry of compositional styles, connecting Partchian abstraction to gospel, rap (the voice of Richard Tandy as DJ Prosody), and bottleneck Delta blues.
On a screen behind the musicians, animation was interspersed with images of real people rowing and paddling, all striving to move toward a better future one stroke at a time.
I left REDCAT with that uplifting message in mind, only to be greeted by the sirens of approaching police cars, the roar of helicopters, and the current reality that is L.A.
