The Eldritch Evola & Others

by James O'Meara

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  http://marcjwolf.com/articles/harry-partch-america-s-first-microtonal-composer/

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  Gilmore, p. 252.

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  For the lowdown on Wagner, see Deems Taylor, “The Monster,” another part of the Counter-Currents Wagner Bicentennial Symposium, http://www.counter-currents.com/2013/05/the-monster/.

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  We’ve frequently identified the period of circa 1972-76, admittedly our own Young Manhood, as the peak of White Western Civilization, it being, despite the myths of Liberal “progress”, all downhill culturally, economically, social, since the Boomers took over. And yes, I know that 1901 is no longer “this century” but that’s what Kennedy meant, and I’m sticking to it. As Gary Wills mordantly observed in Nixon Agonistes, Kennedy meant to rudely insult the departing Eisenhower, and wound up lauding the even more elderly Reagan.

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  At the end of his life, Partch had a sign on his door that threatened visitors with “Another Boxer Rebellion.”

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  And, as we anticipated, Partch will also wind up, like Bert Cooper, with “no balls at all,” due to either having had mumps, untreated by his Christian Science mother, resulting in sterility, or a medical condition known as “undescended testicles,” resulting in same.

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  I’ve found at least one other bit of evidence of Partch’s racial realism; in one of his most sustained pieces of satire—comparable to the “routines” developed by his fellow American Crank, William Burroughs, during his own time among the Männerbund of the down and out, or “beat”—Partch mocks the local booster notions that the “pioneer spirit” of San Francisco’s “49er” descendants would produce a “real American music.”

  To demonstrate this neo-pioneer spirit, they build a four million dollar opera house which allows descendants of 49ers to repose their fulsome fundaments in a diamond horseshoe, from which they support “American” music. . . . As a final demonstration of pioneering . . . persons with shattered English and long noses are engaged to conduct 90 piece orchestras. (Bitter Music, pp. 50–51)

  While “looking down one’s nose” is a common metaphor for snobbery, I can’t help but find a trace of anti-Judaism here, not as a knee-jerk obsession but as something sensed, or “smelled out”—in the artificially implanted German-Jewish Kultur system I noted before. I feel confirmed in that suspicion by the way Partch immediately segues into a reminiscence of pounding the streets of New York, confronting “long dark faces” that surely are not those of Sutton Place. One thinks of Lovecraft’s feverish vision of Levantine swarms during his New York stay. While as we’ve seen Partch is otherwise a very different American breed, open to the very “Levantine pipes” that so tormented Lovecraft in his sleep that he turned them into the blind idiot god Azathoth’s piping at the heart of Chaos, both share a loyalty to the possibilities of a real American culture, and a sense of it being submerged by a tide of foreign dreck, whether elite Kultur, immigrant Yiddishkeit, or today’s “vibrant diversity.” As Christopher Pankhurst says in a slightly different context (reviewing Richard King’s How Soon is Now?) “There is a stubborn urge to authenticity within indie music that is entirely in keeping with the mind-set that can lead one to forbidden political places” (http://www.counter-currents.com/ 2013/06/how-soon-is-nowthe-madmen-mavericks-who-made-independent-music-1975-2005/).

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  These comments were made in his seventies, during the making of a biographical film; in a different context, he complained about some aspects of the editing thus: “I am far more interesting with my integrity intact” (Gilmore, p. 380).

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  Gilmore, pp. 30–1.

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  Sort of the same way economics consists of fancy theories with little or no relevance to reality: “I’ve found that economic theory is a useful servant for understanding facts, but many bright people seem to view theory as the master to which their awareness of reality must be enslaved.” Steve Sailer, “How Immigration Can Hurt a Country” in theory, not just in reality,” http://isteve.blogspot.com/ 2013/06/how-immigration-can-hurt-country-in.html

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  Gilmore, pp. 35ff.

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  Partch, Genesis of a Music, p. vii.

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  About this time he began a romance with Latin heartthrob Ramon Novarro, which would end when the latter’s film career took off; see Gilmore, p. 47.

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  Partch, Genesis, p. vii.

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  Gilmore, p. 49 and Genesis, p. vii.

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  Gilmore, p. 260.

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  Gilmore, p. 330.

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  Which also reminds one of the ithyphallic Egyptian statutes, facing each other, arms to the sky, that Evola discusses in The Hermetic Tradition.

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  I would suggest that Partch’s search for a musical system that remains rooted in actual human acoustic experience, not abstract theory, parallels the idea that Evola discusses in “The Idea of Initiatic Knowledge,” in which ordinary experience is transcended not by abstract cogitation—science—nor religious belief, but by a higher form of empirical experience itself. This essay can be found in his collective work Introduction to Magic.

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  “O Freunde, nicht diese Töne! / Sondern laßt uns angenehmere anstimmen, und freudenvollere. . . . Deine Zauber binden wieder / Was die Mode streng geteilt. . . . Ja, wer auch nur eine Seele /Sein nennt auf dem Erdenrund!” Despite his antipathy to the concert tradition, Partch admitted a liking for the emotional intensity of Beethoven. Although Partch’s most obvious classical doppelgänger is Wagner, or perhaps Scriabin, for polemical purposes his Old Guy for the tradition is usually Beethoven, while when intonation in particular is on the table it’s Bach. In both cases, he is at pains to note that he likes the music, sure. An “audibly drunk” Partch recorded in 1966 crows “I’ve never heard anyone play Chopin as well as I do” (Gann, p. 191). But he just doesn’t think that justifies creating a whole totalitarian culture of imitation, privileging “virtuosity” and interpretation (and we know Who the virtuosi and interpreters are) over creativity. As for classical institutions, such as music schools, concert halls, and opera houses, they are anathema, dead and deadening, useful only as figures of mockery.

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  Gilmore, p. 201.

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  See Chapter 14 of The Symbolism of the Cross.

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  “I’ve no business living anywhere east of the Rocky Mountains. . . . No sun in days” (Gilmore, p. 255).

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  Bitter Music, pp. 162–63.

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  In constructing his instruments, Partch always deferred to the integrity or “the daimon” of the instruments; see Gilmore p. 314.

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  Harry Partch “Oedipus” (1954), reprinted in Bitter Music, 219. Cf. Kyle Gann: “He may have written opera, but he was closer to . . . Balinese Monkey Chant, ancient Greek drama, early Florentine opera, the blues—any genre that which uses music to enhance, not dominate, a story (Music Downtown: Writings from The Village Voice, p. 191).

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  “Bach and Temperament” in Bitter Music, p. 163. These are the “mass” effects that Daniélou identified as typical of the attempts of Western composers to supplement the loss of expression in ET. “Eastern listeners often make such remarks as ‘The Beethoven symphonies are very interesting, but why have all those chords been introduced, spoiling the charm of the melodies’”? Needless to say, this was before Nehru, Mao, and others put their people into re-education camps to “modernize” them so as to become Chopin virtuosi, like Red Indians exulting in their glass beads. One thinks of one of Harry Haller’s hallucinations in the Magic Theatre of Steppenwolf: Brahms and Wagner in Hades, condemned to leading hordes of black clad masses over hill and da
le—the notes they wasted. These “mass” effects correspond to mass production, mass media, and other characteristics of the increasingly “quantified” modern world, and make the idea of Wagner’s Ring Cycle as a “critique” of capitalism rather ironic. In the unpublished satire “On G-String Formality” Partch ironically confides “Confidentially, there will never be One World until everyone loves Bach as much as we do” (Gilmore, p. 171).

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  Cf. Alex Kurtagić: “Conservatism is the negation of the new; tradition is the ongoing affirmation of the old, of the archaic. And therefore it’s endlessly regenerating, constantly renewing” (“Masters of the Universe” Revisited—An Interview with Alex Kurtagic, http://alternativeright.com/blog/2013/6/19/masters-of-the-universe-revisited-an-interview-with-alex-kurtagic, June 19, 2013 by George Whale).

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  Partch wryly noted that “The bewilderment of many Orientals is easily equal to the bewilderment of many Caucasians.” Quoted in Mina Yang, California Polyphony: Ethnic Voices, Musical Crossroads (Champaign, Il.: University of Illinois Press, 2008), p. 57.

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  The note of “Faustian Man” here derives perhaps from Partch’s reading of Spengler, although he otherwise had little use for Spengler’s views on music or Eastern culture.

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  Gilmore, p. 356, from Partch’s Genesis of a Music, pp. xii, xi; compare Crowley’s “Every man or woman is a star.” Lest all this talk of “integrity” sound too sanctimonious, it must be noted that Partch had an odd method of coming to decisions by arguing the two positions with himself, often aloud. He was quite open about the method, and recommended it to others. A kind of integrity, I guess. Gilmore (p. 379) quotes a houseguest who overstayed his welcome being awoken one night to sounds of argument in the next room, and realizing first it was about what to do with him, and second, that both voices were Partch’s. I can’t help but be reminded of the composer Adrian Leverkuhn coolly transcribing his hallucinated conversation with the Devil in Mann’s Doktor Faustus.

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  Yang, California Polyphony, p. 56. On the other hand, Partch had cordial and encouraging relations throughout his career with Howard Hanson, a very comfortably Romantic composer who never the less recognized Partch as a fellow independent-minded Aryan-American.

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  From a letter quoted by Gilmore, p. 259.

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  Nor did Partch have any use for Alan Watts, despite being a fellow goateed Northern California Japanophile, with a similar shyness-induced tendency to drink too much. See Gilmore, p. 218 and elsewhere.

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  See Guénon’s Reign of Quantity, chapter 9: “The Two-Fold Significance of Anonymity.”

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  Gilmore, pp. 378–80. Gilmore himself thinks Partch was just “old-fashioned.” Partch was about as “old fashioned” as William Burroughs, another “cultural outlaw” (p. 156) who viewed marriage as “a biological trap” (p. 193). Both were old-fashioned only in their commitment to the values of the Männerbund, although Partch, with his Southwestern background and years of wandering as a hobo, really lived the life that Burroughs only read about—in such books as Jack Black’s turn of the century crime memoir You Can’t Win—or wrote about—such as his Dead Roads Trilogy.

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  Quoted in Wilfred Mellers’ review of Bitter Music in the Times Literary Supplement, with Mellers adding that Partch’s collected writings “Leaves us in no doubt that for Partch life and music were one; personal reflection intermingles with snatches of hobo speech and song, presented in rudimentary notations that demonstrate how ‘words are music,’ in rock-bottom America no less than in ancient Greece, in Gregorian chant, or Provencal troubadour song.”

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  Harlan thinks otherwise: “Indeed, the effect of microtonal melodies and harmonies performed with acoustic instruments and voice is nearly as ‘eerie’ sounding today as it was when Partch received his first concert reviews in 1931” (p. 51) but I think he’s wrong here.

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  Wilfred Mellers, Music in a New Found Land (New York: Knopf, 1964), p. 170.

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  Mellers, p. 171

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  Gilmore, p. 276.

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  “Partch says that watching his instruments being played is part of the experience” (Mellers, p. 173).

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  Gilmore, p. 227.

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  Gilmore, p. 219; Mellers, p. 173, calls them “primitives in their acceptance of magic as real.” During late-night sessions, Partch began to take on a guru-like status, taking on a “willing acceptance of artistic responsibility” and “an involvement with the concerns and aspirations of a younger generation.” In short, creating a musical Männerbund, although Partch’s peripatetic life would prevent any long-term group from being established. One might also find in the magical “Lost Musicians” an echo of the role played by the Master Musicians of Joujouka in the life and work of William Burroughs; the Witch, an “ancient, pre-Christian symbol” (Gilmore, p. 228) corresponds to their Pan festival’s ritual of a young boy dressed as “Bou Jeloud, the Goat God.”

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  Gilmore, p. 227.

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  Ironically, The Bewitched, though the first of his series of increasingly massive productions, born of inspiration at the collaborative work on King Oedipus, would be a complete, almost hysterical disaster, as far as Partch was concerned, though everyone else thought it a triumph. This was the production that inspired Johnston’s portrait, cited above, of Partch as self-destructive.

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  Gilmore, p. 280. Mellers also draws the comparison to American musical theatre. Weirdly, Revelation was written in 1959, one year previous to Bye Bye Birdie. Reviewing the Broadway revival—which, in its 1960 version, also featured in a pivotal episode of Mad Men that season, in which Sal inadvertently outs himself to his wife—the Village Voice slyly commented “Something weird is happening in Middle America: You can see it in Conrad Birdie’s revelation in the courthouse park, howling a hymn to the American Virtue before a stiffly assertive obelisk bollocked by screaming stone eagles”( http://www.villagevoice.com/2004-07-20/film/resurrecting-trad-the-twist-and-a-rude-birdie/full/). Myself, I can see even clearer parallels to the bifurcated shows of Hedwig and Tommy Gnosis in Hedwig and the Angry Inch, especially the themes of castration—Burt, Harry, and Hedwig—life on the road, and of the desire and pursuit of the whole, or one.

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  Gilmore, p. 279.

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  I am reminded of Mark Twain’s praise of Mary Baker Eddy for similarly forestalling any attempts to “reinterpret” her scriptures by requiring all Christian Science services to include nothing but reading from her own works, without any additional commentary.

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  Gilmore fails to note that the satyr play analogue in the African folk tale involves a goat, thus linking it by etymology to the first, tragic part.

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  Gilmore, pp. 326–27.

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  “Partch projected his self-image through his works. In doing so, he created a model that aimed to inspire others toward individual expression and artistic investigation” (Harlan).

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  W. J. Guillaume, “The Importance of Conan,” http://www.counter-

  currents.com/2013/06/the-importance-of-conan/

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  http://www.corporeal.com/freshpix.html

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  Reprinted in Truman Capote, A Capote Reader (New York: Random House, 1987), p. 673.

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  Michael O’Meara, New Culture, New Right: Anti-Liberalism in Postmodern Europe (Bloomington, Ind.: 1stBooks, 2004). Kindle location: 5727.

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  Robert M. Crunden, ed., The Superfluous Men: Critics of American Culture, 1900–1945 (Wilmington, Del.: ISI Books, 1999).

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sp; [←279]

  Douglass Shand-Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: Life and Architecture. 2 volumes. Boston Bohemia (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1994); Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005).

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  “Sir Noël Coward, 1899–1973,” in The Homo and the Negro.

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  Daniel McCarthy, “An Architect for all Purposes,” The University Bookman, vol. 46, no. 1 (Spring 2008).

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  H. P. Lovecraft, “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” VIII, The Weird Tradition in America.

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  Published in 2009, with a rather indifferent introduction by Peter Straub, who also did the Lovecraft volume in the same series.

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  See Tucci, Ralph Adams Cram: An Architect’s Four Quests, p. 171. I would point out that this is also the real motivation behind the recent growth of “historically accurate” musical performance: not to futilely seek to recreate some imaginary “Medievalism” but to strip away layers of “Romantic” and “Modernist” traditions—and we know Who dominates those, don’t we?—so that we can forge our own original relation to the past. Music: another field conquered by Cram!

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