Liner Notes
Cat. No. 80214
Release Date: 1977-01-01
In the United State there has been since Colonial times a music, characterized by its rough-hewn, experimental qualities, distinct from that of Europe. Such men as William Billings (New World Records 80205-2, White Spirituals from the Sacred Harp, and 80255-2, Make a Joyful Noise: Mainstreams and Backwaters of American Psalmody) in the eighteenth century and Anthony Philip Heinrich (80208-2, which features Heinrich’s The Ornithological Combat of Kings, and 80467-2, The Flowering of Vocal Music in America) in the nineteenth still have the power to startle us.
In the nineteenth century the genteel tradition, with its worship of things European and its conservative suspicion of change nearly stamped out this native individualism. It was this conservatism above all else against which Charles Ives struggled. It was the American past to which Ives turned, to Concord, to evangelistic Protestantism, as well as to the vernacular present. But Ives was also trying to get us to “stretch our ears,” and he opened a vast number of musical horizons.
In the generation after World War I, Henry Cowell first stood out as a pioneer in avant-garde music. His music not only challenged us with new sounds and performance practices but more and more turned to a world arena for its materials.
By this point, it was a lonely business to be an avant-garde musician. The hold of latter-day colonialism on the American musical public was strong indeed, and isolation if not ostracism was the almost inevitable cost of individualism. Out of this rich but dubious background emerged two remarkable innovators. Harry Partch and John Cage — both born in California, Partch in 1901, Cage in 1912—are in their generation surely the central figures of the American experimental tradition. They met on several occasions, and Cage, despite an aversion to Partch’s artistic idiom, has always been supportive of Partch’s music. Partch, on the other hand, had no grasp of Cage’s art and even less curiosity about it.
Both men are exemplars of an artistic and philosophic independence and individualism that has few peers. But their approach to music and to life diverged almost as widely as possible. Partch, with vitriolic and passionate condemnation, threw out all of Western musical practice and theory since ancient Greece and set about to forge a wholly new system, with its own scales, melodic and harmonic conventions, instruments, and concert occasions. Cage, more good-naturedly but with equal iconoclasm, divested music first of its focus on pitch, then of countable time, and finally of choice. He launched the principle of indeterminacy in music and has remained its severest practitioner.
In the nineteenth century the genteel tradition, with its worship of things European and its conservative suspicion of change nearly stamped out this native individualism. It was this conservatism above all else against which Charles Ives struggled. It was the American past to which Ives turned, to Concord, to evangelistic Protestantism, as well as to the vernacular present. But Ives was also trying to get us to “stretch our ears,” and he opened a vast number of musical horizons.
In the generation after World War I, Henry Cowell first stood out as a pioneer in avant-garde music. His music not only challenged us with new sounds and performance practices but more and more turned to a world arena for its materials.
By this point, it was a lonely business to be an avant-garde musician. The hold of latter-day colonialism on the American musical public was strong indeed, and isolation if not ostracism was the almost inevitable cost of individualism. Out of this rich but dubious background emerged two remarkable innovators. Harry Partch and John Cage — both born in California, Partch in 1901, Cage in 1912—are in their generation surely the central figures of the American experimental tradition. They met on several occasions, and Cage, despite an aversion to Partch’s artistic idiom, has always been supportive of Partch’s music. Partch, on the other hand, had no grasp of Cage’s art and even less curiosity about it.
Both men are exemplars of an artistic and philosophic independence and individualism that has few peers. But their approach to music and to life diverged almost as widely as possible. Partch, with vitriolic and passionate condemnation, threw out all of Western musical practice and theory since ancient Greece and set about to forge a wholly new system, with its own scales, melodic and harmonic conventions, instruments, and concert occasions. Cage, more good-naturedly but with equal iconoclasm, divested music first of its focus on pitch, then of countable time, and finally of choice. He launched the principle of indeterminacy in music and has remained its severest practitioner.
Harry Partch/John Cage
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