Our Wagner, Only Better:
Harry Partch, Wild Boy of American Music, Part 1

5,476 words

Harry Partch, June 24, 1901–September 3, 1974

Part 1 of 3

“In a healthy culture differing musical philosophies would be coexistent, not mutually exclusive; and they would build from Archean granite, and not, as our one musical system of today builds, from the frame of an inherited keyboard, and from the inherited forms and instruments of Europe’s 18th century. And yet anyone who even toys with the idea of looking beyond these legacies for materials and insight is generally considered foolhardy if not actually a publicity-seeking mountebank.” – Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music 

“The 19th century must have been an enormously comfortable place; no one seems to want to leave it.” – Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told by a Friend.

“Do not be afraid to be out of tune with the piano. It is the piano that is out of tune. The piano with its tempered scale is a compromise in intonation.” — Pablo Casals

Part One: A Coda on Wagner

I undertook my previous look at Wagner,[1] appropriately enough, in the Nietzschean spirit I have always tried to maintain,[2] reserving my critical work only for those cultural idols of sufficient importance that their take-down would serve a greater cultural good – rather than, for example, the typical internet “flame-war.”

The results were all I could have hoped for! Cascades of evidence that Wagner was, indeed, an unquestioned, unquestionable idol for the Right, the alt-Right, White Nationalists, whatever.[3] A veritable religious cult, with all the Judaic characteristics Kevin MacDonald has discerned in such thought-negating outfits.[4]

All the memes were there. “How dare you counsel our Youth to desert our European Heritage!” As if “youth” had not been fleeing from classical music for well over a century, the process, in fact, more or less complete, to judge by the collapse of the classical record industry.[5] As if it was I responsible for this killing of the younglings. Again, how appropriate; my arguments were derived from Evola, after all, so why not put me on trial for corrupting the young as well?[6]

And all the other tactics beloved by Cardinals and Witchfinders down through the ages, such as ignoratio elenchi: after detailing the flaws in the Western system of intonation, the response: “He hasn’t given us any reason to think so.” And the argumentum ad auctoritatem: “All culture is inherently elitist, who cares what people want to listen to?” (Note the contradiction to the younglings argument, but hey, any tool to hit a heretic). Or again, after noting that by reducing the modes to only two, major and minor, considerable amount of expressiveness are lost, which is why jazz resorts to ‘bent’ or ‘blue’ notes to recover the modes, an argument, basically, that two is less than twenty, the flat assertion “No one familiar with Western music would think so.”

In the words of that great Aryan comedian, Rik Mayall,[7] “I despair, I mean, I really do.”

But then, does he not also say, “Nil desperandum, we’re English and there’s a way out of everything”? And so I will try a different tack, explaining a little more of what’s wrong with Wagner, but then offering a positive, Aryan role model that can guide us out of the morass.

1. What’s Wrong with Wagner, or Western Music?

Partch explained that his musical heresy was due to the fact that most musicians treated equal temperament as if it were “handed out of the clouds of Mount Sinai.” Therefore any important music created with it was sacrosanct.[8]

The Western system of ET is neither natural nor inevitable nor optimal, nor even, as composers as early as Wagner himself realized, particularly rich or useful.[9]

According to Kyle Gann:

Music schools teach that this Big Mac tuning has been around for centuries and represents an immutable endpoint of progress. It’s a lie. . . . There is nothing that musicians take more for granted than the fact that there are twelve pitches to an octave, and that these pitches divide the octave into twelve equal steps. Apparently few musicians question this arrangement, and only a tiny minority can explain whence it arose, why, and from what principles its authority derives. This 12-pitch assumption, however, is far from innocent. Twelve-tone equal temperament, as this common tuning is called, is a 20th-century phenomenon, a blandly homogenous tuning increasingly imposed on all the world’s musics in the name of scientific progress. In short, twelve-tone equal temperament is to tuning what the McDonald’s hamburger is to food.

As the little red haired girl on The Kids in the Hall would say, “It’s a fact.”

The problem with Western music is quite simple, and can be expressed with some quite simple mathematics, since music consists of sounds, sounds are vibrations, and vibrations can be expressed as numbers.[10]

Sound = vibration, thus = frequency. Intervals can be expressed by math. Our perception of pitch is the result of a rapid, and rhythmic, displacement of matter. When an object vibrates it pushes on the surrounding air periodically, resulting in a pulsating pattern of first condensed, then stretched, packets of air. Because the pattern is periodic, if it occurs very slowly it will be perceived as rhythm, but if it occurs faster than about twenty times every second it will be perceived as a tone. The pitch of a vibrating object, consequently, can be traced back to the rate at which it is moving, and in turn, how frequently it is pushing on the air around it. Put more plainly, pitch is measured by vibration speed. (Harlan, p. 26)

Now, if we are to have music, there must, contrary to Pete Townsend, be more than one note, so the question arises, which? Well, sounds are pleasing, or harmonious, when they express a ratio of whole numbers. The simplest of these, of course, would be 1:1, two voices or instruments, perhaps single strings, vibrating at the same rate, called a unison. Next, one might imagine the sounds vibrating in a 2:1 ratio, one twice as fast as the other, the so called octave.[11] To illustrate the octave, and show that such simple modes can be expressive, consider the goosepimply first two notes — Some . . . where — of “Somewhere over the Rainbow,” which is nothing but an octave leap.

OK, so we have two notes, defining a scale; so what notes go in between? Pythagoras, who devised all this for the Greeks, reasoned that the next simplest ratio was 3:2, the so-called perfect fifth, so a system of fifths seems reasonable. Here, however, a problem arises.

Now again, this is not just me talking. Get out your calculator.[12] Let’s take 27.5, the vibration of A, and multiply it 2, and do that 7 times. Now, do it again, but this time multiply it by 1.5 — that is, 3:2 — 7 times, and the answer, you will note, is different, yes?

So, how’s all that science and abstract reasoning working out for you, Western Man? As the Bubble Boy would say, “Not . . . too . . . good, eh?”

In fact, the history of Western Music plays out rather like the climax of the Bubble Boy episode of Seinfeld, with George, the music “theorist” and Grand Poobah, insisting that “the Moops” invaded Spain, because that’s what the Trivial Pursuit card says, while the Bubble Boy, representing the human ear, insists that everyone knows it‘s the Moors, and the card must be misprinted. In short, a whole bunch of attempts to deal with the “extra” vibrations, the so-called “Pythagorean Comma.”

Pythagoras himself suggested — well, with guys like Pythagoras, it was more like “God and Reason command” — that we just gather up all the vibrations in a bunch at the back of the scale’s neck and snip off the excess, like a rich old lady getting a facelift.[13] In practice, this meant rendering one of the intervals deliberately out of tune, but hoping it was obscure enough not to be noticed.

Thus did Western Music receive its ritual circumcision, a theme which we will meet up with again. Perhaps that’s why, as Partch suggested in the quote above, musicians think the ET system was handed down on Mount Sinai.

This kind of adjustment happened again and again, for Faustian Man knows only one direction, Onward![14] Re-examining premises, that’s for sissies! — essentially, the argument of the critics of my Wagner piece.

Now, as Gurdjieff tells us, no change is possible unless a new, Third Force, enters in. This involved Faustian Man’s other obsession, technological development. Now, you might think that technological development would help make the system more accurate, but you’d be wrong, Digital Boy. Western composers were besotted with “modulation” between keys, and also with keyboards. Trouble is, it’s hard to re-tune string instruments and nearly impossible to re-tune keyboards. And even without that hassle, think of all those keys for sharps and flats (yes, Bach had a keyboard with separate keys for each).[15]

Thus was born so-called Equal Temperament, in which — wait for it — every note is out of tune, and thus every note is equal to every other note.

So, every note is forced to be equal, and interchangeable, so that technology can be accommodated, and musicians can have absolute “freedom” from any restrictions imposed by mere nature. Does this sound familiar? Like anything else going on in the 18th century? In France, maybe? And this, my pro-Wagnerians, is of the Right, how exactly?

Thus were all of the dozens of modes, each with its own expressive possibilities, junked in favor of just two, so-called Major and Minor, vaguely signifying some kind of “happy” and “sad.”[16] I bet you were taught that Major and Minor were like Black and White, Zero and One, Left and Right, and other obvious dualities that just are, right? Well, they lied to you again, Bubba.

2A. Who Cares What’s Wrong with Wagner or Western Music?

It is both fascinating and telling that a core principle of Western music theory, the circle of fifths, and a related tuning technique that predominated in ecclesiastical music until the Renaissance, were both predicated on a kind of numerological mysticism. (Harlan, p. 26)

At this point, if my life were an episode of Mad Men, I would be Pete Campbell, rushing into Bert Cooper’s office to reveal Don Draper’s hidden past, and Bert, putting down his copy of The Fountainhead, would give me a pitying look and wearily sigh:

Cooper: Mr. Campbell, who cares?

Campbell: Mr. Cooper, he’s a fraud and a liar, a criminal even!

Cooper: Even if this were true, who cares? This country was built and run by men with worse stories than whatever you’ve imagined here.[17]

Yet, true to my Faustian Spirit, I must push on! This is all wrong!

First, the “circle” of fifths is metaphysically absurd.[18]

The fifths form a spiral whose sounds, coiled around themselves, can never meet. For us, this limitless spiral can be the joint in the center of the world, the narrow gate that will allow us to escape from the appearance of a closed universe, to travel in other worlds and explore their secrets.[19]

Nature is expansive and open, while human logic strives toward standardized metrics and closed loops. In this sense one could state that just intonation is a more natural system, while equal temperament is a more human system. (Harlan, p. 33)

Let’s go back to Pythagoras. His problem arose because the “cycle of fifths” does not yield a circle or cycle, but a spiral. This offended his sense of propriety. Yes, that’s right, Western music is based on Pythagoras’ obsession with circles.

The circumcision of the Pythagorean Comma was referred to by the composer Dane Rudhyar as “The Great Mutation”: the gradual replacement of Mysticism with Rationalism,[20] the beginning of Western man’s privileging of the “rational” notions of his little mind over transcendental truth.[21]

Pythagoras substituted his little mind for metaphysical truth. Reality, as René Guénon documents the brief but intense Symbolism of the Cross, is a spiral, not a circle. It is a screw that spirals upward as it turns at a certain . . . pitch.[22]

Western music was now set adrift, a menace to navigation, cut off from the music of other cultures, such as India and China, whose music was still metaphysically sound;[23] as well as from what should have been its sister sciences — as we have seen, Western musicians eschew acoustics and pretend that their scales are arbitrary combinations of sound miraculously “discovered” when somebody blew into a reed.

2B: “But really, who cares?”

Away with all this metaphysical rigmarole! What about the music? It’s really purdy! (The sum and substance of most of the objections to my previous article; and just as Bert Cooper insisted that lots of great Americans started out as crooks).

It cannot be denied that ET led to an explosion of creativity, of which Wagner is the ultimate example. But ultimate also means final. This creativity was limited to one kind: modulation between keys — and everything else was sacrificed, such as the expressivity of the numerous modes. Wagner was a “Master” of this above all else,[24] but it depends above all on surprise, as more and more discordant intervals are forced into use, and like drug addiction, leads to the inevitable question, “what next?’ Thus the “crisis of tonality” after Wagner, leading to the numerous experiments of the 20th century.

The “crisis of tonality” at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries was primarily a crisis of materials. Composers such as Mahler and Wagner had exhausted the rhetorical abilities that the 12 building blocks of tonality would provide. Atonality and 12-tone technique were a means of recycling a new language out of the remnants of a diatonic system. Because of the impossibility for exotic and liberating influences to have any effect on sound (the instruments and tuning are still the same) composers used a high degree of abstraction isomorphic manipulation of these arbitrary materials to convey rhetorically a new kind of music. (The best examples of this are Cage and Xenakis.)[25]

The Pythagorean Scale, having become an all-encompassing system — scales, instruments, notation, schools, concert and opera halls — known as Equal Temperament, had finally revealed itself as a Chinese Finger Trap. We had gone as far as we could, and were now solidly wedged in. As Small says, unconsciously and ominously echoing Evola,

“Those who ride the tiger can never dismount.”[26]

2C: Oh who cares about music anyway?

Small “t” traditionalists have reasons to beef as well. The shiny, new, “modern” Western system, bereft of expressive possibilities but with all the persuasive force of the White Man’s Gatling guns behind it, is one of the chief agents of cultural globalization, as young, with-it types turn away from granddad’s old music, newly urbanized Third World workers demand up-to-date music like they hear in the Western movies and TV shows, and local oligarchies compete with each other in promoting Western symphonies, opera houses, and conservatories. Sure, we practice rural infanticide or female circumcision (there it is again, and not for the last time!), but just listen to Ying Yang or Abu Simsim play that Chopin étude!

The same thing happened Stateside first. After German immigrants established the dominance of their own system of Kultur, native White American traditions of music were wiped out.

Sam Francis described this phenomenon in a column on the National Endowment of the Arts (one of the chief life-support systems for the moribund classical culture) compiled in Shots Fired. He notes,

There used to be a real popular culture in America, not only in Maine and Montana but even in metropolitan areas like New York and Boston. In that veiled and lost epoch, many Americans played musical instruments they were raised to play instead of buying recordings produced by European musicians and Japanese corporations, wrote poetry for themselves instead of puzzling over thin volumes and crippled and bitter verse cranked out by whatever lesbian poetess-in-residence New York publishing houses have decided to make a celebrity for a week, and acted in and sometimes even wrote plays that they produced themselves in local theaters instead of packing the house to gibber over Madonna, Michael Jackson, Wayne’s World, and Nightmare on Elm Street, Part 70.

It’s no surprise that before the German Judaics could take over the mass cultural enterprise, it had first to be thoroughly regimented by those very industrious and hardworking Kultur Germans, determining our tuning system, orchestras, music schools, repertoire (plenty of Wagner!) etc.[27] As usual, the goyim do the hard work, the Judaics then move in and take over.[28]

2D: René and Danny Told You So

“One half of this music, the melody, was all pomade and sugar and sentimentality. The other half was savage, temperamental and vigorous. . . . It was the music of decline. There must have been such music in Rome under the later emperors. Compared with . . . real music it was, naturally, a miserable affair; but so was all our art, all our thought, all our makeshift culture in comparison with real culture.” Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf

“The Atreides House is building a secret army, using a technique unknown to us; a technique involving sound.” — Padishah Emperor Shaddam IV in Frank Herbert‘s Dune

This spreading global catastrophe spirals us back again to Daniélou and the Traditionalists; just as we saw that music, math and metaphysics are linked, so is metaphysics and anti-globalism; as Alan Watts said, metaphysics is rockily practical.

In the Traditional metaphysics common to the East and West, the act of creation involves sound; entities are called into being (And God said . . . ; in the beginning was the Word). If we were as powerful as God, we too could create, using the correct Names of things. Such is the nature of Magic. Even so, our limited powers are able to approximate such Names, and using music — with proper intervals, of course — we can evoke (Sanskrit vak, Latin vox) beings – “speak of the Devil” — and psychological states.[29]

Certain intervals between tones resonate within the body more than others. According to this view, the most physically compelling intervals are those in the simplest proportions of one to another. (Harlan, p. 5)

Thus the title of Daniélou’s treatise in its revised English language edition: Music and the Power of Sound.[30]

Needless to say, even that reduced level of efficacy is impossible in the Western system, where intervals are inaccurate and their effects are judged to be purely customary or “merely psychological.” Thus, while when a Hindu musician plays a certain raga, even the animals sense the approaching rainstorm, Richard Strauss, at the end of the West’s “progress,” gave up entirely and dragged a wind machine onstage.

Indeed, the effect of random intervals chosen for superficial effects can be positively harmful, both to one’s own body and the body politic.

The Yue ji declares: In periods of disorder, rites are altered and music is licentious. Then sad sounds are lacking in dignity, joyful sounds lack in calm. . . . When the spirit of opposition manifests itself, indecent music comes into being . . . when the spirit or conformity manifests itself, harmonious music appears, . . . So that, under the effect of music, the five social duties are without admixture, the eyes and the ears are clear, the blood and the vital spirits are balanced, habits are reformed, customs are improved, the Empire is in complete peace.” (Cited by M. Courant, “Essai sur la musique classique des Chinois,” Dictionnaire du Conservatoire, pp. 206–207).

By varying the intervals, inventing new combinations solely to create superficial effects, one endangers both the individual soul and the larger soul known as the State, and even the World Soul of the Universe.

George (posing as a Nazi organizer): “Well, it’s just a game. Remember that, kids.”

Tim (a fan of “his” book): “Just a game. He’s so humble. Don’t forget what you wrote in the epilogue, the fate of the world depends on the outcome of this ‘game‘.”

George: “Well, I was exaggerating a bit, just for effect.”[31]

Away with this System, both played out but still dangerous in its very putrescence! Rather than seeking to preserve the Germanic classical heritage like some dead tooth, we must, in the spirit of archeofuturism, return to the roots in our ever present past and “make new” a White Tradition of our own, using our newest technology. In short, Aryan Futurist Music.[32]