OFF THE RAILS.(Harry Partch)(Biography)

Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch. His exit from civilization has assumed the status of legend, and it's all true. The turning point in Partch's life came in 1935, after he spent six months travelling through Europe on a grant. He was thirty-four years old; his explorations of new tunings and instruments had aroused smatterings of interest. In the hope of making an opera from William Butler Yeats's adaptation of Sophocles' "Oedipus Rex," he had met with the poet in Ireland, and had received his blessing. But few others grasped what Partch was after, and when he returned to the United States he couldn't summon the will to beg for more money. Instead, he decided to drop out, and it wasn't your feel-good hippie kind of dropping out. He spent much of the next eight years living as a hobo--riding trains, doing manual labor, sleeping in shelters or in the wild, contracting syphilis, working occasionally as a proofreader, and, all the while, rethinking every parameter of music. One day in 1940, while passing through Barstow, California, Partch found some graffiti along a highway, and he saw in it what no one else could have seen, material for a rasping, pugnacious song: "It's January 26. I'm freezing. / Ed Fitzgerald. Age 19. Five feet ten inches. / Black hair, brown eyes. / . . . I wish I was dead. / But today I am a man."

Partch, whose "Oedipus" recently had a run of performances in Montclair, New Jersey, was destined to be different. He was born in Oakland in 1901, and spent much of his childhood in the lonely railway outpost of Benson, Arizona. At the age of eighteen, he moved to Los Angeles, where he studied music at U.S.C. One pivotal early experience was his romance with the actor Ramon Samaniego, whom he met when both were ushers at the L.A. Philharmonic. Samaniego ended the affair shortly after becoming Ramon Novarro, the silent-screen idol. That disappointment helped cement Partch's determination to reject the mainstream. He could be difficult, and, with enough alcohol in his system, impossible. But there was something incorrigibly pure about him. Yeats said he was "very simple," and did not mean it as an insult.

Early on, Partch started asking himself why there were twelve notes in the Western scale. Reading the history of tuning, he paid special attention to the theories of Pythagoras and other ancient Greeks, who codified the relationship between elemental harmonies and vibrating strings. (If you pinch the midpoint of a rubber band tuned to C and then pluck it, the tone goes up to the next higher C. At a third of the length, the tone rises to a G. With fractions of a fourth and a fifth, you get another C, then an E. Together, these notes spell a lovely major chord.) Since the early nineteenth century, Western music has been tuned according to the equal-temperament system, which adjusts the neat Greek ratios in order to create a standardized scale. Partch wanted to restore the eerie "rightness" of the old tunings. At the same time, he added minute gradations, or microtones, until he had a forty-three-tone scale, each interval controlled by ratios of integers.

He summarized his thinking in a 1949 book entitled "Genesis of a Music," which begins with the most startling forty-five-page history of music ever written. The art really began to go downhill, we're told, when Johann Sebastian Bach got his grubby fingers on it. Partch held Bach responsible for two trends: (1) the movement toward equal-tempered tuning, which meant that composers could not absorb the scales of other world traditions; and (2) the urge to make music ever more instrumental and abstract. Although Bach advocated neither of these things, Partch's critique of the long-term denaturing of music still packs a punch.

The irony is that Partch himself was sometimes suspected of being a professional originator, a paper genius who tried to write his way into history with outre gestures. In fact, he invented his forty-three-tone scale not to inflict ...