Word: partch
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...often fails by seeming to run in place. Director David Swift has staged far too many of the numbers simply as people singing songs, with the camera standing by as an admiring observer. There is nowhere near enough sight humor to justify the billing "visual gags by [Cartoonist] Virgil Partch...
...Partch's galloping whimsy-the very thing that has made him an admirably tireless pioneer-has also kept him a hopeless, penniless outsider all his life He conjures up such titles as Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball 1 earn in the Shower Room and Happy Birthday to You! (Afro-Chinese Minuet), and when he talks about his work he makes it desperately clear that he is working beyond the reach of his vocab-ary. People may smile when he sits town to play, but the trouble with his misic is less the fault of the composer...
Scratching Mice. Partch grew up on the Mexican border, where his father, an ex-missionary who thought of himself as an "aggressive atheist," had gone to work for the Immigration Service. By the time he was 22, Harry had composed a scholastically pleasing string quartet, a symphonic poem and a piano concerto, but he set fire to them all a few years later when he was struck by the revelation that the spaces between the keys hold more fascination than the keys themselves. Eventually he arrived at a 43-tone octave and brought the good news to the Irish poet...
Alive with his mission, Partch was soon busy building instruments to play his special music; he was, he said, "a philosophic musicman seduced into carpentry." He put a long neck on a viola to give it "microtonal capabilities"-then he built his Surrogate Kithara, a two-deck, 16-string zither that looks like a pair of overgrown abacuses without the beads. Next came the "Bamboo Marimba" (which Partch affectionately calls "the Boo"), a 64-piece, six-tiered assembly of bamboo rods to be struck by sticks padded with felt. Rising to the grandeur of his tasks, he finally produced...
Galloping Whimsy. Though much of Partch's "corporeal music" is pleasing and oddly moving, the clucks, gurgles, thumps and thunders of his instruments sound like the score to Yojimbo, an effect that is reinforced by a recurrent and highly menacing meeeEEEOOOW! from his strings and an occasional unspecific crash that sounds like a Boo player collapsing...