"In some century to come, when the school children will whistle popular tunes in quarter-tones-when the diatonic scale will be as obsolete as the pentatonic is now-perhaps then these borderland experiences may be both easily expressed and readily recognized. But maybe music was not intended to satisfy the curious definiteness of man. Maybe it is better to hope that music may always be transcendental language in the most extravagant sense" (Essays 71).
- Charles Ives

Topic:
ON THE FUTURE OF MUSIC
Rugged Americans

Partch, Ives, Nancarrow and Sessions were maverick composers who, despite minuscule or nonexistent audiences, persevered and fashioned a distinctly American music. At the age of 29, Harry Partch fed his compositions to a pot-bellied stove and undertook the most quixotic journey of any American composer. Rejecting Western temperament and the starched-shirt mores of Western music, Partch devised a unique tuning system and hand-built his own orchestra of over 30 beautiful instruments to realize his musical vision. The Letter recounts the dire times of Pablo, one of Partch's hobo pals from the 1930s. Charles Ives ranks among the most prescient composers of the century. His use of polytonality, polyrhythms, and other innovative techniques antedates the European avant-garde by decades. Three Places in New England conveys many moods, from the solemn stillness of The "Saint Gaudens" in Boston Common, to the folk songs colliding riotously throughout Putnam's Camp. Marrying Stravinsky's truculent rhythms to Schoenberg's spiky melodic arcs, Roger Sessions' Seventh Symphony is a welcome tonic for the tonal whitewash found in many contemporary works. One of Sessions' students was Conlon Nancarrow, who emigrated to Mexico to escape government harassment in the early 1940s. Nancarrow spent the remaining five decades of his composing life punching rolls of astounding polyphonic and polyrhythmic complexity for the player piano.

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