It’s a scorching afternoon in eastern San Diego county and a dozen or so sweaty volunteers are watching as a 53 foot semi-truck attempts a precarious backward pirouette, nearly taking out a chain link fence in the process. A burst of applause greets the driver, who looks a bit like Santa Claus, as he finally navigates the narrow driveway, unlocks the cargo doors, and presents the day’s work. It’s a lot. Over the next few hours a massive collection of bespoke instruments, ranging from the petite adapted viola of 1930 to the hefty mbira bass dyad of 1972, is carefully unloaded, stacked and gawked at by the flabbergasted crew: “How did he manage all this?” After some 30 years in the wilderness, the Harry Partch instruments, handmade by the composer himself to his own exacting microtonal standards, are finally home. Jon Szanto, Partch’s once student and friend, now archivist and champion, looks at once relieved and overwhelmed.

Following years of itinerant living, enduring homelessness, abandoned chick hatcheries, and the occasional college residency, Harry Partch’s final years were spent in a cosy San Diego cottage, his massive homemade instrumentarium ensconced at nearby San Diego State University, watched over by his longtime musical director and right-hand man Danlee Mitchell. It was to him that Partch left his estate upon his death in 1974. Rich in quadrangularis reversums, poor in cash and infrastructure, Mitchell did his best to keep the legacy alive, leading the composer’s hand-picked ensemble of San Diego based musicians, massive cache of instruments in tow, through shows both big and small, including a massive theatrical staging of The Bewitched in Berlin in 1980.

By 1990 Mitchell was buckling under the strain and with San Diego State no longer willing to store the instruments he handed them off to another former Partch collaborator, Dean Drummond, following a concert at New York’s Lincoln Center. Securing storage space at a series of East Coast institutions, Drummond formed his own ensemble – supplanting the San Diego crew – and with Mitchell maintaining the Partch estate and Drummond handling the instruments and performance a seemingly happy collaboration was struck; but when Drummond began composing his own pieces for Partch’s instruments, the estate reacted with alarm and then – as overall aesthetic fidelity and concert standards declined – despair.

Performances envisioned as “portraits of physical and athletic grace” – as Szanto describes Partch’s melding of the visual and corporeal – became rigid reconstructions assayed by the kind of academics Partch had spent his life railing against. The emergence of replica instruments – sourced from Drummond – in the hands of Ensemble Musikfabrik and the unaffiliated PARTCH Ensemble became a further point of contention.

Following Drummond’s death in 2013, composer Charles Corey – the first keeper of the Partch instruments to have no relationship with the composer himself – attempted to right the ship, but with the loss of yet another homebase in 2019 the future looked grim and the instruments were locked away in a Washington storage locker, the monthly tab covered by an increasingly weary and distracted Danlee Mitchell.

As Mitchell’s health declined, the question of how to reclaim Partch’s legacy and his instruments became more urgent. “We talked about what the future would be without institutional support,” Szanto recalls. “What would we do if we got them back here?” Following Mitchell’s death earlier this year, the discussions between his widow Anita and Szanto continue while a barn full of musical behemoths urgently awaits an answer.

“Much of the future comes back to what we've witnessed starting in the 1950s all the way to now: any institution will show an interest in Partch's work and it lasts for a couple of years, and then they go, ‘Could you please move this stuff out of this room? We need it for badminton’, or something like that.” These striking instruments, at once wholly pragmatic (the impoverished Partch just needed something to match the sounds in his head and the tuning systems he devised to contain them) and entirely impractical (the glass cloud chamber bowls are an accident waiting to happen) are now historical works of art, and they’re in danger.

“My first goal,” Szanto explains, “is to take a really thorough assessment of each instrument and see what needs to be done to restore it back to maximum health.” After that the future is uncertain. “I don't have much faith in institutions today,” he continues, but the possibility of a big donor funding some sort of Partch institute, devoted to preservation, display, study and the occasional concert, remains tantalising. With arts funding in the US increasingly reliant on individual benefactors it’s not out of the question; but with Partch still regarded by many in the American musical establishment as something of a novelty, it’s also a big ask.

While Szanto is a strict Partch originalist, some of his former Partch Ensemble colleagues, such as microtonalist Jonathan Glasier and sound artist David Dunn, have a more casual relationship to their mentor, seeing in the composer’s work a source code suitable for further tinkering. In their view, Partch, ever an individualist and contrarian, would have demanded nothing less. If these differences have occasionally strained relationships in Partch world, all agree that the man and his instruments should not be forgotten and that time is running out for Partch’s ageing original acolytes. “What is needed,” Glasier emphasises, “is a new generation of leaders – caretakers and developers – to create a solution which includes maintenance and use of the instruments.”

Szanto, long one of Partch’s closest and most energetic advocates – and at 71 one of the youngest – would seem to agree. Sometimes he wonders how he got into this mess, but until that new generation takes the reins he intends to keep fighting. “I'm the last person who will be working with these instruments who knew Harry,” he insists. “I am the last person who will have any direct connection with the guy that actually made this crap. And I'm not going to squander my responsibility to try and get it right.”

Bill Perrine's book Alien Territory: Radical, Experimental & Irrelevant Music in 1970s San Diego was reviewed in The Wire 472. Wire subscribers can also read the review in our online library, where they will find more articles on Harry Partch and his instrumentarium.