Music

The Barbican Centre's festival of "American Pioneers" ended with the music of three composers, two of whom are indubitably American and indubitably pioneers, but one who has often seemed barely either. America, Elliott Carter once complained, offered no ideas of "sufficient depth, clarity, and quality" to be of use to him, and he has been for 50 years that country's most able and affable spokesman for Europe. The great modernist turned 90 this week.

Steve Reich has found no end of inspiration in America. He remains, though no longer a minimalist, minimalism's most intellectually coherent and artistically convincing product. His Desert Music of 1984 dealt with the atomic bomb, an American device, and set the poetry of William Carlos Williams; the BBC Singers and the City of London Sinfonia performed it skilfully. Reich is now pioneering a modern form of drama involving videos aided by human speech transmuted by electronic chips into expressive American music.

The high point of the festival's finale was an earlier, odder composer altogether, who may just have been the most authentic pioneer of all. Harry Partch's wit was wry and his beard, latterly, was long. His parents were missionaries to China; he was raised in the Arizona desert; he visited Dublin to see Yeats, London to see Dolmetsch, the pioneer maker of early instruments. In the 1930s and 1940s Partch picked fruit, rode trains, spent eight years in "transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms". It was his "personal Great Depression", during which he formulated one of the most singular musical philosophies of the century.

We saw Partch on film: dusty and artisanal, in the company of jigsaws, vices and set-squares. During the concert we saw, for the first time in Britain, the products of his imagination and his workshop: glass cloches hanging from a wooden frame which he called the "cloud chamber bowls" and which sounded like the patter of tiny crystal feet; the "marimba eroica", echoing with the slap of an elephantine drum; the "gourd tree", Chinese bells suspended from a bough of eucalyptus; the "Mazda marimba", tuned light bulbs sounding like a puff of wind; the "kithara", Partch's vast and famous reconstruction of the instrument of Orpheus.

Partch was obsessed with freedom. The hobo's life was a bid for it; the piano keyboard was "12 black and white bars" in front of it. To liberate music from captivity in convention he invented a system of tuning: 43 tones to replace the usual 12. Partch's biographer demonstrated the Partch octave on one of the composer's instruments in a pre-concert talk: his fingers scuttled up the keyboard of the chromelodeon for an eternity. The same instrument - an adapted church organ operated by pedal bellows - suffused the music like a blush during the concert.

Did Partch's works cut the mustard? Newband, directed by a former associate of Partch, introduced us to a sound-world of shadowy taps and plucks and shimmering glissandi. But a purely instrumental piece like And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma could not be the best guide to the composer's careful art or basic inspiration.

We needed U S Highball. The British Harry Partch Society did a brisk trade in the recent American release of Partch's masterpiece at the Barbican. It is not easily available. Partch's own voice, gravelly and sinuous, dictates the up-and-down of the melody, moulds the musical material as he believed it always should. Like Janacek and Mussorgsky before him and Steve Reich after, Partch believed in the "intrinsic music of spoken words". U S Highball, his record in a bum's real words of a bum's journey across America, is his gently satirical demonstration of the idea's validity.

Partch wanted no "movement in a crypto-religious sense" constructed from his work. He remains, 25 years after his death, an inspiration for the humanity of his ideals and the visit of his instruments to this country was greeted with wolf-whistles and excitement. There were many listeners in the audience, young composers and musicians among them, who will not forget the occasion.

Bob Gilmore's "Harry Partch: a biography" is published by Yale at £25

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