Partch and Cantonese opera

 Cantonese opera, San Francisco, H. Partch, these three things may sound irrelevant at the first glance. However, these three things documented the very first scene of Chinese music exported to America.

In California, where Partch was born, living and dead, Gold Rush first lured them in 1848, Chinese immigrants had come to the United States to work. About 175,000 Chinese immigrants who entered San Francisco through Angel Island between the great earthquake in 1906 and the Exclusion Act's repeal of many Chinese in 1943 by the Magnuson Act. The immigrants also brought with them a desire for entertainment from home, a desire musicians and touring companies eagerly filled as Chinatown prospered.  Chinese opera was regaining its foothold in Chinatown in the 1920s; Cantonese opera flourished from this early start until the 1890s and reached its peak in 1920’s. Mei Lanfang and Ma Shizeng toured the United States in 1930 and 1931–32, respectively.

Chinese music kept resurfacing throughout Partch's life and career by pointing to his parents and the atmosphere of his childhood home. Partch grew up with Chinese lullabies sung by his parents and mentioned that he attended Cantonese opera concerts as a teenager. His parents had lived in China and knew Chinese (see more). He placed the music and performance styles of Chinese opera at the heart of his aesthetic, particularly in his large-scale music-theater works of the 1950s and 1960s.  China's musical traditions were tied directly to the spoken word and featured integration of the arts through ritual, and thus for Partch presented a way to renew Western music. 

The exposure of Chinese opera opened a door for Partch of broadly Eastern music theater and was used to show opposition to the West. Through this door, he wanted to trace back the original integrity of music. The evolution of Partch's use of Chinese music and its impact on his aesthetic therefore mirrors his movement from Monophony to Corporeality. The Monophony refers to the song practice since ancient times, speech, intonation, rhythm in speaking, as the origin. As the song extended, Corporeality, the theatrical works like Cantonese opera, integrate all sorts of performing arts, with concrete meaning, with emotionally "tactile". While in the West had music became a means of communication without reliance on any other art form. Music was kept separate from painting, which was kept separate from dance, which was kept separate from drama, which in Partch's Genesis of Music describes the "abstract" developed.

GRANADE, S. (2010) “Rekindling Ancient Values: The Influence of Chinese Music and Aesthetics on Harry Partch,” Journal of the Society for American Music. Cambridge University Press, 4(1), pp. 1–32. doi: 10.1017/S1752196309990812.