Harry Partch
Harry Partch (
June 24,
1901 –
September 3,
1974) was an
American
composer. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with
microtonal scales, writing much of his
music for
instruments he built himself, tuned in 11-
limit just intonation.
Partch was born on
June 24 1901 in
Oakland, California. Both his parents were
Presbyterian missionaries. He learned to play the
clarinet,
harmonium,
viola, piano and
guitar as a child. He began to compose at an early age using the equally-tempered
chromatic scale normal in recent western music, but burned all his early works after becoming frustrated with what he saw as the imperfections of that particular system of
musical tuning and its inability to reflect the subtle melodic contours of dramatic speech.
Interested in the potential musicality of
speech, Partch found it necessary to build instruments that could underpin the intoning voice and develop notations that accurately and practically instructed players what to play. He first instrument was the Monophone later known as the adapted
viola. He then secured a grant, which allowed him to go to
London to study the history of tuning systems and word-setting. While there, he met the
poet W. B. Yeats with the intention of gaining his permission to write an
opera based on his translation of
Sophocles'
Oedipus the King. He accompanied himself on the Monophone while intoning By the Rivers of Babylon and also transcribed the exact inflections of actors from the Abbey Theatre reciting lines from Oedipus. Yeats was enthusiastic, saying "a play done entirely in this way, with this wonderful instrument, and with this type of music, might really be sensational", and giving Partch's idea his blessing.
Partch set about building more instruments with which to realise his opera. However, his grant money ran out, and, back in the United States at the height of the Depression, he began to live as a
hobo, travelling around on
trains and taking casual work where he could find it. He continued in this way for ten years, writing about his experiences in a journal named
Bitter Music. The entries frequently include snatches of overheard everyday vernacular
speech notated on
musical staves according to the
pitches used by the speaker. This technique (which had been earlier used by the Florentine Camerata, Berlioz, Mussorgsky, Debussy, Schoenberg,
Leoš Janáček and others (and would be later used by
Steve Reich)) was to become a standard approach to vocal parts in Partch's work.
In
1941, Partch wrote
Barstow, a work that takes as its text eight pieces of
graffiti he had seen on a highway railing in
Barstow, California. The piece, originally for voice and guitar, was transcribed several times throughout his life as his collection of instruments grew.
In 1943, Partch received a Guggenheim grant, and was able to settle down somewhat and work with more dedication on the music. He returned to his
Oedipus project, although the executors of Yeats' estate refused permission for him to use Yeats' translation, and he had to make his own (a [recording][
1] with Yeats' translation has since been released, Yeats' text having passed into the
public domain). He also started work on
US Highball, a piece that used many of his jottings from his hobo years as text. The work is, essentially, the story of a hobo's trip from San Francisco, California to
Chicago, Illinois, a journey that Partch had himself undertaken.
Since 1923 Partch had been working on a book, eventually published as
Genesis of a Music in 1949. It is an account of his own music, with discussions of music theory and instrument design. It is considered a standard text of microtonal music theory and expounds his concept of Corporeality; the fusion of all artforms with the body as its central focus.
Due to peculiarities of media reporting, Partch is famous for his
43-tone scale, even though he used many different scales in his work and the number of divisions is theoretically infinite.
Partch went on to write
The Bewitched, a sort of cross between a
ballet and an
opera and
Revelation in the Courthouse Park, a work based in large part on
Euripides'
The Bacchae.
Delusion of the Fury (
1969) is seen by some as his greatest work. He died on
September 3 1974 in
San Diego, California of a
heart attack.
Partch ran his own record label, "
Gate 5", to release recordings of his works and generate income. Towards the end of his life,
Columbia Records made recordings of some of his works, including
Delusion of the Fury, which helped in large part to bring him to the attention of the musical world. He remains a somewhat obscure figure, but is well known in experimental, instrument-building, and microtonal circles, where he is considered by many to be one of the most significant composers of the 20th century.
Harry Partch's desire to use a different system of tuning required him to drastically modify existing instruments and build new ones from scratch. He was, in his own words, "a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".
His "adapted" instruments include the Adapted Viola, a
viola fitted with a
cello neck to allow more accurate intonation, and the Adapted Guitar, a guitar with the equal tempered frets replaced by a complex system of justly tuned frets.
He retuned the reeds of several
reed organs and labeled the keys with a color code. The first one was called the
Ptolemy, in tribute to the ancient music theorist
Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose musical scales included ratios of the 11-limit, as Partch's did. The others were called
Chromelodeons, a
portmanteau of
chrome (meaning "color") and
melodeon.
Partch also designed and built many instruments from scratch:
* The
Diamond Marimba was a
marimba with keys arranged in a physical manefestation of the 11-limit
tonality diamond.
* The
Quadrangularis Reversum was an inverted Diamond Marimba with auxiliary keys on either side.
* The
Bass Marimba and the
Marimba Eroica had more traditional linear layouts.
* The
Mazda Marimba was made of
Mazda light bulbs and named after the Zoroastrian god
Ahura Mazda.
* The
Boo was made of
bamboo.
* The
Spoils of War and the
Gourd Tree with Cone Gongs are among his many percussion instruments assembled from junk, the "Spoils of War" included a set of tuned artillery shell casings
* The
Cloud Chamber Bowls were glass bowls from a
cloud chamber, suspended in a frame.
* The
Zymo-Xyl (from the Greek words for "fermentation" and "wood") was a
xylophone augmented with tuned liquor bottles and hubcaps. (Partch lamented that there was no Greek word for "hubcaps".)
* The
Kitharas (named after the Greek
kithara) were large upright stringed instruments, played by sliding
pyrex rods along them and plucking. Their sound is one of the most unmistakable in Partch's music.
* The
Harmonic Canons (from the same root as
qanún) were many-stringed
zithers with a complex system of bridges.
In
1990,
Dean Drummond's
Newband became custodians of the original Harry Partch instrument collection, and frequently perform with and commission new pieces for Partch's instruments.
The instruments have been housed in the Harry Partch Instrumentarium at
Montclair State University in Montclair, NJ since 1999. In 2004, for the first time in the lifespan of the collection, after years of borrowed spaces, the instruments moved into their first permanent home. The lower floor of the new Alexander Kasser Theatre of MSU was built and designed specifically for the instruments, where they are likely to stay for a long time. Concerts by Newband and MSU's Harry Partch Ensemble may be viewed several times a year in this concert hall.
Many people have duplicated partial sets of Partch instruments including John Schneider, director of Microfest[
2]. His West Coast ensemble PARTCH also uses Partch's original Kithara 1.
Albums
Enclosure II: Harry Partch (Early Speech-Music works) (innova 401)[
3]
Enclosure V: Harry Partch (On a Greek Theme) (innova 405)[
4]
Enclosure VI: Harry Partch (Delusion of the Fury) (innova 406)[
5]
Videos
"Enclosure I: Harry Partch" (innova 400, VHS) Four films by Madeline Tourtelot[
6]
"Enclosure IV: Harry Partch" (Innova 404, VHS) Delusion, Music of HP[
7]
"Enclosure VII: Harry Partch" (innova 407, DVD) Delusion, Dreamer, Bonus Album, Revelation[
8]
*Blackburn, Philip (1998)
Harry Partch: Enclosure III, Saint Paul: Innova. ISBN 0-9656569-0-X[
9]
*Gilmore, Bob (1998).
Harry Partch, A Biography, New Haven: Yale University Press.
*Partch, Harry (1974).
Genesis of a Music, New York: Da Capo Press. ISBN 0-306-80106-X
*Partch, Harry (1991).
Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions and Librettos, Champaign: University of Illinois Press.
*
Corporeal Meadows: Harry Partch an American Original*
American Mavericks: Harry Partch's Instruments playable with explanations and musical examples
*
Harry Partch Information Center and
Newband Home Page*
Art of the States: Harry Partch*
Enclosures Series: Harry Partch's archives published as book, film and audio from innova
