Harry Partch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer and instrument builder. He was one of the first twentieth-century composers to work extensively and systematically with microtonal scales, writing much of his music for custom-made instruments he built himself, tuned in 11-limit just intonation.
Contents |
[edit] Biography
Partch was born on June 24, 1901 in Oakland, California. Both his parents were Presbyterian missionaries; Harry was born soon after they fled the Boxer Rebellion in China. He spent his childhood in small remote towns in Arizona and New Mexico, where he heard and sang songs in Mandarin, Spanish and Indian languages. 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 unsuitability for reflecting 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. His first instrument was the "Monophone," later known as the "Adapted viola". He then secured a grant that 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 gave 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, after receiving a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation, Partch was able to dedicate more time to 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 with Yeats' translation has since been released, Yeats' text having passed into the public domain). While living briefly in Ithaca, New York, he began work on US Highball, a musical memoir of his experience as a Depression-era hobo.
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 art forms with the body as its central focus.
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 'dance satire' The Bewitched, 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 created and maintained 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 increase public attention to his work. He remains a somewhat obscure figure, but is well known to experimental musicians (especially those interested in microtonality) and instrument-builders, and is considered by many to be one of the most significant composers of the 20th century.
He was an uncle of the late cartoonist Virgil Franklin Partch.
[edit] Harry Partch's instruments
Harry Partch's desire to use a different system of tuning inspired him to modify existing instruments and create new ones. 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 raw materials:
- 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 detritus; 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[1]. His West Coast ensemble PARTCH also uses Partch's original Kithara 1.
[edit] Discography
[edit] Albums
- Enclosure II: Harry Partch (Early Speech-Music works) (innova 401) [2]
- Enclosure V: Harry Partch (On a Greek Theme) (innova 405) [3]
- Enclosure VI: Harry Partch (Delusion of the Fury) (innova 406) [4]
- The Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po (Tzadik, 1995). ASIN B000003YSU.
[edit] Videos
- "Enclosure I: Harry Partch" (innova 400, VHS) Four films by Madeline Tourtelot [5]
- "Enclosure IV: Harry Partch" (Innova 404, VHS) Delusion, Music of HP [6]
- "Enclosure VII: Harry Partch" (innova 407, DVD) Delusion, Dreamer, Bonus Album, Revelation [7]
- 1995 - Musical Outsiders: An American Legacy - Harry Partch, Lou Harrison, and Terry Riley. Directed by Michael Blackwood.
[edit] Bibliography
- Blackburn, Philip (1998) Harry Partch: Enclosure III, Saint Paul: Innova. ISBN 0-9656569-0-X[8]
- 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.
[edit] See also
[edit] External links
- 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 three works by the composer
- Enclosures Series: Harry Partch's archives published as book, film and audio from innova
