THE MUSIC OF HARRY PARTCH Harry Partch is now acknowledged to be one of the great American individualist experimenters, like Charles Ives, though the road to this recognition, as with so many courageous explorers, was marked by neglect and misunderstanding. Born of parents who had been missionaries in China (although they later "lost" their religious faiths), Partch grew up in the Ameri- can Southwest, surrounded by the influences of Oriental visitors and the songs of Native Americans. He had little formal training in music, but was a voracious reader, and knowing from an early age that he wanted to be a composer, taught himself most of what was necessary. The knowledge he thus acquired regarding the "rules" of Western music did not accord with his childhood experi- ences with more exotic musics, however. He therefore became con- vinced that there were other directions to pursue than those within the limitations of Western music's equal temperament. After composing in the traditional idioms for a number of years, Partch decided to begin again. After burning his earlier composi- tions in a pot-bellied stove in New Orleans, an act which he char- acterized as an "auto-de-fe," he set about to learn all he could about acoustics and tuning systems in order to compose music more satisfying to his own inclinations. Combining childhood training in woodworking with his musical interests, Partch began designing and building his own instruments, utilizing the "just" intonation system, which he felt to offer greater potential than equal temperament, and which he determined was the system employed by the ancient Greeks. In the just tuning system chords, within a limited range of keys, can be sounded which are perfectly in tune (no beat tones), whereas the twelve- tone equally tempered system is a compromise to enable playing in a variety of keys with chords which have beat tones. Partch's tun- ing system was based upon perfectly tuned 5ths and led to the cap- ability of having up to 43 increments within an octave. Partch came to think of himself, perhaps facetiously, as a reincarnated Greek, and along with extensive exploration of Greek musical theory in the construction of his instruments, Partch com- posed theatrical spectacles that combined music and drama in a manner thought to be similar to Greek drama. His earliest instruments were adaptations of existent instruments. The Chromelodeon, for example, was a gutted pump organ with recon- ditioned reeds tuned to the just system. A viola was also adapted, with special fingering guides, to play in that tuning. As the musical theory and philosophy developed, so did the instruments. With his skill as a woodworker, Partch created instruments not only unique in sound, but also sculpturally beautiful: the Kitheras, modelled after Greek design, the Gourd Tree, the Eucal Blossom, the Spoils of War, the Maazda Marimba, the Diamond Marimba, and many others, each one unique and incorporated into "total" music works in which the performers on the instruments be- came actors and dancers, and the instruments themselves were used as part of the stage setting. Partch's music was not only influenced by ancient Greek and Oriental sources, but was also affected by his travels as a hobo throughout the U.S. during the Great Depression. That way of life, the friendships, travails, sayings, and so on, formed a permanent repertoire of material for his compositions. Partch was, in fact, an authentic hobo all his life, never holding a "permanent" or "secure" job. When a few people began recognizing the value of what he was doing, he was invited to teach as a visiting composer, at the University of Illinois, and the University of California, San Diego, but these, too, were temporary positions, and Partch spent much of his life living from hand to mouth, in a houseboat in Sausilito, for instance, and ending up his life mostly in soli- tude north of San Diego. Underlying Partch's individualist approach to composition was a solid grasp of theory, acoustics, and philosopohy. He wanted his music to be "corporeal," not abstract. It was to produce gut response. The music does have striking beauty, in sound as well as structure. His largest and last full-scale work, The Delusion of the Fury, combines bathos and pathos on a plane that carries the listener through a sense of the human to the realm of the holy and divine. Partch also wrote a book about his investigations of acoustics and the building of his instruments, Genesis of a Music. The Author's Preface to this book contains a straight-forward statement of the perspective from which Partch saw things. This may provide as good a place for ending this essay as any: "Perhaps the most hallowed of traditions among artists of creative vigor is this: traditions in the creative arts are per se suspect. For they exist on the patrimony of standard- ization, which means degeneration. They dominate because they are to the interest of some group that has the power to per- petuate them, and they cease to dominate when some equally powerful group undertankes to bend them to a new pattern. It is not difficult for the alert student to acquire the traditional techniques. Under the pressures of study these are unconsciously and all too easily absorbed. The extent to which an individual can resist being blindly led by tra- dition is a good measure of his vitality. "Traditions remain undisturbed when we say: let us improve ourselves; let us become better pianists, teachers, con- ductors, better composers. They remain undisturbed when we say: let us increase the knowledge and appreciation of 'good' music. Traditions remain undisturbed, uninvestigated, and therefore a culture of music based upon such palpably noble precepts is already senile. "The quality of vitality that makes any culture significant involves something else, the presence of which constantly undermines tradition; it is found in the perceptive fresh- ness of the Tang Dynasty poets, the bold curiosity of the Renaissance Florentines. In large measure it is compounded of investigation, investigation, investigation. In poetry and in many other forms of creative expression investiga- tion may take an entirely intellectual and metaphysical path, but in music, because of the very nature of the art, it must also take a physical path. A phalanx of good pianists, good teachers, good composers, and 'good' music no more creates a spirit of investigation and a vital age in music than good grades in school create a spirit of investigation and a body of thinking citizens. To promote a youthful vitality in music we must have students who will question every idea and related physical object that they encounter. They must question the corpus of knowledge, traditions, and usages that give us a piano, for example-- the very fact of a piano; they must question the tones of its keys, question the music on its rack, and, above all, they must question, constantly and eternally, what might be called the philosophies behind device, the philosophies that are really responsible for these things. "Good grades in school are the result of a less commend- able ability, and no aspect of the musical scene could be more depressing than the prospect that those with the ability to get good grades in school, to copy others, to absorb and apply traditions with facility, shall hold the fort of 'good' music. "Music, 'good' or not 'good,' has only two ingredients that might be called God-given: the capacity of a body to vibrate and produce sound and the mechanism of the human ear that registers it. These two ingredients can be studied and analyzed, but they cannot be changed; they are the comparative constants. All else in the art of of music, which may also be studied and analyzed, was created by man or is implicit in human acts and is there- fore subject to the fiercest scrutiny--and ultimately to approval, indifference, or contempt. In other words, all else is subject to change." (pp. xv-xvi, 1949,1974) INSTRUCTIONS 1. 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