From: mclaren
Subject: myths about Harry Partch
--
Many members of the popular press and general public
have heard of Harry Partch. Alas, most of what they've
heard is untrue. While plenty of musicians know
something about Partch, the bulk of what they know
is outright nonsense, inaccurate caricature, "just-so"
stories, and wildly exaggerated rumor.
Herewith, a list of the most obviously false myths:
[1] MYTH: Harry Partch had no formal musical education.
FACT: This is a fairy tale created by Partch himself.
On more than one occasion he claimed to be musically
untutored. However, as Robert Gilmore's PhD thesis
shows, Partch was enrolled at USC several times,
for a number of months in each case. Partch himself
mentions that he spent three months working on the
resolution of the dominant seventh chord (source: Bitter
Music); when challenged, in later life, to produce an
academically flawless example of 16th-century counterpoint,
he did so without difficulty. Clearly, Partch was far
from the musical naif he pretended to be.
[2] MYTH: Harry Partch failed to reach a popular audience,
and his work was utterly rejected at all turns.
FACT: Harry Partch's Gate 5 records sold well during his
lifetime, and his CRI recordings are the most popular
recordings ever issued by that organization. In fact,
Harry Partch was one of the most successful avant garde
composers of the twentieth century. Nearly all his works
received major performances, and Partch himself was able
to spend the last third of his life supported by various
foundations and grant. Far from being systematically
shunned, Partch was generously supported by the
Guggenheim Foundation, the Koussevitsky Foundation,
Betty Freeman's Whitelight Foundation, and others.
Moreover, Partch was written about more than almost any
other avant garde composer of the period: he received
glowing reviews in The New York Times, Tempo magazine,
and many other influential periodicals. With Ben
Johnston as a strong supporter, Partch was able to
gain fellowships and residencies at a number of
universities (U of Wisconsin in 1947, UCSD in 1967).
The American Society of Composers even invited Partch
to give a special presentation on his music in 1967.
True, Partch never gave the presentation--but not
because the ASC retracted its invitation; rather,
Partch's relentless hyperperfectionism compelled him
to tinker with and revise his lecture and recorded
examples until it was too late to give the talk.
(This presentation is now known as "Quarter-Saw Cut
of Motivations and Intonations," available on Inova
Enclosure 2 CD number 2. A small excerpt has been
printed in Tom McGeary's Bitter Music.)
The main reason Partch's music wasn't heard by a
wide audience wasn't because people didn't like
Partch's music--rather, the problem was that Partch's
orchestra of instruments proved far too expensive to
move around to various concert venues. The tab for
the European tour of Partch's instruments in 1979
came to $100,000.00 U.S., which correcting for
inflation amounts to something like a million
dollars in today's money. It is simply impractical
to take Partch's instruments on the road for a
concert tour: always has been, always will be.
But that's an entirely different matter from the
question of the popularity of Partch's music,
which has always been considerable.
Just compare Partch's treatment with the treatment
of Wyschnegradsky, you never heard any of his music
performed or was able to get an orchestra to play
his compositions between 1937 and 1979! Partch was
able to get ALL of his large theater pieces performed.
[3] MYTH: Harry Partch used a 43 note 11-limit just
intonation scale.
FACT: As Partch himself points out in the above
lecture, he felt free to expand or alter his
intonational system whenever it suited him. Thus,
Partch himself testifies that he used prime ratios
greater than 11 (listen to the tape "A Quarter-Saw
Cut of Motivations and Intonations..." Also corroborated
by John Chalmers, who states that he saw Partch set
up 13-limit ratios on his harmonic canons during
at least one occasion)
Throughout his life Partch used tuning systems with
many different numbers of pitches: from as few as
11 notes in 1923 to as many as 55 notes in 1930
(source: Exposition of Monphony, 1933; newspaper
article included in back; also written testimony
by Bertha Knisely in "Los Angeles Saturday Night"
in 1933). Partch's tuning system was never fixed
or finalized; he changed it from composition to
composition, drawing upon what he called his
"tonal flux"--an infinite sea of integer ratios
only fleetingly and partially embodied in this or
that specific composition. In this regard--as in
so many others--Partch showed himself far in ahead
of his time musically and theoretically.
[4] MYTH: Harry Partch built a set of exotic instruments
on which it's impossible to perform anyone else's music.
Conversely, Partch's music cannot be performed on
conventional instruments.
FACT: Something akin to a chromatic 12-note scale can
be found inside Partch's 43-note monophonic fabric of
1948 as published in Genesis of A Music.
What does "akin" mean?
See for yourself:
PARTCH PITCH CENTS 12/oct PITCH IN CENTS DIFFERENCE IN CENTS
1/1 0 0 0
16/15 111.73 100 11.73
9/8 203.91 200 3.91
6/5 315.64 300 15.64
5/4 386.31 400 13.69
4/3 498.04 500 1.955
10/7 617.48 600 17.48 3/2 701.95 700 1.955
8/5 813.68 800 13.69
5/3 884.35 900 15.64
16/9 996.09 1000 3.91
15/8 1088.26 1100 11.73
The largest discrepancy (17.48 cents, about 1/6 of
a semitone) occurs in the tritone--an interval about
whose purity few listeners are likely to complain.
Excluding the tritone, the next largest discrepancy
between 12-TET and Partch's pitches is 15.64 cents,
about 1/7 of a semitone, or 1/84 of an octave. This
is a perceptible interval, but hardly a large one.
"Weird Nightmare," a CD devoted to Charles Mingus'
music performed in part on Harry Partch's instruments,
shows that even the strictest form of Partch's most
didactic 43-note scale can support some compositions
written in the conventional western musical scale.
At the same time, Johnny Reinhard, the Kronos Quartet,
Dean Drummond and many others have shown that Partch's
music can be successfully performed on conventional
western instruments such as flute, viola, 'cello,
violin, etc. In fact, unfretted string instruments
are especially well suited to live performances of
Partch's music, as the Kronos Quartet has proven.
[5] MYTH: Harry Partch received almost no performances
of his compositions during his lifetime, and was
systematically shunned by major American professional
composers' organizations.
FACT: Partch received not just one but several
performances of his most elaborate music/ritual
drama, Oedipus, and one performance of every one
of his other theater pieces--no matter how elaborate
they became. Oedipus was mounted twice--no small
achievement. Despite the extraordinary difficulty
inherent in staging these multimedia extravaganzas,
Partch managed it, though he did complain about the
difficulty of doing so--moreover, he managed to
record everything he ever composed and issue the
resulting LPs. Thus Partch was far more successful
in getting performances than the average microtonal
avant garde composer, whose work was seldom performed
and almost never recorded. Consider, by way of
comparison, Ivan Wyschnegradsky. I.W. received virtually
no performances of his works: most of Wyschnegradsky's
compositions were never performed, let alone recorded
during his lifetime, and the same is true of other
microtonalists in Partch's generation--Elsie Hamilton,
Geyorgi RImsky-Kosakov, etc. The truth is that Partch
stands almost alone in his singular success at getting
concert performances and recordings of his compositions;
his debut at Carnegie Hall in the early 1940s proves
that Partch was far from the misunderstood outcast he's
described as being in misinformed "histories" of
20th century music.
[6] MYTH: With single-minded determination, Partch devised
a unified system of musical intonation and stuck to it
throughout his life.
FACT: Partch experimented constantly with different numbers
of pitches, different notations, and different instrumentation.
Partch at first composed for just intonation string quartet
in 1923 (early JI quartet, now lost); then, in 1930-1933, he
composed for unfretted solo string instruments with female
vocal accompaniment (Li Po song); then he experimented with
a string trio in just intonation in late 1933 and early 1934 (source:
testimony by Berhta Kniseley in "Los Angeles Saturday Night,"
1933); in 1934 he travelled to England and commissioned a
just intonation harmonium with a generalized keyboard (source:
Genesis of a Music, introduction); in 1941-2 Partch built a
just intonation guitar and several percussion instruments (source:
1942 document known as "Introducing the work of Harry Partch...")
Not until the early 1950s did an "orchestra" of just intonation
instruments evolve, and all the music-theater works for which Partch
is best known belong to the last 20 years of his life. (Source:
chronology of instrumental works in the back of "Genesis of A
Music," 2nd ed., 1974)
Moreover, most of Partch's theories about just intonation and
Corpoeality and the importance of the human voice as set forth
in Genesis of A Music are not embodied in his music. Only "Dark
Brother" and sections of "Oedipus" use extensive progressions
of vertical otonalities or utonalities. For all his discussion
of the "superior consonances" of just intonation, Partch composed
rapid highly polyphonic textures in which the notes almost never
slow down long enough to provide any sense of vertical harmony.
And not only that: after 1948, Partch composed almost exclusively
for percussion instruments with short-lived and highly inharmonic
timbres whose spectra were completely UN-suited to show off the
"superior consonances" of his just intonation system. As far as
most of Partch's pre-1968 compositions are concerned, they have
aboslutely nothing to do with his theories about vertical just
intonation harmony. The vast bulk of Partch's music is not
slow-moving, chordal and homophonic, but instead fast-moving, melodic
and polyphonic.
[7] MYTH: Partch's music is intonationally complex, but
rhythmically simple.
FACT: Partch's music up through the early 1940s was indeed
rhythmically simple, as Henry Cowell pointed out in an early
criticism. However, Partch's music through the 1950s and 1960s
shows an exponential increase in rhythmic sophistication.
By 1967, with "And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma..."
Partch had attained an apex of rhythmic complexity seldom seen
outside the masterworks of the Ars Nova in the 1380s, or the
piano compositions of Conlon Nancarrow.
[8] MYTH: Partch loathed electronic technology and never used
it in his performances or in his compositional process.
FACT: Harry Partch used tape recorders as part of
the compositional process on a number of occasions. "Daphne In
the Dunes" was composed by layering and overdubbing recorded
improvisations--Partch then transcribed these improvisations,
changing them slightly in the process, to produce the live
notated version of "Daphne." In composing "And on the
Seventh Day, Petals Fell In Petaluma..." Partch pursued an
even more aggressively experimental electronic direction: he
first practiced, then recorded, a series of one-minute
pieces. Then, while playing these pieces back, he electronically
generated quartets by using tape overdubs.
Toward the end of his life, Kenneth Gaburo reports that when
Partch heard about the microtunable Motorola Scalatron
synthesizer, Harry commented, "Finally they invented what
I needed--forty years too late." (Source: Warren Burt)
Partch's extensive use of analog tape recording overdub
technology is one of the least-known yet most important
aspects of his compositional process.
[9] MYTH: Partch was an American original who burst on
the musical scene out of nowhere.
FACT: Just as Johann Sebastian Bach stands at the
culmination of a long series of Baroque master composers,
Harry Partch's theories and music are the culmination of
a long series of masterful late-19th-century early-20th-century
just intonation composers and theorists.
R.H.M. Bosanquet, Hermann Helmholtz, Thaddeus Cahill,
Shohei Tanaka, Wilfrid Perrett, Kathleen Schlesigners,
Henry Ward Poole, James White and many others preceded
Harry Partch. Some of these--notably Cahill, Poole
and White--were primarily instrument inventors and
performers, while others distinguished themselves
mainly as theorists. Partch was the first to combine
supreme theoretical dexterity and superb compositional
practice and performance skill.
[10] MYTH: Partch is the fountainhead of just intonation
theory and practice in the 20th century. The rediscovery
of just intonation starts with him.
FACT: Many composers and theorists have advocated the
musical use of just intonation throughout the centuries.
In fact, the clash between advocates of musical just
intonation (following in the footsteps of Pythagoras,
the Babylonians, the Sumerians and the Greeks) and
those who espouse some compromise form of temperament
(after Aristoxenos and the lutenists of the early
middle ages) is one of the longest-lasting of all
musical disputes. From the end of the Roman Empire
circa 600 A.D. to the present time, music theorists
have disagreed over and debated about these two
irreconcilable musical directions. To cast Harry
Partch in the role of the sole advocate of just
intonation in modern musical history is to completely
mis-read the musical history of the 20th century and the
19th century as well. Partch was merely the first
composer to produce an entire orchestra of just
intonation instruments; and this is as much a
testament to the improved technology of modern
electric-powered woodworking instruments as to
Partch's tenacity and drive. Many others tried
(and, due to the primitive woodworking technology,
failed) to build workable just intonation instruments
prior to Partch--H. J. White is an outstanding exmpale.
Many just intonation composers have successfully
followed Partch's example since the 1940s. In fact,
the magazine Experimental Musical Instruments is
largely deovted to the successful and musically
fascinating efforts of armies of do-it-yourself
musical instrument builders who have followed
Partch's example to good effect.
[11] MYTH: Harry Partch was a "paper" composer who
carefully notated all his scores before performing
them. To Partch, improvisation was anathema.
FACT: The truth is just about exactly the opposite.
Partch himself admitted that his vocal lines for
the Li Po songs were largely improvised (source:
Ben Johnston); on many occasions Partch improvised
and then later wrote the results down as a musical
score (most notably in "On the Seventh Day, Petals
Fell in Petaluma..." See Earls, "Harry Partch:
Verses In Preparation for `Delusion of the Fury,'
for more details). Improvisation was an integral
part of Partch's compositional method.
-mclaren
