From: mclaren
Subject: A saga of low cunning and
feral persistence
---
As an infamously unrepentant electronics
gonzo, permit me a small confession:
Yes, I finally built myself a duplicate of
Harry Partch's Harmonic Canon I (minus
Harry's bad design features).
And it sounds INCREDIBLE.
Johnny Reinhard has roundly chided me
for slighting acoustic music. Of course,
he's right.
In the end, there's no subsitute for live
acoustic music played by good performers
on real acoustic instruments. The richness
and subtlety of the sound is nonpareil.
On the other hand, some of us are interested
in exploring worlds of timbre and massed
sonority which would not be possible to
realize (xenharmonically, anyway) without
the aid of "pushing a button on electronic
boxes."
The Harmonic Canon is a marvel, though. A
universe of stuble & gorgeous xenharmonies
lie within its bridges and pinblocks.
For example, entirely different sounds can
be gotten by stroking the strings with one's
fingers; by plucking them with guitar picks;
by tapping them with a knitting needle; by
hitting them with a piece of a piano action
(Jarry gets his revenge against the piano--
50 years late!); and by beating the strings
with a soft paint roller.
Moreover, non-Partchian string-bending
koto-style performance techniques
bring out an entirely different side
of the instrument.
The great virtue of the Harmonic Canon
lies in its potential as a kind of mechanical
sequencer. You set up various justly-intoned
melodies by mving the many independent
bridges, and you can get triples, repeated
notes, single notes, entirely melodic chains
playing at a rate entirely controlled by
the rate at which you move your finger or
your pick across the strings. Add to this
the potential gestural effects--pitch-bent
chords, for instance, or dissonant clusters
obtained by rapidly brushing groups of
strings--and a single player has got a
whole galaxy of microtonal sounds at
hi/r beck and call.
The Harmonic Canon is to my mind the most
impressive of Partch's instruments. It's one
of the few that can't be duplicated by a sampler
or a DX7. To everyone who's interested in
composing xenharmonically, my first
suggestion wuold be: built a Harmonic Canon I.
Costs less than $100, and it'll open your
ears to a new universe of xenharmonic
harmonies and melodies.
N.B.: Harry's bad design ideas were 1) Using
guitar tuning gears; 2) using round wooden
pegs to anchor the guitar strings on the
other bridge; 3) using the wacky plexiglas
pitch-bender under the strings.
Instead of building triangular wooden tongues
and mounting guitar tuning gears on 'em,
just anchor 44 piano tuning pins in the
left-hand bridge. It works fine. The problem
with the wooden tongues is that they will
inevitably crack under all the tension from
those 44 guitar strings--Harry himself had
to build metal supports under the wooden
tongues to keep 'em from splitting off
entirely. Moreover, the guitar tuning gears
never stay in tune. So the blasted original
Partch-design Harmonic Canon was *always*
going out of tune.
By contrast, our Harmonic Canon stays in
tuen for days at a time and can support
a much higher tension--thus the sound is
louder, and without tone holes, has far
more bass than Harry's Canon. Plus the harmonics
from the plucked or struck guitar strings will
ring much longer than Harry's strings did.
Instead, use screws on the right-hand bridge.
Aroudn the screws, settle 5/16" washers.
Between the screws and washers thread the
guitar string, and voila! The brass loop end
of the guitar string will automatically catch
tight when you sink the screws with a screwdriver.
This was Bill Wesley's inspiration, and it's
infinitely simpler and less trouble-prone than
Partch's original design.
--mclaren
