Harry Partch

I defiantly agree with Cowell’s comment about Partch mentioned by Dr. Brunner in class, “He was a crazy guy”. His most well known innovation was his tuning system and his creation of instruments. Logically, he had to make his own instruments to demonstrate his tuning ideas. I couldn’t explain his tuning system in detail because I really had a hard time trying to understand it.

Forty-three pitches in an octave, as I’m a performance major, many questions came to my mind immediately: how did he notate the score and how did he play on the correct spots on the instrument? My first thought was: it must have many lines for a staff. Maybe he also created his own notation system to compose. But in fact, the score that I saw looked very much like normal music.

I also played some of Partch’s music to one of my friends who is a keyboard technician. That was an interesting moment to see his confusion while listening to Partch’s music. We had the same feeling about Partch’s music, and just as Partch’s had said himself before the music on the recording began: we might be too scholarly. The instruments sound out of tuned to us. But he was very interested to know Partch’s tuning ideas after I told him Harry Partch wrote a great book about tuning, Geneis of a Music.

After Jeffery’s presentation in the class, I realized that I couldn’t use the “traditional” aesthetic ideals to appreciate Partch’s composition. Because of his dramatic life experiences, it is not surprising that he became one of the great composers in the genre of experimentalism. The sounds around him are music. Of course, the “traditional” Equal Temperament pitch system does not satisfy him for his compositions. My interpretation of his motivation to invent a microtonal system is that it is what he heard in the sounds around him. The pitches are existing in the natural environment, and just need to be organized. This also can be an explaination for Partch’s very percussive ensemble style.

Listening to his Barstow was very entertaining and it is an avant-garde piece. I can image the theatric elements involved in this composition. It should be even more interesting to see as a life-performance which would include acting, costumes, and dancing. It feels like this would be one of the live performances that I would see on the street or subway. His music has a sense of reality and is easy to approach.

Maybe that was one of the reasons that he was considered an amateur. I don’t think there were any conservative composers who use text such as “what the hell” in their compositions at that time. It is still pretty crazy that the “classical” composer would use a swear word as composition material. For example, Grab It! by Jacob ter Veldhuis. Although the style and material are used very differently, I think they have a similar purpose in using the language – presenting an emotional form of speech.