WHY IS HARRY PARTCH IMPORTANT?
by
B. McLaren
Much of the material written about microtonality in the second half of the twentieth century refers to Harry Partch. Why? What did Partch do or think that makes his contribution so important?
[1] Partch was the first composer to construct an orchestra of microtonal just intonation instruments and to train performers to play music on them in concert.
Thus he is the first American microtonalist to force his way into the so-called "serious" concert halls on a regular basis.
Partch's debut at Carnegie Hall in the mid 1940s proved that he could make microtonal music acceptable to general audiences. Throughout his subsequent career, Partch refused to settle for anything less than rehearsed concerts in high-quality venues: university auditoria, respected halls like the Carnegie, etc. Not for Partch the informal "happening" in a small loft in Greenwich Village; Partch wasn't interested in presenting his work at an impromptu cocktail party at some tiny art gallery opening in Soho. He demanded and received carefully staged performances in large, appropriate concert halls.
Partch was important, therefore, because he was the first microtonalist in America who broke into the serious concert halls on a regular basis. While other composers (Ives, Copland, Bartok, etc.) produced one or two quartertone pieces for concert performances, Partch produced an entire body of work. Moreover, he took great pains to see that the performances came off as well as possible--no easy task, given that many of his performers were students whose rehearsal schedule proved erratic at best.
Harry Partch wasn't the first microtonalist to espouse just intonation in the 20th century. Many other influential composers and instrument-builders proposed the resurrection of just intonation: Shohei Tanaka, Kathleen Schlesinger, Wilfrid Perrett, Carl Eitz, Eivind Groven, Thaddeus Cahill. But all of these people were either pure theorists who composed little or no music (and none of it for concert performance), or they were instrument-builders. In any case, these musicians concerned themselves primarily with producing a single elaborate device for the performance of just intonation music. They did not tackle the problem of finding a way of bringing JI to the attention of a wider audience.
And so Partch was important because he not only theorized and built instruments, he was the first American composer to force microtonal music into the concert hall on a regular basis. After Partch opened the door, other microtonalists could not be denied. Once Partch had performed microtonal music at Carnegie Hall, no American could claim that "audiences in this country won't listen to that weird stuff."
All subsequent microtonal composers and performers owe Harry Partch a great debt for breaking through the invisible wall that kept non-12 music out of the concert hall.
[2] Partch was the first modern just intonation theorist to go beyond the Greeks without limiting himself to an equal tempered approximation of just intonation.
All of the other major theorists and instrument-builders based their just intonation systems on Greek practice.
Kathleen Schlesinger did so explicitly. Her 13-limit system of subharmonic scales, set out in her 1939 book "The Greek Aulos," imaginatively reconstrued Greek musical practice. Contemporary scholarship indicates that Schlesinger's ideas bear little relation to likely Greek musical theorie...but even so, she offered a daring and interesting set of just intonation scales for would-be microtonal composers. (The Australian composer Elsie Hamilton appears to have taken Schlesinger's tuning system and run with it, composing a number of microtonal just intonation pieces for retuned piano and orchestra.)
However, Schlesinger based her theories entirely on classical Greek models. Her works flow from a study of Greek music texts, of paintings on Greek vases, and measurements of the tone-holes in surviving Greek wind instruments. She even hired craftsmen to build replicas of ancient Greek lyres and auloi. And so her theories proposed an intriguing direction for microtonalists in the 20th century--but not a new one. She remained bound by ancient Greek paradigms.
Hans Keyser's system of just intonation, while it anticipates Partch's diamond in some ways, is based on an extension of the Pythagorean tetraktys, and thus derives at a basic level from Greek theory.
Wilfrid Perrett also offered a number of interesting ideas.. Again, however, he started from Greek musical theory. Like Schlesigner, Perrett built an instrument to realize just intonation music--in his case, a retuned pump organ. He proposed novel harmonizations of Greek scales. (Alas, all evidence runs against the idea that the classical Greek composers ever thought of harmonizing their music with vertical triads.) Perrett's system of just intonation did not venture as far into the upper reaches of the harmonic series as did Schlesinger's, since he stopped at the 7th harmonic while Schlesinger proceeded to the 13th. But--like her--Perrett based his system of just intonation entirely on conjectured Greek theory and practice...as implied in the title of his 1926 book "Some Questions of Musical Theory."
Carl Eitz, Shohei Tanaka, Thaddeus Cahill and Eivind Groven all built organs using the 53-tone equal tempered scale to approximate just intonation ratios. While this approach to just intonation broke with Greek musical theory, it also had drawbacks... It restricted the erstwhile microtonalist to inaccurate approximations of small integer ratios, defeating the main purpose of just intonation.
Western european composers and theorists weren't the only ones to advocate just intonation in the 1910s and 1920s. The Soviet composer Leonid Sabaneev built at least one just intonation instrument and he espoused his own just intonation system throughout the 1920s. But, like the other 20th century precursors to Partch, he was unable or unwilling to produce a coherent musical theory for using just intonation...other than the traditional harmonic series approach of the classical Greeks.
This is an important point. So it's worth taking a moment to discuss Greek methods of scale construction.
From Pythagoras onward, Greek music theorists started by dividing a string, then successively subdividing it until they reached some arbitrary number of divisions. These string divisions formed the basis of the just intonation scales used in Greek music, and of all subsequent just intonation theory--until Partch.
Thinking of just intonation in terms of subdividing a string produces problems for the JI music theory. One of the most basic dilemmas is that (prior to Partch) no theorist could justify using a particular just intonation. Many just intonation theorists offered many different systems, but each one was arbitrary. No just tuning system was both musically sufficient and theoretically necessary.
This arises from the nature of string subdivisions. Once one begins to section off a string, there is no necessary stopping point; one can continue to infinity. Moreover, once one fixes some member of the harmonic series as the highest prime used in a just ratio, one immediately faces the question: Why? If three divisions of the tetrachord are good, why not 4? Why not 5? Why not 93? If 7 is a good JI limit, why isn't 11 better? If 13 is better still, why not 17? And so on, up to infinity
This led to endless debate between just intonation theorists. Which scale was best? Which limit was most musical? The acrimony and arguments tended to drown out the music, leaving the impression that just intonation theory prior to Partch was a "Serbonian bog into which whole armies of musical-minded mathematicians and mathematically-minded musicians have disappeared without a trace." [James Clerk Maxwell, Rede Lecture, 1867]
This traditional Greek approach to just intonation dominated microtonal JI theory from the time of Ptolemy in 100 A.D. It ruled europe through Boethius circa 600 A.D. up to the time of Prosdocimus to Vicentino and Mersenne, onward to Helmholtz, Ellis and Bosanquet in the 1800s...and the obsession with Greek theories of just intonation remained very much alive and well when Harry Partch wrote his breakthrough Exposition of Monophony in 1927-1933.
Partch's "Exposition" represents a breakthrough because, for the first time, Partch reached beyond the Greek method of just intonation scale construction by string subdivision.
Instead, Partch introduced a more sophisticated way of constructing just scales. He set out the first N members of the harmonic series and multiplied them by the first N members of the subharmonic series, generating a set of (N2 - N) - 1 pitches. (If N=6, N2-N - 1 = 29) Partch called this a "tonality diamond" (because he turned the square on its side to form a diamond).
In one leap, Partch introduced an entirely new functional method of generating just intonation scales. Subsequent theorists were no longer limited to conceiving of just scales as string subdivision.; Instead, they could now view just intonation scales as cyclic groups generated by mathematical functions operating on sets of integers. (In the case of Partch's tonality diamond, the functions concerned are y = x and y = 1/x functions and the set is a sub-group of positive odd integers).
By introducing the concept of the tonality diamond, Partch immediately gave just intonation composers a rationale for their scales: Partch's diamond pitches are necessarily limited to a specific group of (N2 - N) - 1 pitches, where N is the number of integers in the generating set. For the first time, just intonation composers knew where to stop. For the first time, they had a theoretically necessary and musically coherent set of scale pitches which did not arise ex nihilio, from the theorist's whim.
Most subsequent just intonation theory flows from Partch's crucial insight. His breakthrough: the realization that just scales construction could be reformulated as mathematical functions operating on subsets of the integers. Since 1933, it has become commonplace for just intonation music theorists to speak of "generating sets" and operations performed on them.
In the case of Erv Wilson's combination product sets, the generating set is a group of positive odd integers and the function performed is the combination of N out of M of these. In the case of John Chalmers, the sets are formed from the pitches of the Dominant, Tonic and Mediant chords in a given limit and the operation performed is the union of sets. The case of my just scales, the sets are various groups of juggler numbers or gapped primes or hailstone numbers and the operations performed are various linear recursions... But in every case the essential ideas remain elaborations of Partch's basic concept.
Thus Partch is the theoretical wellspring from which a enormous amount of exciting just intonation music theory has flowed.
[3] Partch was the first just intonation composer and theorist to recognize that modulation was musically superfluous.
Prio to Partch, most of the attacks on just intonation center around the difficulty of modulation.
This "problem" crops up again and again the writings of those who sought to discredit just intonation; J. Murray Barbour, for example, ridicules erstwhile just intonation composers as "mathematicians who know no music, and musicians who know no mathematics." in his 1934 article "Just Intonation Confuted."
Again and again, critics cited the "impossibility" of modulating through just key centers. (This, since no power of a prime greater than 2 is ever equal to a power of 2.)
From the 17th century -- when Giuseppi Di Doni fought a losing and passionate battle to re-introduce just intonation in to western music -- to the 1930s, music theorists dismissed the idea of just intonation. They scoffed at the idea of composing or performing in just intonation as impractical...always because of the difficulties introduced for modulation.
Partch was the first music theorist to destroy that objection.
He recognized that the expanded musical resources of just intonation made modulation unnecessary. In the Vivian Perls interview in 1974, Tape 2, Side, Partch states: "I really didn't know at the time how tremendously variable [the musical resources within a single 1/1] were and what great potentialities there were within one tone... I just said, `Look...I'm going to start with one tone, I'm going to see what happens.' And then I remember walking along the levee of the Mississippi in New Orleans and realizing some of the great potential of just that one tone."
Partch's crucial insight? The harmonic/melodic subtleties within a single microtonal just intonation key could produce the same musical effect as modulation through equal-tempered keys.
This solved one of the most perplexing problems to bedevil just intonation composers. From the time of Bach and Froberger, european composers had used movement through a succession of keys to add zest and spice to the music. Countless western composers had delighted audiences by introducing unexpected tones and effervescent modulations.
Partch recognized that even though a just intonation composer stayed in one key, movement through different higher members of the harmonic series could provide the same function. Partch's insight offered just intonation composers a way to add the same kind of zest and spice to their music that Bach and Handel had added to theirs.
An enormously important idea. At one blow, Partch's epiphany shattered three hundred years of objections to just intonation. The purported difficulties of modulating through a succession of just key centers now became irrelevant, since a just intonation composer could achieve the same musical effects without modulation.
In practice, Partch's inspiration works extremely well. Many subsequent just intonation composers have produced exciting and dramatic music without modulating, simply by exploring the iridescent gamut of microchromatic pitches offered by the expanded resources of just intonation.
[4] Partch broke composers out of the straitjacket of thinking in terms of traditional european instruments.
The "impossibility" of just intonation in musical practice can be traced to the development of the modern orchestra and the piano.
By mass-producing musical instruments, 19th-century manufacturers not only put music within reach of the general public... They also unwittingly locked composers into twelve tone equal temperament. It is impractical to build one-of-a-kind pianos in a mass production factory. It is also impractical to tune a piano to more than 12 pitches out of a given just intonation scheme... And once one limits oneself to 12 pitches, why not stay with twelve equal pitches?
The problems grow progressively greater with woodwind and brass instruments. Since they must be "lipped" to play in tune with 12 tone equal temperament, a player needs must throw away many year of equal-tempered performance practice in order to sound just intonation pitches. And so an orchestra would have had to entirely re-learn their performance skills from zero.
String players faced the same daunting challenge (although they are used to sounding just fifths because of their Pythagorean tuning--but they are not used to sounding, for example, 17/16 intervals, or 31/17, etc.). And so it was impractical to ask performers to play just intonation composition using traditional european musical instruments.
Partch recognized this early on. He burned his 1928 just intonation string quartet in 1930. And, although an article by Bertha Knisely in 1933 in the magazine Los Angeles Saturday Night states that Partch went to New York in search of funding and craftsmen to "adapt" a trio of string instruments to his just intonation pitches, it's clear that by 1934 Partch had realized the impracticality of the idea. By the time he got his Carnegie grant in 1934 he had abandoned the idea of performing just intonation music with traditional european instruments.
Most of Partch's Carnegie grant in 1934 went into constructing his first entirely new instrument. (The adapted viola was a modification of an existing 19th century orchestral instrument.) To wit, a microtonal just intonation harmonium which he christened the Ptolemy (probably a bow to Wilfrid Perrett's just harmonium, named the Olympion).
From 1934 on, Partch diverged ever more steadily from the european tradition. Instead, Partch built a succession of just intonation psaltery and wooden/bamboo/metal percussion instruments.
By abandoning western instruments and building his own orchestra, Partch started a revolution. The entire contemporary mass movement toward homebuilt instruments can be traced back to Partch's influence. As John Chalmers has pointed out, "Harry Partch [was] an American original who singlehandedly made extended just intonation and home-built instruments not only acceptable, but virtually mandatory for musical experimenters at some stage in their careers." [Chalmers, J., "Divisions of the Tetrachord," pp. 2-3, 1993]
Partch's crucial realization?
By the late 1940s, electric power tools made it possible for a modern composer to build his own orchestra--if traditional western paradigms were thrown out.
Many scholars have credited Partch with realizing that non-western instruments were an idea whose time had come. Yet too little credit has been given Partch for his really big idea... Namely, that technology had advanced to the point where it was practical, for the first time in history, for a single person to built and maintain his own orchestra of microtonal instruments.
It is an accident of history that Partch was the first microtonal composer to come along at a point where electric-powered consumer tools and "do-it-yourself" ethos allowed a a microtonalist to "do it all" hi/rself.
While this confluence was an historical accident, chance (as Edison said) favors the prepared mind. Thus Partch's contribution as an instrument-builder is vital. The entire history of subsequent instrument-building by modern microtonal composers can be traced back to Partch's labors in the woodworking shops of the University of Wisconsin from 1948 onwards.
[5] Partch was the first microtonal composer to combine scholarship with instrument-building and composition and performance as weapons against the conventional musical orthodoxy.
Other xenharmonists proved adept as theorists, but lacked interest in composing music for their microtonal systems--for example, Mersenne, Huyghens, Helmholtz, Ellis, Bosanquet. Or they spent their entire lives building one single microtonal instrument, but never developed a convincing theoretical justification for the use of microtonal music--for example, David Ward Poole, Carl Eitz, Henry James White, Thaddeus Cahill.
Other microtonally-minded scholars excelled at interpreting and recognizing the truly alien nature of classical Greek music theory and practice--for example, Kathleen Schlesinger, Otto Gombosi, M. L. Hunt. But they did not take the next step and apply their understanding of these different musical paradigms to the problems faced by contemporary composers with the so-called "exhaustion of tonality" in the 1920s-1960s. (Like Mark Twain's death, reports of the demise of tonality in western europe during the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s appear to have been exaggerated.)
Partch was the first composer to not only re-discover the radically different nature of Greek, Babylonian, Chinese and Sumerian musical theories, but also to champion them in practice as a solution to the problems facing the contemporary composer of the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s. (Earlier, in the 1870s, George Biddell Airy had also written about the importance of the harmonic series to the basis of western music in "On Sound," but his text compromises and settles on equal temperament as the best musical solution. Hermann L. F. Helmholtz's "On the Sensations of Tone" takes the same ideas to a more radical conclusion--namely, that just intonation is theoretically superior to equal temperament. However, Helmholtz did not build large numbers of just instruments, nor did he compose or perform just intonation music. Henry Cowell also espoused non-western musical forms--but again, only in the context of the 12 tone equal tempered scale. By the time Partch finished writing "Genesis Of A Music," Colin McPhee had written extensively about Javanese musical paradigms. However, McPhee's post-1939 compositions used Balinese and Javanese musical forms forced into 12 tone equal temperament. Thus Partch remains the first modern theorist/composer to champion both non-western musical structures and non-western pitches.)
Within the western tradition, another group of microtonalists proceeded down the path of subdividing the whole-tone to obtain 24, 36, 48 and up to 96 equal tempered pitches per octave (Ivan Wychnegradsky, Julian Carrillo, Alois Haba, Areseny Avraamov). But the theoretical and musical justifications for these equal divisions of the octave proved less convincing. In truth, the main justification for quartertone music was that it wasn't serialism, faux Stravinsky, or warmed-over Wagner, and it could (theoretically) be performed by conventional orchestras using unmodified conventional instruments.
Throughout the 1920s, 1930s and 1940s, a small (yet vocal) contingent of theorists espoused 19 or 31 or 53 equal divisions. (Eivind Groven, William Piehl, Joseph Yasser, Adriaan Fokker, Thorwald Kornerup, and many others.) These tunings, however, proved extremely difficult to put into practice. Worse, once someone went to the immense time and trouble of constructing an instrument in 19 or 31 or 53, the composer usually had so much effort and time invested in that one tuning that there was no time or energy left to explore other microtonal tunings (as Ivor Darreg has pointed out).
By contrast, Partch used his scholarship to uncover a wealth of historical precedents for just intonation in musical theory and practice. Armed with the results of his research, he set forth an impressive argument for both the historical and practical superiority of just intonation.
Prior to Partch, exponents of just intonation relied mainly on vague numerology, abstruse mathematics, or smoke and mirrors. The work of Hans Keyser is lamentably typical in this regard, although the tradition goes back to Boethius.
Alas, numerological tirades have proven a remarkably poor justification for taking the time and trouble to build just intonation instruments and compose and perform just intonation music. So it was particularly important that Partch changed the nature of the debate.
For the first time, he linked the precedent of Greek musical theory with the dilemma introduced by the ever-increasing chromaticism of 12-tone equal tempered music by the end of the 19th century--and put his ideas into musical practice.
[6] Partch was the first composer to recognize that western note-names and conventional western notation could not adequately represent music in extended just intonation.
ALthough Hermann Helmholtz, Alexander James Ellis and Professor Theodor Wittstein of the University of Jena all proposed just intonation tunings between 1875 and 1888, these theorists consistently relied on conventional western notation. Daggers, slashes and apostrophes were used to denote a different "type" of a or b or c, but none of these theorists took the crucial step of recognizing that just intonation (once extended) produces pitches which cannot be adequately described by the conventional diatonic western scale.
The pitch 11/8 above 1/1, for instance, is neither an F nor an F# above C; it is an entirely new interval which cannot be described in conventional western terms.
Although Wittstein, in the pamphlet "Grundzu"ge der mathematisch-physikalischen Theorie der Musik," set forth two different 5-limit just intonation tunings--one with 19 tones to the octave, the other with 30 tones to the octave--he failed to push his sytem to its logical limits.
Partch carried his system of first 29, then 55, then 37, then 41, then 43 just pitches to the end point demanded by his extension of just intonation--namely, a tuning system which contains pitches indescribable by standard western notation.
Partch's use of ratios rather than conventional musical notes is an important breakthrough. It encouraged future generations of microtonal composers to abandon the strictures of conventional western notation. Without realizing it, composers often limit themselves by using a method of notation which inherently limits the kind of music they are capable of imagining--Partch's notation shattered one of the most important of these limitations, and allowed composers to think directly in terms of members of the harmonic series, rather than note names like "a" or "c."
CONCLUSION
Partch's legacy comes down to us in the form of his music, his writings, his goals and his ideas.
Ironically, his musical instruments probably offer the least promising avenue for contemporary composers. Like it or not, the brutal reality remains that--ever since the start of the industrial revolution--products which require human labor have risen steadily in price.
Alas, live acoustic concerts are products which demand enormous amount of skilled labor. Thus they are slowly but surely going the way of the dodo and the carrier pigeon.
With the introduction of analog electronics in the 1950s and digital technology in the 1980s, subsequent generations of microtonal composers have progressively departed from the methods and techniques of Harry Partch. As the rain forests vanish, wood grows ever more scarce. As oil prices rise, metal becomes ever more costly to smelt and refine. Synthetic composites lie at the heart of modern materials science, and they increasingly replace traditional materials. Thus it seems likely that future performances of Partch's music, generations hence, will not take place on his instruments. Once the wood rots and the metal corrodes, performers in the latter half of the next century will likely produce Partch's timbres on synthetic digital controllers crafted to look like Partch's instruments. Physical modelling synthesis will allow uncannily exact duplication of Partch's timbres, but without the expense of instrument repair or the inherent inaccuracy in tuning due to changes in humidity, etc.
Too, economic constraints make it unlikely that any future microtonal composer will build and train performers to use a large orchestra of wooden microtonal instruments. (Glenn Branca has already given up. "It was beyond my means. I had to build my own instruments, for god's sake. Or pay to have them built! With the orchestra, you hand them the paper and you go home. It's not just a matter of being easier, it's a bit more realistic." [Twomey, Chris. "Glenn Branca's Sound-Field of Dreams," MusicWorks 66, Fall 1996, pp. 18-22])
The tab for the 1979 concert of Partch's music in Europe came to $100,000.00 U.S. This is serious sugar. As the industrialized world's population ages, there will be less and less money for the arts, education, and anything but medical care for geezers. As a result, Partch's own music will seldom be heard live by a mass audience in the second millenium. Instead, Partch's compositions will probably reach future audiences in the form of digital recordings and computer-based interactive multimedia events--as, for example, in the web page of the British Harry Partch Society or the upcoming CRI CD set.
Some of Partch's ideas about just intonation are also now known to be incorrect.
Modern research into psychoacoustics from the 1950s onward (with the aid of digital computers to generate and analyze sound) has systematically disproven some of Partch's claims in Genesis of A Music about the human ear's purported "preference" for just intonation.
"In 1987, IPO issued a wonderful disc by Houtsma, Rossing, and Wagenaars entitled Auditory Demonstration. Tracks 58 through 61 illustrated the effects of a moderate stretching (octave 2.1 rather than 2.0) of scale frequencies and/or partial spacings. Part of a Bach chorale is played with synthesized tones. When neither scale nor partial frequencies are stretched, we hear the intended harmonic effects. When the scale is unstretched but the partial frequencies are stretched, the music sounds awful. Clearly, melodic intervals in the ratios of small whole numbers are in themselves insufficient to give Western harmonic effects."[Pierce, J. R., "The Science of Musical Sound," 1992, 2nd. ed., pg. 92]
The upshot of these developments?
As a microtonal composer in contact with many others of my ilk, it's clear to me that modern post-Partch microtonalists have typically not followed Partch's lead in carpentering orchestras of wood instruments. Instead, just intonation composers post-1983 (the dawn of MIDI) typically use computers and digital synthesizers, rather than lathes and jigsaws and routers.
These are details.
The essential influence of Partch's work and ideas remains profound.
While most contemporary microtonalists have not followed Partch's lead in the small things, this does not in any way diminish Harry's influence.
True, the means he used to realize his particular type of just intonation music have to a large extent been superseded by newer technologies. For example, the reed organs Partch picked up second-hand for a pittance are now fabulously expensive antiques. Another example: the plexiglas vats from which Partch constructed his cloud chamber bells are now hard to find, since cloud chambers aren't used much in physics labs nowadays. Modern high energy physics experiments don't use cloud chambers because high-energy particles have long paths in air--paths too long to be usefully recorded by cloud chambers. Thus, most of the money in particle physics today goes into large accelerators lined with digital detectors hooked up to huge computers, not into cloud chambers.
And even ardent Partch purists like Dean Drummond now use multi-track digital tape recording to generate an artificial "orchestra" of Partch instruments from a smaller group of actual instruments. So the advance of technology continues, rendering Partch's methods ever more obsolete. Nonethless, Harry's ideals and basic inspirations still light the way for subsequent generations of microtonalists.
And so Partch's basic goals continue to energize modern just intonation theory and practice. Not only just intonation composers, but all modern microtonalists, owe a vast debt to Partch's dedication, insights, and musical genius.