MYTHS AND FACTS ABOUT HARRY PARTCH
by
B. McLaren
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; 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. [Source: Bob Gilmore's Phd Thesis on the early music of Harry Partch; Inova Enclosure 2 CD set liner notes; Genesis of a Music, 2nd Ed. 1974]
[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 quite well during his lifetime, and his CRI recordings are some of 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. 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 perfectionism 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. [Source: Many newspaper clippings announcing concerts of Partch's music, many letters by Partch to and from the Harry Partch Foundation; Interview with Betty Freeman in Conoisseur magazine, 1983]
[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 (a fact corroborated by John Chalmers, who states that he saw Partch set up 13-limit ratios on his harmonic canons during at least one occasion), and 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). 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. [Source: Partch's own words in the 1967 recording made for the American Society of Composers, available on Inova Enclosure 2 4-CD set]
[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: A recognizable 12-note scale can be found inside Partch's 43-note monophonic fabric of 1948 as published in Genesis of A Music.
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 between Partch's scale and the 12-note chromatic scale on G occurs in the tritone--an interval about whose purity few listeners are likely to complain. Excluding the tritone, the next largest discrepancy is 15.64 cents, about 1/7 of a semitone, or 1/84 of an octave.
"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.
[Proof: Kronos' quartet's performance of "Barstow," also the CD "Weird Nightmare" featuring music of Charlie Mingus played on Partch's instruments]
[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 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. 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. [Source: Performance list at the end of Genesis of a Music, 2nd ed., 1974; also many clippings from the New York Times, etc. announcing Partch performances ]
[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; then, in 1930-1933, he composed for unfretted solo string instruments with female vocal accompaniment; then he experimented with a string trio in just intonation in late 1933 and early 1934; in 1934 he travelled to England and commissioned a just intonation harmonium with a generalized keyboard; in 1941-2 Partch built a just intonation guitar and several percussion instruments. 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.
Moreover, most of Partch's theories about just intonation and Corporeality 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. [Source: The differences between Partch's 1933 Exposition of Monophony, the 1942 document "Presenting the Music of Harry Partch..." the 1949 first edition of Genesis of A Music and the 1974 2nd edition]
[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. [Source: Partch scores from 1948 to the 1970s. Note in particular the difference in rhythmic complexity between the Li Po Songs or the 2 Studies on Ancient Greek Scales and the Plectra & Percussion Dances]
[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. "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 agressively experimental electronic direction: he first practiced, then recorded, a series of one-minute improvisations. Then, while playing these improvs back, he improvised a second part and recorded the result. Then he transcribed the results to produce the published score of "Petals." In some cases, Partch modified and re-recorded the scores in order to allow a number of the duets to be overlaid as quartets. None of this would have been possible without modern magnetic tape recording technology.
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."
Partch's extensive use of analog tape recording overdub technology is one of the least-known yet most important aspects of his compositional process. [Source: Partch's own liner notes for "The Music of Harry Partch." He states specifically that "2 duets were turned into quartets with the aid of electronic synthesis." What Partch means here ccan be clearly heard on the CD of "Petals." Each of the 2 stereo tracks is an independent monophonic recording: Partch recorded one instrumental like into a monophonic open-reel recorder, then played it back and accompanied himself while recording with another open-reel recorder. The entire "When Petals Fell..." recording is produced by open-reel recorder overdubs.]
[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.
[Source: Partch's own remarks in Genesis of A Music, 2nd ed., 1974, to the effect that "Monophony's Kithara was inspired by [Kathless Schlesinger's] instruments..." and the extensive notes of his investigations of British just intonation and his contacts with the British JI community recorded in the appendices to Genesis, 2nd ed.]
[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 musical history. 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, and 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. [Source: George Biddell Airy, On Sound and Atmospheric Vibrations, 1872; Hermann Helmholtz, Tonempfindungen, English translation with foreword & afterword by A. J. Ellis, 1885; Shohei Tanaka, In Gebeit der Reine Stimmung, 1890; Wilfrid Perrett, "On Some Questions of Music Theory," 1923; Kathleen Schlesinger, The Greek Aulos, 1939, etc., on and on and on and on.]
[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; 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..."). Improvisation was an integral part of Partch's compositional method.
[Sources: Earls, "Harry Partch: Verses In Preparation for `Delusion of the Fury.' Also Ben Johnston's testimony that the vocal parts for Partch's 17 Li Po Songs were first improvised, then later written down. Also testimony from John Chalmers to the effect that he personally saw Partch playing his instruments while listening to headphones of previous recordings of his performances, comparing one improvisation to another.]