Harry Partch Musical Achievements



Harry Partch Musical Achievements

Introduction

Harry Partch (1901-1974), one of the greatest and most individualistic composers of all time, was not only a great composer, but an innovative theorist who broke through the shackles of many centuries of one tuning system for all of Western music, a music instrument inventor who created dozens of incredible instruments for the performance of his music, and a musical dramatist who created his own texts and dance/theatre extravaganzas based on everything from Greek mythology to his own experiences as a hobo. Between 1930 and 1972, he created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century: music dramas, dance theater, multi-media extravaganzas, vocal music and chamber music---mostly all performed on the instruments he built himself1 .

Musical Contribution of Harry Partch

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 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 best2 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.

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. 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 Partch3 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.

Partch's "Exposition" represents a breakthrough because, for ...