I tell my students every year when I get to Harry Partch in the Music since 1945 class that the day is my vanity day - a chance for me to spend a day reveling in a composer I find endlessly fascinating. This morning, I was searching on youtube looking for a specific video when I discovered this:
That's right, the Beck song I blogged about last year that grew out of a feud between the lead singer of The Fiery Furnaces and Radiohead has a video. Most of the images are taken from the Partch documentary The Dreamer That Remains and is full of vintage Partch. Hope you enjoy as much as I did.
Looking for a little light reading? Have access to online journals through your local library or institution of higher learning? Then you should check out my new article "Rekindling Ancient Values: The Influence of Chinese Music and Aesthetics on Harry Partch" in the Journal of the Society for American Music. The cover features my picture of Partch's Chromelodeon and is full of fun facts like Partch's experiences in San Francisco Chinese theaters. You can read the abstract and more about the article on the journal's webpage.
It isn't often that the main subject of my scholarly inquiry ends up at the center of a feud between rock musicians. So imagine my glee when I discovered this single this morning: That's right, Beck has posted a song called "Harry Partch" over on his website. Granted that listening to it he borrows from minimalism as he does from Partch, but he's got some sounds that mimic Partch's plectrum instruments and he plays around in a justly tuned toolbox.
Evidently the single was inspired by an argument between Radiohead and The Fiery Furnaces. Radiohead recently released a single called "Harry Patch" in honor to the oldest WWI British Soldier who died this summer. The lead singer of Furnaces responded:
"'Oh, please listen to our new song about Harry Patch'. You brand yourself by brazenly and arbitrarily associating yourself with things that you know people consider cool. That is bogus. That's a put-on. That's a branding technique, and Radiohead have their brand that they're popular and intelligent, so they have a song about Harry Patch. How's the song? Is it 48 notes to the octave? What does it have to do with Harry Patch? Oh, my wife says I am being very rude. She doesn't like me insulting Radiohead. She's afraid they will send their lackeys through the computer to sabotage us. But they needn't worry -- we are a band that sabotages ourselves."
Sam is certainly on the mend from his recent bout of all-encompassing-kid-sickness. His fever has been down for two days, his spirits have been up for one, and we're back to chasing him around, trying to figure out what to do with this kid.
The fever seems to have knocked something loose in his head or jump started a new developmental leap because since he recovered, he's been obsessed with stories. He's always loved for us to read to him, but now he sits and reads the books to himself, making up stories as he goes along. And last night, the stories spilled over to dinner.
I was telling Joy about my most recent work at school, which invariably involves Harry Partch, when we noticed that Sam was carrying on with an outlandish story even though we were paying him no mind. While I was heating up supper, he had played happily on the kitchen floor with a measuring cup, a spoon, an old spice jar, and a bowl of pita chips. He transfered the chips to the measuring cup, then crushed a few with his spoon, which he then used to transfer said crushed chips into the jar, which he then shook out into the bowl.
You know, he was cooking.
Later, while eating, he was still fascinated by the process of chip movement and so, picking up on my conversation about Harry Partch, began relating how Harry Partch had come over and needed to get some chips but they were broken....
When he realized we were suddenly silent and listening he slyly raised his eyes, grinned, and stopped telling the story. Taking our cue, we continued talking, but were really listening. The story continued with a bird that flew into the kitchen and crunched up the pita chips and then began spilling the chips, but Sam told the bird that, no, he shouldn't spill the chips, but then the bird said he wanted to come and eat with Sam and...
Then the story stopped and Sam went back to stuffing his face. He obviously knows how to start a story, but hasn't fully learned how to stop a story. Or how not to leave plot threads hanging. I mean, what ever happened to Harry Partch?
You may recall that last fall I posted on the glories of the uncyclopedia and specifically their entry on Harry Partch. I still haven't added that last book in the series yet, but it turns out that I might not need to. Around the same time I was sharing with you the joys of mistaking Harrys Partch and Potter, it turns out that someone else was taking the joke to the nth degree. That's right, another blogger created his own series of Harry Partch books with different titles than those found in the uncyclopedia:
Harry Partch and the Sorcerer’s Apprentice (in the EU it is known as "Harry Partch and the Philosopher Symphony") Harry Partch and the Torture Chamber Music Harry Partch and the Prisoner of Ausdrucksvoll Harry Partch and the Guitar of Feuermann Harry Partch and the Order of Sharps and Flats Harry Partch and the Half Note Prince Harry Partch and the Deathly Hockets
If the titles alone don't make you want to go read his treatment of the books, I don't know what will.
As you might have noticed by now, many of Partch's instruments went through several versions, creating a bit of confusion regarding their numbering. We've seen the different Adapted Guitars and Chromelodeons; today's instrument has a less twisted history, but still comes in many flavors.
The Kithara is, along with the Chromelodeon, one of Partch’s oldest instrumental conceptions.In 1934, he traveled to England under the Carnegie Corporation in order to study tuning at the British Library and attempt to develop a justly-tuned instrument. That fall he met Kathleen Schlesinger, a musicologist and ancient Greek scholar who had built several replicas of Greek instruments and written about her findings in the Encyclopedia Britannica. Partch was ecstatic to make her acquaintance and eager to see the Kithara she had constructed out of wood from an orange box using the pictures on Greek vases as her guide. They met for tea, shared sketches of instruments, and Partch left wanting to construct his own Kithara.
He was attracted to the instrument because of its Greek origins and the knowledge of Greek tuning he gained that fall in the British Library. In 1938, he built his first Kithara, an alto version of the instrument, and began using it in his Americana compositions almost immediately. It was a large instrument, almost six feet tall, and served him well until 1952, when he restrung and retuned it. In the process of adapting the Kithara I, he realized he wanted more bass resonance, and so, in 1954 in Sausalito, California, he built the seven-foot tall Kithara II as a bass instrument.
Both Kithara I and Kithara II use seventy-two guitar strings arranged vertically in twelve groups of six strings each.Eight of these hexads are tuned to fixed pitches, while the remaining four use moveable pyrex rods to change the pitches during performance, resulting in a sound similar to that of a slide guitar.
By 1972, he decided to replicate the Kithara I in order to make a stronger, more playable instrument that had increased resonance. As he often remarked, he didn't have 200 years of manufacturing know-how behind him as piano makers do, so he needed a little trial and error to sort things out.
This excerpt is from Partch's And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma and features the Kithara II accompanied by the Marimba Eroica. You'll notice the Kithara II because of the alternation of delicate plucked strings that swoop and swerve thanks to the pyrex rods along with sweeping chords along the hexads:
I've long been aware of the distinct similarities of my studies of Harry Partch and my love of the Harry Potter novels. Many times I've stumbled and used one name for the other, most humorously in my graduate class one day. Well, I've learned I'm not alone - enter Uncyclopedia, the content-free wiki that deflates the pretensions of Wikipedia to authoritative knowledge with blistering acuity. Their entry on Harry Partch is a masterpiece of a mash-up between these two cultural icons. My only problem with it? No one has edited it with a name and synopsis of the final book. Harry Partch and the Deathly Harmonic Canons? Harry Partch and the Death of Hallowed Music? Add your own ideas in the comments, and I'll post the best along with a synopsis to the Uncyclopedia.
Today's instrument is one of Partch's first forays into the world of percussion. When he was presenting his music around New York City in 1943 and 1944, one of the most frequent criticisms he received was that his music lacked rhythmic interest. Many seemed to feel that Partch concentrated too hard on pitch to the exclusion of rhythm.
So when he arrived in Madison, Wisconsin, Partch set to work adding some "rhythmic interest" by creating percussion instruments. One of the first fruits of this new focus was the diamond marimba.
Before describing that instrument, I need to make a slight detour. One of Partch's great contributions to microtonal theory was his formulation of the tonality diamond. In the diamond, he took his starting pitch (a G for him) and built chords of six pitches above it following the overtone series to the 11th limit (which he called otonalities) and then built chords of six pitches flipping the overtone series and going down (which he called utonalities). He then arranged these in a diamond shape with the starting pitch (that G) in the middle and the otonalities moving up towards the right and the utonalities moving down towards the right, resulting in 29 pitches altogether. It looks like this:
(Here's a website where you can listen to the various pitches.)
Right up the middle, you can see the same pitch rendered in the various limits - 1/1, 3/3, 5/5, etc. Recognize this shape? Yes, the diamond marimba is nothing more than the tonality diamond come to life with a few modifications for ease of playing. Partch worked with Warren E. Gilson in Madison to create the instrument, making the blocks out of Brazilian rosewood and Pernambuco, mounting them on thin foam rubber, placing resonators of Brazilian bamboo below the blocks, and holding the entire thing together on a stand of white pine with bronze posts supporting it.
Here's the beginning of Partch's song "The Waterfall." You'll hear the diamond marimba make runs as well as the sweeping chords that are its most distinguishing characteristic:
The Chromelodeon is one of my favorite of Partch's instruments because it is an adaptation of a keyboard instrument, it has a wonderful name, and because it is just so darn colorful.
The Chromelodeon is actually one of Partch's earliest conceptions for an instrument; when he was studying in England in 1934, he drew up plans to build a justly-tuned keyboard instrument he called the Ptolemy. It was a reed organ with a typewriter keyboard and he had a mock-up built, but the instrument broke during shipping back to the states and he abandoned it in favor of the Chromelodeon.
There are actually three Chromelodeons:
Chromelodeon I - a six-octave melodeon (hence the final part of the name) that he obtained in Chicago for experimental purposes. He turned it to play all the chromatic "colors" of his scale (hence the first part of the name) and it has six stops and a series of sub-bass keys to augment the sound it is capable of producing. The keyboard is color coded with bright primary colors to represent the various harmonic relationships between pitches. This was the instrument he used in his early Americana works.
Old Chromelodeon II - originally a chapel organ with a five octave range and four planes of keys on the keyboard. This doubling of keys made it easy to play Partch's music, but he lacked the skills to service the organ and abandoned it in 1949.
Chromelodeon II - a full piano keyboard of 88 keys drew Partch to this version in 1950. It is another reed organ, but Partch tuned it to all the unusual tunings he used in Oedipus, Revelation in Courthouse Park, and Delusion of the Fury so he didn't have to constantly retune the Chromelodeon I.
The sound of all three is as you would expect - imagine being in an old country church singing hymns to a pump organ and you have the sound in your head. But what was amazing to me about Partch's use of the instrument was his ability to make it sound so fresh and new and unlike you might expect. Here's a clip from U.S. Highball, where he often makes the Chromelodeon sound like a train:
Today's instruments are a bit confusing because Partch shifted the roman numerals he used to name them during his life.
Partch bought and altered his first Adapted Guitar (pictured here thanks to Corporeal.com) in 1934 and used it to compose and perform his Americana works Barstow and U.S. Highball. He fitted the guitar with high, stainless-steel frets on a brass plate that was screwed into the neck to aid in tuning the guitar to just intonation.
In 1945, he adapted a guitar with a smooth and narrow fingerboard by adding pinheads and brass rivets and filing them down to be equal to the the fingerboard's level.
That same year, Partch adapted a Hawaiian guitar, complete with a plastic rod to make gliding pitches possible. While the six strings of the first two guitars were tuned in three pairs of octaves (2/1), each a third (5/4) apart, the ten strings of the third guitar are tuned according to one of Partch's hexads.
Obviously he couldn't call all three instruments "Adapted Guitar," so he started calling the second guitar Adapted Guitar I, the Hawaiian guitar Adapted Guitar II, and the original guitar Adapted Guitar III. But in 1956, he gave up on the second guitar and renamed the original guitar Adapted Guitar I.
Confused? I thought so. All you need to remember is that Partch ended up with two guitars - Adapted Guitar I, which was the original and has six strings, and Adapted Guitar II, which is based on a Hawaiian guitar and has ten strings.
Here's an excerpt from Partch's Barstow performed on Adapted Guitar I:
My lack of posting here and instead applying my writing muse to my book has paid off. In the past two weeks, I've managed to rough out one complete chapter of my book on Harry Partch. I'll keep going tomorrow and see how far I can get in the what remains to me of the month, but for now I'm going to rest easy for a bit.
Of course, all this writing has meant I've not gotten my hands on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. I have to content myself with my read-through of Half-Blood Prince in preparation for the new book.
This year I'll be teaching my class on Music since 1945 again, and I've already started collecting wonderful resources to use, like this website that has recordings of the bird calls Messiaen used to compose Réveil des oiseaux along with cute little pictures of the birds and this one that automatically generates your twelve-tone matrix from a tone row. There is an incredible website where you can play Harry Partch's instruments, and Corporeal Meadows has good information on many of his instruments, but I haven't found a resource that suits my purposes and lists all his instruments with pictures and short commentary.
So I'm making it myself.
Over the next few months I'll slowly profile Partch's Instrumentarium so that hopefully, come next spring, I'll have a complete list ready for use. And hopefully, since many of you have wondered about Partch's music, you'll enjoy this little taste of the scholarly work I do as well.
Adapted Viola (photo by Fred Lyon)
A combination of the viola and cello, the Adapted Viola was Partch’s first attempt at adapting an instrument to just intonation.He created the fingerboard in 1928, but it wasn't until two years later while in New Orleans that he hit upon the idea of putting it on a viola's body.
The instrument consists of an average-size viola soundbox with a neck and fingerboard that is six inches longer than usual.The tuning pegs are from a cello, as are all the strings except the first, which is a double-length violin first string.Instead of frets, the fingerboard is marked with a series of brads hammered in beside the strings to mark the various pitches, 37 to the octave at this point in Partch's career.As you can see, the Adapted Viola is played with a bow and the instrument is held between the legs.The Adapted Viola’s range is expanded from the traditional viola to rest between the cello’s and the violin’s.
Partch's first large-scale work in just intonation, The Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po, was written for this instrument and solo voice and is hauntingly beautiful. Here's a bit of the beginning of "A Midnight Farewell:"
The Adapted Viola started Partch on his instrument building path, and it remained central to his music through the 1940s.
I've just discovered the most enjoyable website of the day. MyHeritage takes a picture you upload, runs it through its magic machine, and matches it to a likely celebrity. It's like casting your own bio-pic of your favorite people. Just for fun, and because my mind is consumed with the Harry Partch paper I'm writing, I decided to run the four composers I taught in my American Mavericks class this past spring semester. And, as the immortal Dave Berry would remark, I'm not making this up.
First in our lineup is Mr. Charles Ives. Connecticut's state composer evidently looks like David Carradine. No word yet on when Mr. Ives will be showing us his kung-fu moves, but I'm sure the composer who once remarked "I don't write music for sissy ears" has some moves in him.
Next up is composer of the whole world of music, Mr. Henry Cowell. Evidently, Cowell would work well in a superhero movie because he looks like none other than Sir Ian McKellen.
Amazingly, the recognition software knew our next composer, Mr. John Cage. But an equal match for himself was Gary Busey. Is it the hair or the grin?
Finally, there is good old Harry Partch. I figured Kenny Rogers might come up or someone else with an impressive beard or mustache. No, tonight the role of Harry Partch will be played by none other than David Cronenberg, director of Videodrome.
Go ahead, give it a try. The whole process is endlessly fascinating.
