American Composer Harry Partch
Twentieth-Century Experimentation with Just Intonation
If you are looking for a sound that is slightly bizarre but always fascinating, investigate the music of Harry Partch.
Twentieth-century composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) may have lived a few decades after the nineteenth-century's colossus of German opera, but he certainly employed Wagner's aesthetic of "holistic" art: drama, music, set design, dance, poetry, and literature all combined into one encompassing sensory experience. And both pushed the capabilities of the orchestra to achieve a greater instrumental color.
But the comparisons between Wagner and Partch stop there. While Wagner expanded the orchestra to create denser and richer harmonic palettes, Partch stripped the orchestra down, his sparse textures highlighting the diverse timbres he exploits. Perhaps a more accurate description is to say that he simply rebuilt an orchestra from scratch.
Not above creating his own instruments if the ones at hand didn't suit his purposes, Partch built several percussive ones that could easily double as modern sculptures. Even cloud-chamber bowls (recruited from early particle physics labs) were put to musical use.
Partch drew his musical language from Chinese, Native American, Jewish, Christian, African, and rural American sources, fusing them together with experiments in just intonation. Attributed to Pythagoras, just intonation tunes pitches based on the ratios of sound wave vibrations to each other. Over the centuries, just intonation was modified to produce sweeter, richer harmonic intervals. By the opening of the twentieth-century, Western harmony was firmly rooted in equal temperament, which tweaked the ratios in order to allow movement from one tonal center to another. It is to the earlier system of tuning that Partch returned, and some of his instruments were built especially to produce the sounds of his 43-note octave scale.
Partch continues the experiments blazed by other twentieth-century composers such as Charles Ives, Henry Cowell, and Edgar Varèse. However, the degree to which he synthesized and pushed a whole host of art forms to new edges makes his music extraordinarily distinct.
Introductory listening: The Collection of Harry Partch, Vol. 1. This includes Cloud-Chamber Music and will give you the opportunity to hear some of Partch's unique sound colors.
