Harry Partch

• Born: June 24, 1901
• Birthplace: Oakland, California
• Died: September 3, 1974
• Place of death: San Diego, California

American classical composer

Partch was notable for composing almost exclusively for instruments he designed and built and for employing unique melodic and harmonic ideas based upon the subdivision of the musical octave into microtonal intervals.

The Life

Born in California to parents who had been missionaries in China, Harry Partch spent formative years in Arizona and New Mexico. As a teenager, he took an interest in music and theater, and while in high school he worked as an organist and pianist in a film theater in Albuquerque. After the death of his father in 1919, Partch moved with his mother to Los Angeles, where he briefly studied music at the University of Southern California. While performing and teaching piano in the following years, Partch often found work as a copy editor.

Partch moved frequently in his twenties and thirties while pursuing varied music projects. The award of a grant in 1934 allowed him to study in Europe for six months. Returning to the United States, he worked as a transient laborer in the West for eight months, and then he settled in California. Beginning in 1941, Partch lived in several cities in the Eastern United States, supported by research grants and fees from his lectures and performances.

In the 1950’s and early 1960’s, Partch was associated with the University of Wisconsin and the University of Illinois, where most of his efforts were directed toward instrument-building and the creation of music to be performed at the schools. A series of recordings and documentary and experimental films were made during these years and later in California, where he lived from 1962 until his death in 1974.

The Music

Partch’s career was in many respects unorthodox, largely because of the novelty of his ideas and the uncompromising ways he advanced them during a career lasting nearly half a century. His early training, though not extensive, seems to have made him a promising pianist. However, in 1923, his reading of On the Sensations of Tone (1863) by the German physicist Hermann von Helmholtz sparked his interest in the role of acoustics in music, and it led him to abandon the dominant tonal framework of equal temperament. Partch was convinced that this system of dividing the musical octave into twelve equal steps was a fundamental mistake for European music, one that had led to a loss of musical integrity.

Over the next three decades, Partch experimented in his compositions with alternative scales with varying numbers of notes, later settling on a scale of forty-three notes to the octave. His intonation schemes belong to the category known as just intonation, which, though hardly unknown, was little used in Western music. Partch also created the means of performing works composed in just intonation, and through the years he adapted existing instruments, he developed and built new instruments, and he trained musical collaborators in their use.

Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po. Among the composer’s early works making use of an altered instrument—in this case, an adapted viola—are settings of verses by Li Po, a Chinese poet of the eighth century. Like other Partch compositions, this was written over a period of years. The chronology of the composer’s body of work is complex, with some compositions evolving over ten years or more and others being revised long after they were initially completed. Moreover, many works were not performed until years after their completion, with fewer still being recorded until Partch was much better established in the musical scene.

Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing in Barstow, California. A new phase of Partch’s work began with this composition for baritone and adapted guitar. While hitchhiking in California’s Mojave Desert in 1940, Partch had written down the humorous and wistful inscriptions he discovered on a highway railing, and the following year he composed the work over a period of five weeks. Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing in Barstow, California is among Partch’s most accessible works, and it is cited as an excellent example of the composer’s grasp of a specifically American cultural sensibility.

Oedipus. In 1934 Partch’s wish to take up the theme of King Oedipus led him to visit the Irish poet William Butler Yeats to discuss the ancient Greek tragedy and to visually notate Yeats’s voice reciting his translation of Sophocles’ work. After many years of gestation, Partch’s Oedipus was presented to sold-out audiences at Mills College in Oakland, California, in March, 1952. This opera-scaled work is a fusion of the composer’s musical and theoretical ideas, and it also marks the full integration of his instrument-building activities with his theatrical ambitions.

Delusion of the Fury. A major work of Partch’s final years, Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual Dream and Delusion was conceived in late 1964 as a two-act theater work, and it was composed during the next fifteen months. The scenario deals with human anger and reconciliation, with the first act being, in Partch’s words, “intensely serious,” and the second “highly farcical.” The work’s subtitle suggests Partch’s goal of creating an intense form of ritual theater that bridges individual technical disciplines and his need to address profound issues of life, with its conflicts, ironies, and aspirations. Delusion of the Fury premiered with great critical success in early 1969 at the University of California, Los Angeles, and it was commercially recorded, bringing Partch a growing national and international audience.

Musical Legacy

Partch’s approach to the fusion of music and theater is recognized as original and visionary, but his strictly musical influence has been constrained by the difficulty of authentically reproducing his work in performance, as Partch’s original instruments are difficult to access and few reproductions have been made.

The acoustic, vocal, and compositional elements of Partch’s musical style are so closely bound to his approach to intonation and microtonality that his work is likely to remain of limited appeal to most listeners. Nevertheless, successful performances of his work continue, and the integrity of Partch’s artistic vision attracts interest in him as a cultural figure as well as a musician.

Bibliography

Blackburn, Philip. Enclosure 3: Harry Partch. St. Paul, Minn.: American Composers Forum, 1997. This book is a compilation of material from the Harry Partch Archive, including manuscripts, concert programs, photographs, and notes by the composer.

Gilmore, Bob. Harry Partch: A Biography. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1998. Comprehensive and readable, this biography is a scholarly work and also a kind of elegy for Partch’s difficult life. A well-chosen selection of photographs provides essential impressions of Partch’s instruments and environments.

McGeary, Thomas. The Music of Harry Partch: A Descriptive Catalog. Brooklyn, N.Y.: Institute for Studies in American Music, 1991. This documentary volume serves as an anthology and a guide, and it has several brief essays aimed at the nonspecialist reader.

Partch, Harry. Genesis of a Music. New York: Da Capo Press, 1972. This volume first appeared in 1949, the result of the composer’s musical investigations and experiments dating back to the 1920’s. Photographs, drawings, and diagrams reveal the depth and complexity of Partch’s musical thought.

Ross, Alex. “Off the Rails: A Rare Performance of Harry Partch’s Oedipus.” The New Yorker 81, no. 9 (April 18, 2005): 199-201. Ross, a sympathetic critic, writes that Partch’s opera “is staggeringly strange, but also achingly beautiful.”

Principal Works

chamber work:Castor and Pollux, 1952.

orchestral work:And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, 1966.

performance works (music, choreography, and libretto): Oedipus, 1952 (text by William Butler Yeats; based on the play by Sophocles); The Bewitched, 1957; Windsong, 1958 (revised as Daphne of the Dunes, 1967); Revelation in the Courthouse Park, 1961; Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual Dream and Delusion, 1969.

vocal works:Potion Scene from “Romeo and Juliet,” 1932, revised 1955 (text by William Shakespeare); Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po, 1932; The Letter: A Depression Message from a Hobo Friend, 1943; Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California, 1944; San Francisco: A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties, 1944; U.S. Highball: A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip, 1944; Yankee Doodle Fantasy, 1944; “I’m Very Happy to Be Able to Tell You About This . . .,” 1945; Two Settings from “Finnegan’s Wake,” 1945 (text by James Joyce); Sonata Dementia, 1949 (revised as Ring Around the Moon, 1950); Even Wild Horses (Dance Music for an Absent Drama), 1953 (text from Arthur Rimbaud’s A Season in Hell); Water! Water!, 1962.

writings of interest:Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos, 1936; Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, Its Roots, and Its Fulfillment, 1949.