The American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, derived from the natural Harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in the standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals. The tonal system Partch used has 43 tones to the octave. To play this music he invented and built many new instruments, with names such as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl.
Partch called himself "a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry".[1] The path towards Partch's use of many unique instruments was a gradual one.[2] Partch began in the 1920s using traditional instruments, and wrote a string quartet in just intonation (now lost).[3][4] He had his first specialized instrument built for him in 1930—the Adapted Viola, a viola with a cello's neck fitted on it.[3]
He re-tuned the reeds of several reed organs and labeled the keys with a color code. The first was called the Ptolemy, in tribute to the ancient music theorist Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose musical scales included ratios of the 11-limit, as Partch's did. The others were called Chromelodeons, a portmanteau of chrome (meaning "color") and melodeon.[citation needed]
Most of Partch's works used the instruments he created exclusively. Some works made use of unaltered standard instruments such as oboe, clarinet, or cello, and Revelation in the Courtyard Park (1960) used an unaltered small wind band.[1]
In 1991, Dean Drummond became the custodian of the original Harry Partch instrument collection until his death in 2013.[5][6] In 1999 the instruments began a residency at Montclair State University in Montclair, New Jersey which lasted until November 2014 when they moved to the University of Washington in Seattle, where they remained until 2019. They are currently under the care of Charles Corey.[7]
Those who have duplicated partial sets of Partch instruments include John Schneider, whose West Coast ensemble includes replicas of the Kithara, Surrogate Kithara, Cloud-Chamber Bowls, Adapted Guitars, Adapted Viola, Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, Chromelodeon, and two Harmonic Canons.[citation needed]
A complete set of replica instruments was commissioned by Ensemble Musikfabrik in 2012 and built by German percussionist Thomas Meixner. They were used in performances of Partch's works including his large-scale theater piece, Delusion of the Fury including at The Ruhrtriennale: International Festival of the Arts.[8][9]
Adapted Guitars
Adapted Guitar I
Adapted Guitar II
Partch built two steel-string guitars: the six-string Adapted Guitar I, and the ten-string Adapted Guitar II (played with a slide). Partch first started experimenting with such instruments in 1934, and the Adapted Guitar I first appeared in Barstow in 1941.[10] In 1945, he began using amplification for both instruments.[10]
Adapted Viola
Adapted Viola
Tuning of the four strings of Harry Partch's Adapted Viola. It also shows the ratios in which each string is tuned (G=1/1).
The Adapted Viola is the earliest extant instrument created by Partch. It is made from a cello fingerboard neck attached to the body of a viola.[11] It also includes a changeable bridge which allows triple stops, i.e. full triads, to be sustained.[12] Partch hammered brads into the fingerboard to aid with finding fingerings.[2] The Adapted Viola was constructed in New Orleans with the assistance of an Edward Benton, a local violin maker. Partch originally called it the Monophone, but by 1933 it had become known as the Adapted Viola.[11]
Partch tuned the Adapted Viola an octave below the violin and the brads inserted into the instrument fingerboard are placed at ratios commonly used in Partch's works. In playing the instrument, Partch called for a "one-finger technique," which is "much closer to the spirit of Indian vina playing than it is to the pipe organ."[13] Specifically, he desired that notes should be approached by gliding from tone to tone:
The finger may start slowly on its move, increase speed, and hit the next ratio exactly. It may move very fast from the first ratio, and then move slowly and insinuatingly into the next—so slowly, sometimes, that one is not sure as to the point where rest has been achieved. Or, all this may be reversed. What the bow is doing meanwhile, in its capacity of providing an infinitude of nuance, is supremely important.
As Partch's first instrument, the Adapted Viola is used heavily in many of his early mature compositions. In works such as Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po and Two Psalms the music is scored only for Adapted Viola and intoning voice.[14]
Bamboo Marimbas
Boo I
Boo II
Nicknamed "Boo" and "Boo II", the Bamboo Marimbas are marimbas made of bamboo, using the concept of a tongued resonator to produce the tones.
The Boo I was first built in 1955.[15] Some of the bamboo was replaced with larger-diameter pieces in 1963. It has a total of 64 bamboo resonators, organized into six ranks. The back ends of the tubes are sealed.[16]
Boo II was built in 1971. It also has 64 tubes, but the tubes are open at both ends. The tongues cut into the bamboo are approximately 1/6 of the length of the tube in order to produce a harmonic at 6/5 of the fundamental.[16]
Bass Marimba and Marimba Eroica
Bass Marimba
Marimba Eroica
The Bass Marimba and Marimba Eroica have more traditional linear layouts and are very low in pitch.
The Bass Marimba was first built in 1950. It has eleven bars made of Sitka spruce. The lowest bar corresponds to a piano C2. It can be played with mallets or by slapping with the pads of the fingers.[16]
The Marimba Eroica was built in 1954. It comprises four bars of Sitka spruce on top of large resonator boxes. The lowest bar sounds at 22 Hz, approximately the F below the lowest note of a piano.[16]
Chromelodeons
Chromelodeon I
Chromelodeon II
Detail of the keyboard of a Chromelodeon
The Chromelodeons are pump organs modified by Partch to conform to his tonality system. Chromelodeon I was adapted in 1945 from a 73-key pump organ. Chromelodeon II was adapted in 1959 from an 88-key pump organ. Both keyboards have colored and numbered labels representing ratios of the tuning system.[16]
Cloud-Chamber Bowls
Cloud-Chamber Bowls
The Cloud-Chamber Bowls are a set of 12-US-gallon (45L), 16-inch diameter Pyrex bowls cut from carboys, suspended in a frame. The carboys were originally sourced from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, where they were used in the construction of cloud chambers.[16][17][18] It was first built in 1950.[15]
Diamond Marimba
Diamond Marimba
The Diamond Marimba is a marimba with keys arranged in a physical manifestation of the 11-limit tonality diamond.[19] Partch first built it in 1946.[15]
Eucal Blossom
Eucal Blossom
Close-up of the Eucal Blossom showing tonality ratios
The Eucal Blossom is a bamboo marimba with 33 resonators in three rows of eleven, supported by a branch of eucalyptus.[16] It was first built in 1964.[15]
Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs
Gourd Tree & Cone Gongs
Twelve temple bells bolted to gourd resonators on a bar of eucalyptus, and two Douglas Aircraft bomber nosecones.[20] First built in 1964.[15]
Harmonic Canons
Castor & Pollux (Harmonic Canon II)
Blue Rainbow (Harmonic Canon III)
Steve Silverstein tries out a Harmonic Canon.
The Harmonic Canons (from the same root as qanún) are 44-stringed sonometer instruments with complex systems of movable bridges that were mostly positioned by Partch on harmonic nodal positions to get a just intoned harmonic relation between the left and right string part. They are tuned differently depending on the piece, and are played with fingers or picks, or, in some cases, unique mallets.[citation needed]
Harmonic Canon I (1945), II (1953), III (1965).[15]
Kitharas
New Kithara I
Surrogate Kithara
Kithara II
Named after their inspiration, the Greek kithara, the Kitharas are 71-by-43-inch (180cm ×110cm)[21] upright 72-stringed instruments,[17] tuned by sliding pyrex rods underneath the strings, and played with fingers or a variety of plectra.[citation needed]
The Kithara I was first built in 1938, and restored in 1972. The Surrogate Kithara was built in 1953, and the Kithara II in 1954.[15]
Partch built the Quadrangularis Reversum in 1965, about twenty years after the Diamond Marimba.[15] The central section's 36 African padauk blocks are an upside-down, mirrored version of the Diamond Marimba—hence Reversum. This reverse possibility was shown to Partch by Erv Wilson who helped with its construction. To the left and right are sets of ten alto-register blocks.[19] Bamboo resonators are under the blocks. Partch's initial plan, abandoned due to cost, was to use square bamboo (C. quadrangularis) for the resonators—hence the first part of the instrument's name.[22] The curved uprights are eucalyptus, and the bar across the top is intended to evoke a torii. The instrument is quite large at 103 inches (2.6m) across the top and 79 inches (2.0m) tall.[23]
Spoils of War
Spoils of War
The Spoils of War is a collection of several instruments, including more Cloud Chamber Bowls, artillery shell casings, metal "whang-guns", a Pernambuco wood block, and a gourd.[17][24] First built in 1950.[15]
Zymo-Xyl
Zymo-Xyl
The Zymo-Xyl is an oak-block xylophone augmented with tuned liquor and wine bottles, Ford hubcaps, and an aluminum ketchup bottle. The name is from the Greek zymo- for "fermentation", and xylo- or xyl- for "wood".[25] First built in 1963.[15]
A harmonic series is the sequence of harmonics, musical tones, or pure tones whose frequency is an integer multiple of a fundamental frequency.
In music, just intonation or pure intonation is the tuning of musical intervals as whole number ratios of frequencies. An interval tuned in this way is said to be pure, and is called a just interval. Just intervals consist of tones from a single harmonic series of an implied fundamental. For example, in the diagram, if the notes G3 and C4 are tuned as members of the harmonic series of the lowest C, their frequencies will be 3 and 4 times the fundamental frequency. The interval ratio between C4 and G3 is therefore 4:3, a just fourth.
In music, there are two common meanings for tuning:
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments. In spite of being a very common term to designate instruments, and to relate them to their players, the percussionists, percussion is not a systematic classificatory category of instruments, as described by the scientific field of organology. It is shown below that percussion instruments may belong to the organological classes of idiophone, membranophone, aerophone and chordophone.
The marimba is a musical instrument in the percussion family that consists of wooden bars that are struck by mallets. Below each bar is a resonator pipe that amplifies particular harmonics of its sound. Compared to the xylophone, the marimba has a lower range. Typically, the bars of a marimba are arranged chromatically, like the keys of a piano. The marimba is a type of idiophone.
Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).
Sympathetic strings or resonance strings are auxiliary strings found on many Indian musical instruments, as well as some Western Baroque instruments and a variety of folk instruments. They are typically not played directly by the performer, only indirectly through the tones that are played on the main strings, based on the principle of sympathetic resonance. The resonance is most often heard when the fundamental frequency of the string is in unison or an octave lower or higher than the catalyst note, although it can occur for other intervals, such as a fifth, with less effect.
The boobam is a percussion instrument of the membranophone family consisting of an array of tubes with membranes stretched on one end, the other end open. The tuning depends partly on the tension on the membrane and partly on the length of the tube.
John Schneider is a Grammy® Award winning and 4-time Grammy® nominated American classical guitarist. He performs in just intonation and various well-temperaments, including Pythagorean tuning, including works by Lou Harrison, LaMonte Young, John Cage, and Harry Partch. He often arranges pieces for guitar and other instruments such as harp or percussion.
The 43-tone scale is a just intonation scale with 43 pitches in each octave. It is based on an eleven-limit tonality diamond, similar to the seven-limit diamond previously devised by Max Friedrich Meyer and refined by Harry Partch.
Otonality and utonality are terms introduced by Harry Partch to describe chords whose pitch classes are the harmonics or subharmonics of a given fixed tone (identity), respectively. For example: 1/1, 2/1, 3/1,... or 1/1, 1/2, 1/3,....
An Otonality is that set of pitches generated by the numerical factors (...identities)...over a numerical constant in the denominator. Conversely, a Utonality is the inversion of an Otonality, a set of pitches with a numerical constant in the numerator over the numerical factors...in the denominator.
In music theory and tuning, a tonality diamond is a two-dimensional diagram of ratios in which one dimension is the Otonality and one the Utonality. Thus the n-limit tonality diamond is an arrangement in diamond-shape of the set of rational numbers r, , such that the odd part of both the numerator and the denominator of r, when reduced to lowest terms, is less than or equal to the fixed odd number n. Equivalently, the diamond may be considered as a set of pitch classes, where a pitch class is an equivalence class of pitches under octave equivalence. The tonality diamond is often regarded as comprising the set of consonances of the n-limit. Although originally invented by Max Friedrich Meyer, the tonality diamond is now most associated with Harry Partch.
Ervin Wilson was a Mexican/American music theorist.
Newband is a contemporary music ensemble devoted to the performance of microtonal music. The group was founded in 1977 by musicians Stefani Starin and Dean Drummond. As a youth, Drummond performed with maverick composer Harry Partch in a unique ensemble of microtonal instruments that Partch designed and built himself; Drummond performed in the premieres of Partch’s Daphne of the Dunes, And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, and Delusion of the Fury, as well as on both Partch Columbia Masterworks recordings made during the late 1960s.
An experimental musical instrument is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modifications, such as cracked cymbals or metal objects inserted between piano strings in a prepared piano. Some experimental instruments are created from household items like a homemade mute for brass instruments such as bathtub plugs. Other experimental instruments are created from electronic spare parts, or by mixing acoustic instruments with electric components.
Genesis of a Music is a book first published in 1949 by microtonal composer Harry Partch (1901–1974).
Dean Drummond was an American composer, arranger, conductor and musician. His music featured microtonality, electronics, and a variety of percussion. He invented a 31-tone instrument called the zoomoozophone in 1978. From 1990 to his death he was the conservator of the Harry Partch instrumentarium.
The 3rd bridge is an extended playing technique used on the electric guitar and other string instruments that allows a musician to produce distinctive timbres and overtones that are unavailable on a conventional string instrument with two bridges. The timbre created with this technique is close to that of gamelan instruments like the bonang and similar Indonesian types of pitched gongs.
A third bridge can be devised by inserting a rigid preparation object between the strings and the body or neck of the instrument, effectively dividing the string into distinct vibrating segments.
Bamboo's natural hollow form makes it an obvious choice for many musical instruments. In South and South East Asia, traditional uses of bamboo the instrument include various types of woodwind instruments, such as flutes, and devices like xylophones and organs, which require resonating sections. In some traditional instruments bamboo is the primary material, while others combine bamboo with other materials such as wood and leather.
Stranger to Stranger is the thirteenth solo studio album by American folk rock singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Produced by Paul Simon and Roy Halee, it was released on June 3, 2016 through Concord Records. Simon wrote the material over a period of several years, perfecting it and rewriting it to his liking. Its music is experimental, making use of custom-made instruments by composer and music theorist Harry Partch. Three of the songs on the album are collaborations with Italian electronic artist Clap! Clap!.
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Adapted Guitar I
Adapted Guitar II
