Genesis of a Music

I was doing a little reading about Harry Partch this morning. Partch was an American composer who lived from 1901 to 1974. He was known for developing music that abandoned traditional systems of pitch. He grew up mostly in Arizona in the early 1900s, (although he did move around the southwest a bit) were the country still resembled the wild west. Exposed to outlaws and diversity, his father worked for immigration authorities and his mother taught him to read music. She also sang to him in Cantonese and brought him to a wide variety of instruments and cultures. His father died by the time he was 18 and his mother was killed in a trolly car accident in Los Angeles in 1920. He left the University of Southern California’s school of music because he was dissatisfied with the teachers. He rejected western tonality and in a break from accepted practices in western traditions, he burned all his scores in New Orleans in 1930.

Harry Partch has a book called “Genesis of a Music”, in which he describes his basic premise for his perceptions of pitch, tonality and expression. The book reads like Jack Kerouac, famous beatnik from the 60s. While he navigates prose through an intertwining distain for traditional thought on expression, his sometimes radical thinking borders on that of the democratic revolutionist, then winds its way forward into a modernist revisionist path of imagining harmony through the lens of just-intonation. Partch’s concepts of tonality are not strictly about “just-intonation”, but his concepts for pitch are very much rooted in this premis.

Just-intonation refers to the mathematical intervals that exists through the physics of sound waves. Typically, what we hear today is considered a tempered scale. Western ears are accustomed to sound that is slightly adjusted in its ratios. I won’t go into the complicated math behind this other than to say that what is important is if you don’t make these slight adjustments to the ratios in pitch, it sounds out-of-tune to the western ear. Various cultures have different perceptions on pitch, but generally speaking, most make some sort of accommodation to the natural production of sound waves to create what is considered harmonic. As far back as the Greeks, we see that it took compromises to produce melody. Plato talks at length about the harmony of human discourse, and Greek philosophy considered the principles of music as much a part of debate as dialogue.

The reason I got caught up in Partch was because of a curious passage in his book. Over the course of a few paragraphs, he describes what he perceived as some of the fundamental reasons he pursed the odd path of inventing new instruments and composing music based on a 43 pitch system of just-intonation. He viewed music to follow a sliding scale in terms of its association with lyrical expression. The closer a music followed a narrative, the further it strayed from expression through purely tonal qualities. He believed that “program music”, such as “Night on Bald Mountain”, or even “Four Seasons”, by Vivaldi, could be seen as leaning towards an expression that it one so wanted, they could potentially remove the music altogether and simply read it as a play, devoid of harmonic content. The other end of the scale was abstract, sometimes atonal music of perhaps someone like Stravinsky or Schoenberg. Mahler may be seen on the more progressive side of the scale, where unique experiments in percussion and tonal experimentation lent itself to music divorced from the confines of linguistics. Partch wanted to strip all conformities to language, and dive deeply into the abstract projection of emotion. For this, he describes his forms of expression, the emulation of not only the language, but of the vowels, themselves. The very breakdown of speech could be analogous to his desire to infiltrate the locked-away depths of human expressiveness.

I am personally, not a fan of his music. However, what it does for me, is open the channels of pursuing a language of music and a deeper perception of why musical expression pursues ideas that language is eluded by. It helps me understand, and better utilize the tools of music as a means of conveying ideas and connecting people to concepts that otherwise would be locked away. It is the reason for the spiritual song to connect to people without religion, or the person filled with hate to resign themselves to compassion. You may not like Harry Partch either, but what a tale he tells!

Here is a link to a facinating documentary on his life: https://youtu.be/aKD3zm0WZjA

Here is some of his music. “Delusion of the Fruy, Act I: Treats with Death and with Life Despite Death:Chorus of Shadows, from “Innova 2010: Music with Sound”: https://youtu.be/3gtIEzBp_UA