Volume 47, Number 12 · July 20, 2000
Fascinatin' Rhythm
By David Hajdu
Harry Partch
by Bob Gilmore
Yale University Press, 468 pp., $35.00
Enclosure 3: Harry Partch
edited and with an essay by Philip Blackburn
American Composers Forum, 524 pp., $75.00
Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos
by Harry Partch, edited and with an introduction by Thomas McGeary
University of Illinois Press, 487 pp., $24.95 (paper)
Genesis of a Music
by Harry Partch
Da Capo, 517 pp., $17.95 (paper)
Indigent and homeless for many years, the American composer and instrument inventor Harry Partch, who died in 1974 at age seventy-three, made resourceful use of refuse. He patched together an odd musical style of his own from materials others had discarded. From the figurative dustbin of music history, Partch dug out arcane theories of tonality abandoned in the mid-seventeenth century—ideas outmoded when Bach established the 'tempered' scale of twelve semitones—and he used them to develop idiosyncratic compositional systems based upon microtones, resulting in a range of tones much larger (and more attuned to nature) than the conventional scale allows. From literal garbage heaps, meantime, he took objects such as used laboratory bowls, beams from a dismantled bridge, empty liquor bottles, and surplus aircraft nose cones, and constructed instruments out of them that would produce notes on the scales he invented. Partch's peculiar junkyard art has more serious aims than the popular trash aesthetic, a celebration of rubbish as kitsch. It was not that he took ironic pleasure in bad ideas and vulgar sounds; he saw merit and beauty in musical systems and in objects others had rejected, and he couldn't bear to let them go to waste.
Review, 4763 words
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