Harry Partch

Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) 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). Partch composed with scales dividing the octave into 43 unequal tones derived from the natural harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals to the octave. To play his music, Partch built many unique instruments, with such names as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. Partch described his music as "corporeal" (emphasizing its physical/visceral elements), and distinguished it from abstract music, which he perceived as the dominant trend in Western music since the time of J.S. Bach, whose seminal book of preludes and fugues called The Well-tempered Clavier (in German, Das wohltemperierte Klavier) is often cited as the pivot point beyond which older mean-tone and ancient just intonation tunings were abandoned (in the late-18th century) and the then-future of Western Classical (and popular) instruments were (and most are still) based, for exploitation of all 24 theoretical key signatures. Partch's earliest compositions were small-scale pieces to be intoned with simple folkloric-like string instrumental backing; his later works were large-scale (like a fusion of theater and music decidedly related to but quite apart from Wagnerian opera), they were integrated theater productions in which he expected each of the performers to sing, dance, speak, and play instruments in a "corporeal apotheosis". Ancient Greek theatre and Japanese...