Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and inventor of special musical instruments. He wrote music using scales with unequal intervals based on just intonation, a tuning system that divides the octave into specific ratios. He was among the first 20th-century Western composers to use microtonal scales systematically, along with Lou Harrison. Partch built his own instruments to play his music in these tunings and explained his methods in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).

Partch’s scales divided the octave into 43 unequal tones derived from the natural harmonic series. These scales included more tones with smaller intervals than standard Western tuning, which divides the octave into twelve equal parts. To perform his music, Partch created unique instruments, such as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. He described his music as "corporeal," emphasizing its physical and emotional impact, and contrasted it with abstract music, which he believed dominated Western music since the time of J.S. Bach. Bach’s famous work, The Well-Tempered Clavier (Das wohltemperierte Klavier), marked a shift in Western music tuning, leading to the widespread use of equal temperament in classical and popular instruments. Partch’s early works were small pieces with simple folk-style string accompaniment, while his later works were large-scale productions combining theater and music, influenced by ancient Greek theater and Japanese Noh and kabuki traditions. These performances required performers to sing, dance, speak, and play instruments in a unified, physical expression.

Partch’s mother encouraged him to learn instruments at a young age. By age 14, he was composing and focused on dramatic settings. He left the University of Southern California’s School of Music in 1922 due to dissatisfaction with his teachers. He studied independently in San Francisco, where he discovered Hermann von Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone, which inspired him to focus on just intonation. In 1930, he destroyed all his earlier compositions, rejecting European concert traditions. Partch often moved across the United States, working as a transient laborer early in his career and later relying on grants, university positions, and record sales for support. In 1970, supporters established the Harry Partch Foundation to manage his music and instruments.

Personal history

On June 24, 1901, Harry Partch was born in Oakland, California. His parents were Virgil Franklin Partch (1860–1919) and Jennie (born Childers, 1863–1920). The couple were members of the Presbyterian Church and worked as missionaries in China from 1888 to 1893 and again from 1895 to 1900. They left China during the Boxer Rebellion.

Partch moved with his family to Arizona for his mother’s health. His father worked for the Immigration Service there, and the family settled in the small town of Benson. In the early 1900s, Benson was still part of the Wild West, and Partch remembered seeing outlaws in town. Nearby lived the Yaqui people, whose music he heard. His mother sang to him in Mandarin Chinese, and he heard and sang songs in Spanish. His mother encouraged her children to learn music, and he studied the mandolin, violin, piano, reed organ, and cornet. His mother taught him to read music.

In 1913, the family moved to Albuquerque, New Mexico, where Partch began studying the piano seriously. He played keyboards for silent films while in high school. By age 14, he was writing music for the piano. He became interested in composing music for dramatic scenes and mentioned a lost work called Death and the Desert (1916) as an early example.

In 1919, Partch graduated from high school. The family moved to Los Angeles that year after his father’s death. His mother was killed in a trolley accident in 1920. Partch enrolled in the University of Southern California School of Music in 1920 but left after the summer of 1922 because he was unhappy with his teachers. He moved to San Francisco, studied music books in libraries, and continued composing. In 1923, he rejected the standard twelve-tone equal temperament of Western music after reading a translation of Hermann von Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone. This book led him to use just intonation as a basis for his music. Around this time, while working as an usher for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he had a romantic relationship with actor Ramon Novarro, who was then known as Ramón Samaniego. Samaniego ended the relationship when his acting career grew.

By 1925, Partch began testing his ideas by creating paper fingerings for violin and viola in just intonation and wrote a string quartet using these tunings. In May 1928, he wrote the first draft of a book called Exposition of Monophony. To support himself, he worked as a piano teacher, proofreader, and sailor. In 1930, while in New Orleans, he decided to abandon European musical traditions entirely and burned all his earlier compositions in a stove.

Partch had a violin maker in New Orleans build a viola with a cello-sized fingerboard. He used this instrument, called the Adapted Viola, to write music using a scale with 29 tones per octave. His earliest surviving works from this time include pieces based on Bible verses, Shakespeare, and Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po (1931–1933), which used translations of Chinese poetry by Li Bai. In 1932, he performed his music in San Francisco and Los Angeles with sopranos he recruited. A performance on February 9, 1932, at Henry Cowell’s New Music Society of California received reviews. A private group of sponsors sent him to New York in 1933, where he gave solo performances and gained support from composers such as Roy Harris, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, Howard Hanson, Otto Luening, Walter Piston, and Aaron Copland.

Partch applied for Guggenheim grants in 1933 and 1934 but was not successful. The Carnegie Corporation of New York gave him $1,500 to research in England. He gave readings at the British Museum and traveled in Europe. He met poet W. B. Yeats in Dublin, who had translated Sophocles’ King Oedipus. Partch studied the speech patterns in Yeats’s recitation of the text. He built a keyboard instrument called the Chromatic Organ, which used a scale with 43 tones per octave. He met musicologist Kathleen Schlesinger, who recreated an ancient Greek kithara from images on a vase at the British Museum. Partch sketched the instrument in her home and discussed ancient Greek music theory with her. He returned to the U.S. in 1935 during the Great Depression and spent nine years traveling, often as a hobo, and working or receiving grants from groups like the Federal Writers’ Project. For the first eight months of this period, he kept a journal published later as Bitter Music. He recorded speech patterns of people he met and continued composing, building instruments, and developing his book and theories. He made his first recordings and had sculptor Gordon Newell modify his kithara sketches. After taking woodworking classes in 1938, he built his first kithara in Big Sur, California, at about twice the size of Schlesinger’s. In 1942, he built his Chromelodeon, a 43-tone reed organ, in Chicago. While on the East Coast, he received a Guggenheim grant in March 1943 to build instruments and complete a seven-part Monophonic Cycle. On April 22, 1944

Personal life

Partch was first cousins with gag cartoonist Virgil Partch (1916–1984). Partch believed he was sterile because of mumps he had as a child, and he had a romantic relationship with film actor Ramon Novarro.

Legacy

Harry Partch met Danlee Mitchell while he was at the University of Illinois. Partch made Mitchell his heir, and Mitchell is the director of the Harry Partch Foundation. Dean Drummond and his group Newband took responsibility for Partch's instruments and performed his music. After Drummond's death in 2013, Charles Corey, a former doctoral student of Drummond, took over responsibility for the instruments.

The Sousa Archives and Center for American Music in Urbana, Illinois, holds the Harry Partch Estate Archive, which includes Partch's personal papers, musical scores, films, tapes, and photographs that document his work as a composer, writer, and producer. It also holds the Music and Performing Arts Library Harry Partch Collection, which includes books, music, films, personal papers, artifacts, and sound recordings collected by the staff of the Music and Performing Arts Library and the University of Illinois School of Music. These materials document the life and career of Harry Partch and others connected to him during his time as a composer and writer.

Partch's notation system is difficult to use because it combines a type of tablature with notes showing pitch ratios. This makes it hard for people trained in traditional Western music notation to understand, and it does not show how the music should sound visually.

Paul Simon used Partch's instruments to create songs for his 2016 album Stranger to Stranger.

In 1974, Partch was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Percussive Arts Society, an organization that promotes education, research, performance, and appreciation of percussion music. In 2004, U.S. Highball was chosen by the Library of Congress's National Recording Preservation Board as "culturally, historically, or aesthetically significant."

Music

Harry Partch shared his musical ideas in his book Genesis of a Music (1947). He began the book by explaining music history and argued that Western music started to face problems after the time of Bach. At that point, Western music mostly used a system called twelve-tone equal temperament, which replaced other tuning methods. This system focused on abstract, instrumental music rather than vocal music. Partch wanted to bring back the importance of singing and used tunings and scales he believed were better for vocal music.

Partch was influenced by Sensations of Tone, a book by Hermann von Helmholtz about how sound is heard and understood. He used a tuning system called just intonation in his music. He tuned his instruments based on the overtone series, which is a natural sequence of musical notes produced by vibrating objects. He extended this series up to the eleventh partial, creating many small, unequal intervals not found in Western classical music’s twelve-tone equal temperament. Partch’s tuning is often called microtonality because it includes intervals smaller than 100 cents. However, he did not think of it as microtonality. Instead, he believed it was a return to early Western musical traditions, especially those of ancient Greece. By using principles from Helmholtz’s book, he developed a system that divided the octave into 43 tones based on simple number ratios.

Partch used the terms Otonality and Utonality to describe chords. These chords are made up of harmonics or subharmonics of a single note. In his music, these six-note chords function similarly to the three-note major and minor chords (called triads) in classical music. Otonalities come from the overtone series, while Utonalities come from the undertone series.

Genesis of a Music has influenced many composers who explored new tuning systems, such as Ben Johnston and James Tenney. Both worked with Partch in the 1950s.

Partch believed that the modern era’s focus on specialization led to art that ignored sound and science that ignored art. He said that modern music and drama had become disconnected from their roots. He rejected the Western concert music tradition, claiming that composers like Beethoven had weak connections to Western culture. His interest in non-Western music was clear, such as when he set poetry by Li Bai to music or combined Noh dramas from Japan with one from Ethiopia in The Delusion of the Fury.

Partch thought Western music in the 20th century suffered from over-specialization. He criticized modern theater for separating music and drama and aimed to create fully integrated performances where each performer sang, danced, played instruments, and acted. He used the words "ritual" and "corporeal" to describe his theater works, emphasizing that musicians and instruments were visible parts of the performance, not hidden.

Partch’s use of rhythm varied from simple to complex. In Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po for the Adapted Viola, he did not write specific rhythmic notes, instead asking performers to follow the natural rhythm of the poem. In Castor and Pollux, the rhythm was highly structured: Each duet lasted 234 beats. In the first half (Castor), the music alternated between 4 and 5 beats per bar, with a rest on the eighth beat of each nine-beat group. In the second half (Pollux), the rhythm was more complex, alternating between six bars of 7 beats and six bars of 9 beats until 234 beats were reached.

Partch called himself "a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry." His journey to creating unique instruments began in the 1920s with traditional instruments. He wrote a string quartet in just intonation (now lost). His first specialized instrument, the Adapted Viola (a viola with a cello’s neck), was built in 1930.

Most of Partch’s works used the instruments he designed. Some works, like Revelation in the Courtyard Park (1960), used unaltered standard instruments such as a small wind band. Yankee Doodle Fantasy (1944) used unaltered oboe and flute.

In 1991, Dean Drummond became the caretaker of Partch’s original instruments until his death in 2013. In 1999, Drummond moved the collection to Montclair State University in New Jersey, where it stayed until 2014, when it was transferred to the University of Washington in Seattle. The instruments are now cared for by Charles Corey, a former PhD student of Drummond.

In 2012, Thomas Meixner built a complete set of replicas of Partch’s instruments under commission by Ensemble Musikfabrik. These replicas were used in performances of Delusion of the Fury.

• Part of the keyboard of the Chromelodeon
• Boo II on display at a Harry Partch Institute open house
• Quadrangularis Reversum

Works

Harry Partch's later works were large-scale theater shows that combined singing, dancing, speaking, and playing instruments. He explained his musical ideas and methods in his book Genesis of a Music, which he first published in 1947 and later updated in 1974. After his death, a collection of his writings, including essays, journals, and librettos, was published in 1991 as Bitter Music.

To help pay for his living expenses, Partch sold recordings he made starting in the late 1930s. He released these recordings under the Gate 5 Records label beginning in 1953. On recordings like the soundtrack for Windsong, he used a technique called multitrack recording, which allowed him to play all the instruments by himself. Even though he had access to modern technology like synthesized or computer-generated sounds, he never used them.

Partch created the music for six films directed by Madeline Tourtelot, beginning with Windsong in 1957. His life and work have also been featured in several documentary films.