I had been away from the part of the world I generally consider home for six years. In the seventh year I found a studio in the unused Pioneer Hatchery in Petaluma, California. However sentimental or Oriental that many sound, the fact remains: it was the time of falling petals, and this music followed. – Harry Partch

One of the most individualistic composers of all time, Harry Partch was not only a great composer, but an innovative theorist who broke through the shackles of a tuning system of all Western music which had lasted for many centuries. He created dozens of incredible musical instruments for the specific peformance of his music and was a dramatist who wrote his own texts for dance-theatre extravaganzas based on everything from Greek mythology to his own experience as a hobo. Between 1930 and 1972, he created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music in the 20th century: music dramas, dance theatre, multi-media extravaganzas, vocal music and chamber music – mostly all performed on the instruments he built himself.

The picture to the right is of an instrument created by Partch called Cloud Chamber Bowls. The bowls themselves are 12-gallon Pyrex carboys, suspended from a redwood frame on ropes. These difficult to find and impossible to tune glass gongs are played very carefully by a percussionist who risks the anguish of of a shattered disaster. The original bowls were found at the Radiation Laboratory of the University of California, Berkeley, and had been sued as cloud-chambers to trace the paths of sub-atomic particles.

Considering the earlist known letter written by Harry Partch dates from 1931, when he was already 30 years old, very little is knows about his pre-mature life. As a child, living in various areas of the American southwest, Partch was exposed to a variety of influences from Asian to Native American. He spent his childhood in remote tones in Arizona and New Mexico where he heard and sang songs in Mandarin, Spanish and American Indian languages. After dropping out of the University of Southern California, he began to study on his own and to question the validity of the tuning and philosophical foundations of Western music. He believed the standard system was unsuitable for reflecting the subtle melodic contours of dramatic speech, and as a result, he burned all of his early works. Partch was always clear that this burning of his early music was of tremendous symbolic importance to him, and he speaks of it as an act of purification, a ritualistic purging by fire.

During and after the Great Depression, he was a hobo and itinerant worker, riding trains, all the while keeping a musical notebook of his experiences named Bitter Music which he later set to music.The entries frequently included overheard bits of everyday vernacular speech. Partch always said his reason for developing his microtonal scales was to try to replicate and demonstrate verbal expression.

In 1930, Partch broke with Western European tradition and forged a new musicology, based on a primal, corporeal integration of the elements of speech with music, using principles of natural acoustic resonance (Just Intonation) and expanded melodic and harmonic possibilities. He began to first adapt guitars and violas to play his music, and then began to build whole new instruments based on his new microtonal tuning system. Over his lifetime he built over 25 instruments as well as numerous small hand instruments and became a brilliant spokesman for his ideas. Largely ignored by the standard musical institutions and industry, he criticised concert traditions, the roles of the performer and composer, the role of music in society, the 12-tone equal-temperament scale and the concept of “pure” or abstract music. To explain his philosophical and intonational ideas, he wrote a treatise, “Genesis of a Music” which has served as a primary source of information and inspiration to many musicians for the last half century, considered the standard text of microtonal music theory and takes the concept of Corporeality, the fusion of all art forms with the body, as its central focus.

The album we’ve uploaded for you to download and listen to here is the most extended all instrumental work by the microtonal guru. The Haiku-like title may sound metaphysical but has a prosaic explanation. In 1962, Partch returned to California after six years in the Midwest. Returning to his roots in the seventh year was like a sabbatical. He was getting tired of frequent moving: “The spectacle of me and two tons of musical instruments wandering around the country is becoming almost comical. He had to find a spacious and cheap studio and living space, and his former landlord in Sausalito, California in September 1962 allowed him to use an empty chick hatchery. When he visited the building the walkway leading to the place was “… strewn with petals – roses, camelias, and many others” and the title of the new work came to him. “It was a time of falling petals and the music followed.” He had to attract a group of committed musicians who could be relied upon to put in the time, learn how to play the unusual instruments, learn how to play the written parts (in special notational systems), develop the ear to play music where there are many “extra” notes besides the familiar 12 they had learned, and finally learn to play their parts.

Partch was notorious for going beyond instrumental and intonational uniqueness. He communicated to the members of his ensemble the “extra-musical” attitudes and actions he felt lead to an experimental performance. He would show how to approach an instrument with the proper physical inclination, not unlike the motivation of an actor for his part. The physical approach would reflect both the nature of the notes and phrases themselves, and the dramatic or musical intent of the passage. He taught respect for the instruments and how to coax the best and worst sounds out of them. In doing so he wanted to see a transformation of his musicians from passive translators of his scores to active, engaged participants. Partch would often speak of not only “caressing the instrument, but raping it too.” The physical relationship between player and instrument is crucial to the corporeal performance. The musician must transcend their role as instrumentalist and become more fully formed performers, ready to move, act and live the part. To create the corporeal performance.

Partch and some loyal supporters recorded most of Petals in 1964 while the premises they were recording in was literally being bulldozed around them, often begging operators to stop for a minute to make a take. Often the duets are played by Partch on both parts, through overdubbing. The recording was resumed in San Diego in 1966, and the tapes were painstakingly overdubbed for a CRI records release. This results in a useful introduction of the sound of Partch’s instruments. But Petals suffers a bit from its form. At one-minute intervals the music comes to a stop, and half the time resumes in the same tempo and with the same harmonic patterns. Performance and tape synchronisation problems involved in the production of this recording were of an extraordinary level of difficulty, calling for more than a hundred hours of editing. Although the rhythms are wonderfully irregular, this predictability offsets the fascination of the wonderful sounds of Partch’s instruments.

So download the album here, check out our other favourite Outsider music here. And remember what Harry said…

This is my trinity: sound-magic, visual beauty, experience-ritual.