Daphne of the Dunes. Music by Harry Partch. Performed live by Newband. Staging, Costume Design and Choreography by Alice Farley

‘US Highball-A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip’ 1955. Performed by the Gate 5 Ensemble.

Harry PARTCH: Delusion of the Fury

Short Films | 17 min | 1969 | Directed by Madeline Tourtelot

Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion, \\ Recorded at UCLA Playhouse 1969. Conducted by Danlee Mitchell, musician assembly Emil Richards.

American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) had a musical vision for which 12-toned instruments were not enough. His objection to the standard western classical scale wasn’t so much along the philosophical lines of Schoenberg and other early 20th-century atonalists; he was mainly frustrated by the musical limitations of the equal-tempered octave, so devised a system that split the octave into 43 notes instead.

Partch’s masterpiece is the bizarre 1960s music drama Delusion of the Fury. It is outlandish and magnificent and it spits you out wanting to dive back in and experience the whole strange thing again. And if it is hardly ever staged that’s because it can’t be: it requires its very own orchestra of hand-built instruments, each one specially invented by Partch to play his unique microtonal music.

Even the names of the instruments are little poems in themselves: Eucal Blossom, Zymo-Xyl, Quadrangularis Reversum, Castor & Polux, Spoils of War. There are closely-tuned glass gongs and thin sheets of metal which, when tugged by strings, make loud wobbly noises. The Chromelodeon is a sort of harmonium that produces a mellow thrum. The heavy bass of the Marimba Eroica hits you first in the stomach then in the head, like a big wooden subwoofer. A zither-ish instrument plays a recurring spaghetti-western figure – glimmers of Partch’s childhood in remote Arizona, like heat-haze on a long horizon.

There is more to these instruments than wild names and weird sounds. What’s surprising is how, well, tonal his music often ends up sounding. 

Read more: Harry Partch – how Heiner Goebbels bought Delusion of the Fury to Edinburgh

A documentary about avant-garde composer Harry Partch. Broadcast on the BBC. 

American musical iconoclast Harry Partch believed that the 12-tone octave used for centuries in western music was fundamentally wrong, and so developed his own 43-note scale and sculpted instruments on which to play his music. Distancing himself from society, he lived a nomadic existence for much of his life, but his concept of "musical theatre" has influenced composers as diverse as Tom Waits and Philip Glass.

Harry Partch (1901-1974) was an iconoclastic American composer and instrument inventor with a passion for integrating musicians, actors, and dancers in large-scale works of total-theater. He was "seduced into carpentry" by his interest in just intonation and his need to have an orchestra tuned to this system. The instruments are more than just producers of tone, however — each one has an evocative name and dramatic physical presence, and each one puts unique physical demands on the performer. In Partch's book, Genesis of a Music, he writes that the performer of the Marimba Eroica should at times "convey the vision of Ben Hur in his chariot," while a musician playing his Kithara must not "bend at the waist, like an amateur California prune picker," but instead should move with grace and athleticism in a "functional dance."Charles Corey, curator of the instruments which are currently housed at the University of Washington in Seattle, gives a tour of the instruments and the unique sounds they make and iconoclastic musical notations which Partch invented for the performers to be able to play his compositions.This event was presented on May 30, 2017, by the Pacific Northwest Section of the Audio Engineering Society in the Studio Theater at the Meany Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Washington in Seattle. Sincere thanks to their staffs and management for allowing us to be there.

Harry Partch: Music Studio

Short Films | 17 min | 1957 | Directed by Madeline Tourtelot

Harry Partch has been dubbed the “hobo composer” on account of his youthful wanderings during the Great Depression when he rode the railroads with other jobless Americans and found precarious work harvesting fruit. In this short 1958 documentary, though, Partch guides us through his Chicago home full of self-built musical inventions. Perhaps nodding to his itinerant past, a Japanese calligraphic inscription on the studio wall declares “though homeless, you make a shrine wherever you are”. Partch says that his version of shrines are his instruments, “unusual in size, shape and philosophic purpose,” adding “I am a philosophic music man, long ago seduced into musical carpentry.”

Along with esoteric spiritual impulses, it was a quest for different scales and micro-tonal intervals that led Partch to create such outlandish machines as the Diamond Marimba and The Gourd Tree. Sonically these metal and glass contraptions recall the tuned percussion and metallophonic instruments of Indonesian gamelan. But Partch’s actual inspiration came from the Ancient Greeks. His Chromolodeon works with the Greek enharmonic scale, while the 72-stringed Kithara is a drastic expansion upon a lyre used in Antiquity for dances and recitations of epic verse.

For the actual material out of which he fashioned his creations, though, Partch ransacked the modern world. He turned cloud-chamber bowls from the scientific laboratory into bells and repurposed brass artillery casings for an instrument he named The Spoils of Wars. Building these striking-looking and sui generis sound-machines was just the start of the artistic process for Partch, though. His compositions typically were one element in performances involving dance, costume, and mime-like theatre (see Delusion of the Fury, a 72 min film ). Like so many modernists, Partch’s true goal was to go back: to reinvent the holistic audio-visual art forms of the Ancient world, in which “sight and sound unite for a single dramatic purpose”.

HARRY PARTCH - Instrument Demos (Voice Overs by Harry)