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”.

The Lost Art of Playing Glass | FUNK PLUS ONE  S1 • E3 | GREAT BIG STORIES | 2017

Dean Shostak is one of last true masters capable of playing the glass armonica – an enchanting instrument lost to time. First devised in 1761 by Benjamin Franklin, the art of “playing glass” began to fade in popularity as musical fashions changed. Today, there are only eight glass armonica players left in the world. Along with the revival of the armonica, Shostak is also reintroducing an entire family of glass instruments, including the glass violin, the crystal hand bells and the French Cristal baschet.

Les Structures Sonores Lasry-Baschet

Raw Footage |13 min | 1957

Starting in the early 1950s, the sculptor François Baschet and his engineer brother Bernard built a range of “structures sonores” – a term variously translated as sound structures or sonorous sculptures. Among their creations was the poetically named Voice Leaf, a glossy metallic shield that transformed the performer’s voice into an unearthly keening wail. Most famously there was the Cristal Baschet, a glittering array of glass rods that produced piercing drone-tones when rubbed by the performer. Teaming up with the composer-musician Jacques Lasry and his organ-playing wife Yvonne as the ensemble Lasry-Baschet, they performed concerts and made records like Chronophagie. This TV program appears to date from the late Fifties and unless you understand French, your best bet is to skip to about six minutes in, when Monsieur Lasry appears looking a bit like a Gallic Keith Moon. Duetting with his wife, Lasry showcases the shimmering sight-and-sound of the Cristal in operation, his fingers periodically dipping into a bowl of water to keep his tips lubricated. If you are of a puerile, Viz-reading mentality, you might well find all this stroking of perpendicular rods suggestive and snigger-worthy, despite the angelic purity of the tones generated by the frotting fingers of the Frenchman. Among the many Baschet-related videos on YouTube, look out for a recent, full-colour clip of the Hope Ensemble performing Erik Satie’s Gnossienne no. 1.

- Simon Reynolds

Native American Instruments

An Angklung Orchestra - Indonesia

Made by Film Australia 1975  | Directed by Brian Hannant | 6 mins

 An angklung is a Sundanese bamboo instrument which is rattled to produce a fixed note.  Originally tuned to the pentatonic scale, it was used in traditional music.  However, today it is usually tuned to the diatonic scale and Western style music is performed.  In this program the Bandung Conservatoire Orchestra demonstrates the complexity of the instrument and plays a well-known waltz.

2015

The Anarchestra is set up as an interactive art installation that the public gets to play. It can be tuned all to the same key making it hard to hit the wrong notes. You don't have to be a good musician to play it.

Anarchestra INSTRUMENT PLAYLIST: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLgRy08eqGTaORC4QH7QSOJD0rbinM6LEt

by Pupsi | 2018

BY HarvardTHUD | Feb 15, 2020

Original by Billie Eilish. Arranged for Boomwhackers by Ben Meron and Dody Eid.