#harry partch

[nobrashfestivity]

Harry Partch playing the cloud-chamber bowls [n.d.] Designed and built by Harry Partch glass

[davidhudson]

Harry Partch, June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974.

[postpunkindustrial]

VA - Weird Nightmare (Meditations On Mingus)

Here is an oddity I found stumbling around Discogs a little while ago, Weird Nightmare A Tribute to Charles Mingus.

The concept is pretty simple a bunch of NYC Avant Jazz types got together to make a cover/tribute album to Charles Mingus.

Good. Great. I'm in.

Except it isn't so simple. On top of that they are going to use a bunch of homemade instruments made by avant garde composer Harry Partch many used for the first time ever by someone other than the composer himself.

Oh wow. Cool. Bit much but I bet it will yield some interesting results.

But wait! More!

Guest artist will provide vocals on certain tracks. Like who?

Chuck D, Elvis Costello, Dr. John, Keith Richards w/Charlie Watts, Henry Rollins and for the song Eclipse Diamanda Galas with Leonard Cohn.

JESUS! Stop before you mess this up!

Anyway here it is a true oddity from the 90's

Get it from my Google Drive HERE

[onekindredspirit]

Is it Wabi Sabi? - Forgotten Fish Memory Orchestra

[literally-1894]

This is a small issue, and we'll likely never see it amended, but it feels like such a loss that we never got the music of Harry Partch in a Fallout game.

Two of his main bases of operations, Los Angeles and Oakland, can be visited in the series. Having been active from the early 40's through to the early 70's, Partch is also period-accurate. His subject matters dealt with rural, lower-class life in the US during the Great Depression, and his style of composition manages to sound alien and threatening while simultaneously being oddly hilarious (the two main sides of Fallout, the first of which is regrettably missed in recent years) .

If you listen to his voice, he absolutely sounds like he could be a talking head in a Fallout game, and having spent much of his life making bizarre musical instruments in a ranch converted into a carpentry workshop, he'd probably have at least three vault-saving MacGuffins stached away somewhere. Everything about Partch, from his time spent as a hobo to his haircut in the 50's, makes him a perfect fit for the series, but we got a 50/50 distribution of Doo-Wop and Ambient World Music instead with no room for nine minute operatic pieces about hitchhiking.

[garadinervi]

The Music of John Cage and Harry Partch, (Vinyl/LP), NW 214, New World Records, 1978 [midcenturyclassical. Art: © John Cage Trust, Red Hook, NY]

Cover Art: John Cage Design: Carol Robson Liner Notes: Ben Johnston

[soundgrammar]

Harry Partch - "Daphne of the Dunes"

[iskra008]

A Gay Nonconformist Composer & Creator of Musical Instruments: Harry Partch (1901–1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of custom musical instruments. Pioneering microtonal music, he divided the octave into 43 unequal tones in just intonation. To perform his visionary works, he hand-built a legendary collection of unique instruments and lived as a gay, nonconformist, "hobo" artist.

Microtonal Scales:

Frustrated by traditional Western music's standard 12-tone equal temperament, Partch developed his own musical philosophy. He detailed his 43-tone microtonal scale and just intonation theories in his seminal 1947 book, Genesis of a Music.

Custom Instruments

Because traditional instruments could not play his microtonal tunings, Partch became a "philosophic music man seduced into musical carpentry". He hand-built an ensemble of around 25 to 30 extraordinary instruments out of scavenged wood, glass, and metal. Famous examples include:

Chromelodeon: A custom reed organ.

Cloud Chamber Bowls: Percussion instruments made from Pyrex glass carboys.

Adapted Guitars: Modified acoustic guitars with microtonal frets.

Quadrangularis Reversum: A large, complex marimba-like struck instrument.

The "Hobo" Composer and Lifestyle:

During the Great Depression, Partch rejected mainstream society, living as a hobo and riding freight trains across the American West for nearly a decade. His experiences directly inspired his music, most notably in The Wayward, which sets hitchhiker graffiti and conversations from the road to his invented musical speech. (Source: The New York Times)

Life as a Gay Artist:

Partch was openly gay, an identity he navigated in the early-to-mid 20th century well before the Stonewall era. As a young man in the 1920s, he had an affair with silent film actor Ramon Novarro. Because his lifestyle was incredibly non-conformist in so many ways—from his radical microtonal tunings to his itinerant, transient lifestyle—his sexuality was simply one facet of a fiercely independent, bohemian existence. (Source: Robert Greenberg Music)