Harry Partch (June 24, 1901 – September 3, 1974) was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built his own instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).
Partch composed with scales dividing the octave into 43 unequal tones derived from the natural harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals to the octave. To play his music, Partch built many unique instruments, with such names as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl. Partch described his music as "corporeal" (emphasizing its physical/visceral elements), and distinguished it from abstract music, which he perceived as the dominant trend in Western music since the time of J.S. Bach, whose seminal book of preludes and fugues called The Well-tempered Clavier (in German, Das wohltemperierte Klavier) is often cited as the pivot point beyond which older mean-tone and ancient just intonation tunings were abandoned (in the late-18th century) and the then-future of Western Classical (and popular) instruments were (and most are still) based, for exploitation of all 24 theoretical key signatures. Partch's earliest compositions were small-scale pieces to be intoned with simple folkloric-like string instrumental backing; his later works were large-scale (like a fusion of theater and music decidedly related to but quite apart from Wagnerian opera), they were integrated theater productions in which he expected each of the performers to sing, dance, speak, and play instruments in a "corporeal apotheosis". Ancient Greek theatre and Japanese Noh and kabuki heavily influenced Harry Partch's music theatre.
Encouraged by his mother, Partch learned several instruments at a young age. By fourteen, he was composing, and in particular took to setting dramatic situations. He dropped out of the University of Southern California's School of Music in 1922, dissatisfied with the quality of his teachers. He took to self-study in San Francisco's libraries, where he discovered Hermann von Helmholtz's Sensations of Tone, which convinced him to devote himself to music based on scales tuned in just intonation. In 1930, he burned all his previous compositions in a rejection of the European concert tradition. Partch frequently moved around the US. Early in his career, he was a transient worker, and sometimes a hobo; later he depended on grants, university appointments, and record sales to support himself. In 1970, supporters created the Harry Partch Foundation to administer Partch's music and instruments.
On June 24, 1901, Partch was born in Oakland, California. His parents were Virgil Franklin Partch (1860–1919) and Jennie (née Childers, 1863–1920). The Presbyterian couple were missionaries, serving in China from 1888 to 1893, and again from 1895 to 1900, when they fled the Boxer Rebellion.
Partch moved with his family to Arizona for his mother's health. His father worked for the Immigration Service there, and they settled in the small town of Benson. It was still the Wild West there in the early twentieth century, and Partch recalled seeing outlaws in town. Nearby, there were native Yaqui people, whose music he would hear. 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 learned 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 to study the piano seriously. He obtained work playing keyboards for silent films while he was in high school. By 14, he was composing for the piano. He developed an early interest in writing music for dramatic situations, and cited his lost composition Death and the Desert (1916) as an early example.
In 1919, Partch graduated from high school.
The family moved to Los Angeles in 1919 following the death of Partch's father. There, his mother was killed in a trolley accident in 1920. He enrolled in the University of Southern California's School of Music in 1920, but was dissatisfied with his teachers and left after the summer of 1922. He moved to San Francisco and studied books on music in the libraries there and continued to compose. In 1923 he came to reject the standard twelve-tone equal temperament of Western concert music when he discovered a translation of Hermann von Helmholtz's Sensations of Tone. The book pointed Partch towards just intonation as an acoustic basis for his music. Around this time, while working as an usher for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, he had a romantic relationship with the actor Ramon Novarro, then known by his birth name Ramón Samaniego; Samaniego broke off the affair when he started to become successful in his acting career.
By 1925, Partch was putting his theory into practice by developing paper coverings for violin and viola with fingerings in just intonation, and wrote a string quartet using such tunings. He put his theories in words in May 1928 in the first draft for a book, then called Exposition of Monophony. He supported himself during this time doing a variety of jobs, including teaching piano, proofreading, and working as a sailor. In New Orleans in 1930, he resolved to break with the European tradition entirely, and burned all his earlier scores in a potbelly stove.
Partch had a New Orleans violin maker build a viola with the fingerboard of a cello. He used this instrument, dubbed the Adapted Viola, to write music using a scale with twenty-nine tones to the octave. Partch's earliest work to survive comes from this period, including works based on Biblical verse and Shakespeare, and Seventeen Lyrics of Li Po (1931-1933) based on translations of the Chinese poetry of Li Bai. In 1932, Partch performed the music in San Francisco and Los Angeles with sopranos he had recruited. A February 9, 1932, performance at Henry Cowell's New Music Society of California attracted reviews. A private group of sponsors sent Partch to New York in 1933, where he gave solo performances and won the support of composers Roy Harris, Charles Seeger, Henry Cowell, Howard Hanson, Otto Luening, Walter Piston, and Aaron Copland.
Partch unsuccessfully applied for Guggenheim grants in 1933 and 1934. The Carnegie Corporation of New York granted him $1500 so he could do research in England. He gave readings at the British Museum and traveled in Europe. He met W. B. Yeats in Dublin, whose translation of Sophocles' King Oedipus he wanted to set to his music; he studied the spoken inflection in Yeats's recitation of the text. He built a keyboard instrument, the Chromatic Organ, which used a scale with forty-three tones to the octave. He met musicologist Kathleen Schlesinger, who had recreated an ancient Greek kithara from images she found on a vase at the British Museum. Partch made sketches of the instrument in her home, and discussed ancient Greek music theory with her.
Partch returned to the U.S. in 1935 at the height of the Great Depression, and spent a transient nine years, often as a hobo, picking up work or obtaining grants from organizations such as the Federal Writers' Project. For the first eight months of this period, he kept a journal which was published posthumously as Bitter Music, in which Partch included notation on the speech inflections of people he met in his travels. He continued to compose music, build instruments, develop his book and theories, and create his first recordings. He had alterations made by sculptor and designer friend Gordon Newell to the Kithara sketches he had created in England. After taking some woodworking courses in 1938, he built his first Kithara in Big Sur California at a scale of roughly twice the size of Schlesinger's. In 1942 in Chicago, he built his Chromelodeon—another 43-tone reed organ. He was staying on the eastern coast of the U.S. when he was awarded a Guggenheim grant in March 1943 to construct instruments and complete a seven-part Monophonic Cycle. On April 22, 1944, the first performance of his Americana series of compositions was given at Carnegie Chamber Music Hall put on by the League of Composers.