Harry Partch, "Adapted Viola"

From The Instruments of Harry Partch, bonus disc from the box set Delusion of the Fury (Columbia M2 30576).

Original Liner Notes:

There is a kind of mystique connected with musical geniuses that increases reverence for them in proportion to the years they have been in the grave. Certainly, the world has been treating hard-headed Harry Partch that way, waiting to shower its regard on him the minute he steps into the Great Beyond. But he's having the last laugh. Now, after fifty years in the wilderness, he's been discovered. Thanks to the kids.

Partch hasn't made it easy-not for himself, not for anyone. A faithful-and minute-avant-garde has had to take extraordinary measures up to now to appreciate the Partch musical genius. But then, Partch has taken some pretty extraordinary measures himself. He's tried to re-make music, which has not endeared him to the bulk of the music Establishment. He doesn't give a damn.

Harry Partch is the living embodiment of the religion of Doing Your Own Thing, If there is a doyen hippie, he is it, so completely that he doesn't even recognize it. He is an original Original. And because it is in his music, today's unprejudiced ears have heard him loud and clear. The young dig Partch. It doesn't shake his cool one bit. They should.

The one-of-a-kind, unique-in-this-world, far-out, beautiful works of sculptural grace that are his instruments defy description. They have to be seen as well as heard. To be able to play his own multi-tone scale, Partch had to design and build every one of them. There was no one else to do it. He has called himself "a music man seduced into carpentry." And now, at last, there is talk of reproducing every one of his instruments for the Smithsonian Institution. The whole world's catching up with Harry Partch. He still doesn't give a damn.

Harry Partch was born June 24, 1901, in Oakland, California, the third child of Presbyterian missionaries who had spent 10 years in China prior to his birth. His boyhood was spent near Tombstone, Arizona, where, despite the total lack of formal music training, he grew up surrounded by music. His mother, a woman of talent and determination, taught her children to read music and to play several instruments. Young Harry, by the time he was 6, not only knew how to play the reed organ, but also the guitar, the clarinet and the harmonica. He began to compose at 14. When the family moved to New Mexico and he received the first music lesson outside his home, he discovered in short order that he loathed formal music training as repressive and constricting. It was an antipathy that colored the rest of his life. He struck out on his own, and, in the years that followed, wrote a piano concerto, a symphonic poem, a string quartet, all in the conventional mold. To keep body and soul together, he became a proofreader, a sometime piano player, a grape picker, while he continued to compose and to search for a way to express his music. Then, at age 28, in New Orleans, he burned the whole body of his musical work of 14 years, determined to start anew, to develop for himself music that would transcend the conventions of musical composition. Its basis was the multi-tones he found in the space of the octave. It enabled him to make the first transitions ever from the human voice to the musical instrument. During the Depression, Partch traveled throughout America by rail as a hobo, writing of his experiences in his music. Although he had received a Carnegie Corporation of New York grant in 1934, it wasn't until 1943 that he received the first of the more substantial grants that made it possible for him to work and travel and to give the 1931 -34 and 1943-45 performances that started to make his work known.

To this day, the difficulties surrounding a performance of Partch's music-the complexities of training musicians to play his music on his instruments and then to transport those large and delicate objects that cannot function properly without his personal attention-inhibit managers and impresarios.

Partch now lives quietly in Encinitas, California, in what he calls his first real home since his childhood, surrounded by the bizarre and wonderful array of instruments he has built, through which he has made, according to Jacques Barzun, "the most original and powerful contribution to dramatic music on this continent."

-Eugene Paul