the music of harry partch

xjscott · Joined: Apr 25, 2007 Posts: 109 Location: Appalachia

I don't share that perspective myself. In particular I don't think it was "folly", "tragic", the "worst choice" or a "trick" played on him by life.

Partch was perfectly aware that many of his instruments had inharmonic spectra and short decays. He wrote for those qualities. To suggest that he was unaware of the basics of sound is incorrect and a cursory glance at the bibliography in Genesis of a Music should dispel such a notion.

The Harmonium he used as the master tuning reference was certainly very harmonic, and intentionally so - he needed to tune it by ear to his scale.

Just Intonation + perfectly harmonic timbres often sounds pretty lousy and is not personally recommended.

seraph · Posted: Sat Nov 29, 2008 4:03 pm Post subject:

xjscott · Joined: Apr 25, 2007 Posts: 109 Location: Appalachia

Yes, they are both correct.

Lest I be misunderstood as dissing JI, I should emphasize that my statement Just Intonation + perfectly harmonic timbres often sounds pretty lousy is about the mixture of the two, with the focus on the perfectly harmonic timbres. By this I mean digital wavesample oscillators, which are the only perfectly harmonic sound you can get. Acoustic instruments always have slight inharmonicities in their overtones because there is no such thing as a ideal string or windpipe in physical reality. Perfect waveguides creating perfectly harmonic sounds is a theoretical Platonic ideal that can be approximated, but does not exist in nature in a pure form. Therefore, if you were able to play an acoustic instrument in perfect JI, minute phase differences would still create motion in the sound. And if you created an ensemble to play together, the sound could become richer and more beautiful because of these minute differences. But those differences don't exist on digital wavesamples, so you end up with your chords with every note phase locked and beat-free, producing the same sound that you would get by playing one note on a Hammond organ and adjusting the drawbars - you turn harmony into monophony. This might not be too bad as an exploration in minimalism (and has been done on acoustic instruments to good effect) except that you have a dull static timbre with digital. So, that's why I say that Just Intonation + perfectly harmonic timbres often sounds pretty lousy.

Another related factor to all this is that it's impossible to play in perfect JI in the physical world playing physical instruments, since even the best tuners usually tune several cents off from theoretical ideals when tuning acoustic instruments. But this is not a bad thing and there is a quite a bit of intentionality to it. We know that pianos have stretched tunings for example and are really tuned closer to the 7th root of 3/2 rather than 12th root of 2, but even that is wrong, the actual tuning curve of a very well tuned piano is a terribly unobvious thing, which adds to its beauty. Likewise, those classic Hammond organs I mentioned are not tuned to 12tET, but are tuned to a bizarre Rational tuning due to the need to drive tuning from internal gear ratios. This unusual tuning has contributed to the fame and desirability of the instrument since it truly has a unique sound.