Listening to Partch

I find myself in agreement with other posters to this group in that as much
as I am turned on by Partch's theories (he changed forever the way I do
music) I find his music by and large unsatisfying. Before I go on I should
mention that my exposure to his music (like most people's I guess) is from
what is available internationally on CD.

>From my own work with rational tunings, I find that I get most out of them
either using long sustained tones or repeated patterns. This gives the
quality of the interval time to really resonate for me inwardly. Whereas the
short chippy sounds of much of Partch's music communicates well rhythmically
but I don't get much else out of it other than at an intellectual level.
That's fine, but... When I find slow sustained lines like some melodic
sections for the Adapted Viola (I'm thinking of Revelations in the
Courthouse Park) I wish he had done more stuff like that.

The other idea I'm mulling over at the moment relates to Otonalities and
Utonalities. Now, if I remember correctly, you get Otonalities by taking a
chunk of the harmonic series (for example harmonics 6 through 12) and
calling it a scale. Utonalities on the other hand (no I'm not going into the
debate about the existence of undertones) I understand best from Kathleeen
Schlesinger's work. For example if you fret a one string guitar in 16 equal
parts or you make similarly spaced holes in a flute you get a scale which is
the Utonality of 16.

OK (I hope I got that right) Now the 43 tone scale that Partch developed was
a mix of O and U tonalities to the 11 limit which creates a typically
palindromic structure. The idea, as far as I can judge, was to allow many
possibilities to the system that Partch was creating and to pre-empt the
criticism that monophony was limiting compared to the richness and
complexity of the 12TET key system.

The next step he made is the one I find discomfiting. Within a piece or a
passage or sometimes a line he will switch around between different
tonalities. Now since I do not have access to his scores, this comes from my
perceptions of his music and I am open to correction because it is this
switching around that I find creates the difficulty for me.

When I'm doing my thing musically, it makes sense to stick to either a U or
an O tonality structure for a piece. To mix them confuses me. Personally I
prefer working with the introverted quality of Utonalities, compared to the
more extraverted quality I perceive with Otonalities. And so I find myself
asking if Partch's mixing of these two tonalities is the difficulty that I
and perhaps others have with his music.

I would be most interested in others comments/opinions

Brian Lee


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