HP's Composition Techniques

Neil wondered recently...

>Anyway, I think improvisation is a subject that has rarely been touched on
>in this forum...so, it makes me wonder about Partch's compositional
>style...how did he compose his works?

..and Adam wisely opined...

>As far as tuning is concerned, Johnston recounted that he composed alone,
>and not in his head--he would sit at the instruments and plunk around until
>an idea came that was not only musically adequate, but idiomatic for the
>instrument. [...] Also notable is that the kitharas and HCs, as time
>progressed, were tuned less for ease of producing just-intervals and more
>for expressionistic reasons.

I have to say that I never spent any time with Harry while he actually was
composing. I will try to get a more definite picture from Danlee, who
certainly spent more time with him in this regard than anyone I can think of.

My general knowledge of it coincides with Adam's basic thoughts. It is
important to remember that for Harry, this was all one large multi-threaded,
multi-tasking lifestyle. He created the instruments to flesh out his
theories, which themselves were in the service of expressing thought and
feeling through the medium of music and theater. The instruments *did*
evolve, sometimes superseding the underlying rationality, but again in
service of expression.

So, knowing the instruments, Harry did most likely compose by working at
them. I have said how Harry could play all his parts in at least *some*
fashion, and that is recollecting a man at the end of his life. Take a look
at him playing the parts to "Daphne of the Dunes" ("Windsong") in the 'Music
Studio' film on Enclosures One. That puppy could play! And you also start
to get a feeling of just how visceral a performer he could be (and we
*should* be...). But I'm off track again.

So Harry would develop new parts for new pieces. Unless he had decided to
have a Bass Marimba 2 city blocks long, he couldn't use 2 octaves of all 43
tomes, so he had to settle for a few well chosen bass notes. The harmonic
canons, however, were a blank page each time he started fresh. Remember,
they are sounding boxes with 44 (I think) strings on them. To start, you
have 44 individual bridges you can place anywhere under the string. This
sets up 'scales' and 'melodies' and 'clusters' of microtones, depending on
the bridge setup, that suggest many paths. But since the bridges can be
placed *anywhere* between the two ends of the strings, it allows for the
following interesting option.

What a lot of people don't realize is that while a lot of Harry's 'melodies'
sprang from the sequential plucking of the strings, one after another, he
found great stuff on the OTHER side of the bridges too! It's hard to
describe, but here goes. Let's say the individual bridges get closer to
the, um, pegboard side. The pitch goes up the scale. But since the entire
surface of the box is the sounding board, if you pluck the strings on the
other side of the bridges you would get a descending series of notes. Fine
adjust both the bridge location and string tension and you can get both
sides to fall within your scale of choice!

These are the kind of creative games he went through. I can tell you that
having performed on all but a couple of the instruments, even when the licks
were fiendishly difficult to execute, they *were* playable. All the better,
because when you did master them it gave great satisfaction on stage.
Everything he wrote *laid* well on the instruments, from the double-sticking
for odd-rhythm groups (i.e.: RRLRL RRLRL RRLRLRL RRLRLRLRL RRLRL forms the
5-5-7-9-5 pattern for the 31/16 sections in "Daphne").

But I have gotten WAY off course. Harry had an underlying theoretical
foundation upon which to build. He knew the instruments well enough that he
could compose away from them, and did. He combined experimentation
('improvising', if you will) on the instruments (to suss out new melodies,
harmonic motions and the like) with compositional 'imaging' in his head. I
know that during composing "Dreamer" (his last work) he wasn't around the
instruments all the time, so he did *some* stuff in his head. Certainly he
would sing texts, intone phrases and dream up ways to accompany them.

This has been a little laborious to answer -- sorry! If anyone might have a
specific question I'll try to answer it, and I also will try to find out
more from the Mitchell-man about this subject. Lastly, thanks to Adam for
getting the ball rolling...

Cheers,
Jon
*--------------------------------------------------*
Jonathan M. Szanto | .....sound-magic.....
Backbeats & Interrupts | ....visual beauty....
jszanto@adnc.com | ..experience-ritual..
*--------------------------------------------------*


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