Partch, Riley, Reich

Two events framed my interest in microtonal and non-standard tunings. The
first was my father's off-handed comment that he wondered what 7th root of 2
musical scales would sound like and explained the "small whole number ratio"
rationale of JI. Between his slide rule, my tape recorder, and my school's
sine wave generator, I completed a rough school project on 7tet.

The second, when I was maybe 12 years old, came when my mother's copy of
Switched On Bach coughed up a second 7" single from Columbia Records with
samples of other avante-garde releases.
There were several selections (6, as I recall) but only three made an
impression:
1)Terry Riley's Rainbow In Curved Air, an accident of fate that changed my
musical life -- Riley though not a rigid JI theorist does use just tunings
on almost all of his work the past few decades,.
2) Steve Reich's Violon Phase, which when I sought out and found various
Reich albums also introduced me to tape work like Come Out and It's Gonna
Rain and, obliquely, the ideas of psychoacoustics
3) Harry Partch.

Only with Harry Partch did I get a sense that this was something I really
was supposed to appreciate, intellectually, but I just couldn't find a way
to understand and integrate his approach into my own music-making. Harry's
piece made an impression but I've never really gotten used to it.

As an adult I've re-listened to Partch and acquired two albums which rarely
leave their album covers. For me, he's one of those artists whose corpus
has a meaning that far exceeds the sum of the individual pieces. Li Po was
wonderful when I saw it live at The Knitting Factory but it was because it
was part of the Harry legend. If I'd run across Li Po on the radio, I might
well have continued searching the dial.

It seems from reading this TUNING list that a newbie with an interest in
Partch today has to do a fair amount of research to pull together enough
obscure or out-of-print recordings, interviews, personal reminisces, and so
on to get a picture of the man and his music -- and live performances with
correct instruments are rare. I hope Partch can become more "quickly"
accessible (which is different than more "easily" accessible) through a new
wave of Partch recordings and documentation. Maybe I'll give Harry another
try.

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