source file: mills2.txt Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 09:26:38 -0800 Subject: Message from Harry From: Allen Strange Folks: In doing some work on the Harry Partch Web project which I mentioned on this list recently, I began going through my collection of his Gate 5 recordings. Issue D, Oedipus, contains a booklet, Photgraphs of Instruments Built by Harry Partch and Heard in His Recorded Music. As with many other people accessing this tuning list, I were a hat of many colors, two of which are interests in tuning and computers. In reading the statement by Harry on the front of this booklet I was amazed how these words could just as easily be applied to those of us working in the computer media- especially the first two paragraphs. So I thought I should share them with you. Allen Strange ========================== Tear Here ======================================== It is inherent in the being of the creative art worker to know and understand the materials he needs, and to create them where they do not exist, to the best of his ability. In music, this characteristic must go far beyond the mere competence to compose and analyze a score. It is more difficult for the composer to create the colors of needed sound than it is for the painter to create the colors of needed light, but it is no less important that he find it possible to do so. The usual musical traditions are against him in the effort, in our time they are recognizable as traditions only when they have reached the comfortable plateau of academic security. But the rebelliously creative act is also a tradition, and if our art of music is to be anything more than a shadow of its past, the traditions in question must periodically shake off dominant habits and excite themselves into palpable growth. If one must have the feeling of historical respectability beneath him in order to function, our world provides it in myriad variety, beyond the immediate local, before the immediate past. He does not need to become an archeologist to realize that there is hardly an exotic line he could write, a variant article he could create, or a singular idea he could brew, that would be not felicitous in some tradition, at some point on the globe, at some conjectured time in the cultural past. My instruments belong to many traditions, especially including the present one: affirmation of parentage provides the primary substance of rebellion. There tuning is based on the 43-tone-to-the-octave system of acoustic--- not equal--- intonation, which is explained in by book, Genesis of a Music, published by the University of Wisconsin Press in 1949. A new range of melodic resources, a new series of tonal relationships, and a new perspective on consonance and dissonance are all implicit in the system.. Beyond these severely definable ideas is the music itself, elusive to words, I call corporeal, because it roots itself with other arts necessary to civilization, in a unity that is important to the whole being--- mind and body. Even the visual element of seeing the instruments played is a vital one. I began designing and building instruments nearly forty years ago. Five of those represented here are explained in my book. The other have been built since the time of that publication. All have been built and rebuilt--- one of them seven times--- to improve quality. No two are exactly alike. I am not an instrument builder, but a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry. H.P.--- June, 1962 Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Wed, 8 Nov 1995 21:39 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id LAA15194; Wed, 8 Nov 1995 11:39:14 -0800 Date: Wed, 8 Nov 1995 11:39:14 -0800 Message-Id: Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu