source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 09:57:52 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: A saga of low cunning and feral persistence --- As a chronically unrepentant electronics gonzo, permit me a small confession: Yes, I finally built myself a duplicate of Harry Partch's Harmonic Canon I (minus Harry's bad design features). And it sounds INCREDIBLE. Johnny Reinhard has roundly chided me for slighting acoustic music. Of course, he's right. In the end, there's no substitute for live acoustic music played by good performers on real acoustic instruments. The richness and subtlety of the sound is nonpareil. On the other hand, some of us are interested in exploring worlds of timbre and massed sonority which would not be possible to realize (xenharmonically, anyway) without the aid of "pushing a button on electronic boxes." Thus circumstances will doubtless force me to continue "pushing buttons." If you can get together a 100-piece orchestra that can play accurately in 15-TET, though, Johnny, let me know. In that case my computer will definitely be mothballed. :-) The Harmonic Canon is a marvel, though. A universe of subtle & gorgeous xenharmonies lie within its bridges and pinblocks. For example, entirely different timbres can be gotten by stroking the strings with one's fingers; by plucking them with guitar picks; by tapping them with a knitting needle; by thumping them with a piece of a piano action (Harry gets his revenge against the piano-- 50 years late!); and by whanging the strings with a soft paint roller. Moreover, non-Partchian string-bending koto-style performance techniques bring out an entirely different side of the instrument. The great virtue of the Harmonic Canon lies in its potential as a kind of mechanical sequencer. You set up various justly-intoned melodies by moving the many independent bridges, and you can get triplets, repeated notes, single notes, entire melodic chains playing at a rate entirely controlled by the rate at which you move your finger or your pick across the strings. Add to this the potential gestural effects--pitch-bent ji chords, for instance, or dissonant clusters obtained by rapidly brushing groups of strings--and a single player has got a whole galaxy of microtonal sounds at hi/r beck and call. Harry called this instrument his "blank canvas," and after playing it for a while it's easy to see why. He also mentioned that placing the bridges was almost as much of an art as playing the instrument--another truism which becomes even clearer with personal experience in sliding 37-odd bridges around. The Harmonic Canon is to my mind the most impressive of Partch's instruments. It's one of the few that can't be approximated by a sampler or a DX7. To everyone who's interested in composing acoustic xenharmonic music, my first suggestion wuold be: build a Harmonic Canon I. Costs less than $100, and it'll open your ears to a new cosmos of xenharmonic harmonies and melodies. To construct one, follow the plans in Harry's Genesis Of A Music--sans the bad design ideas. N.B.: Harry's bad design ideas were 1) Using guitar tuning gears; 2) using glued wooden pegs to anchor the guitar strings on the other pinblock; 3) sliding that wacky plexiglas pitch-bender under the strings. Instead of tacking triangular wooden tongues onto the end of the left-hand pinblock and then mounting guitar tuning gears on 'em, just anchor 44 piano tuning pins directly in the left-hand pinblock. It works fine. The problem with the wooden tongues is that they will inevitably crack under all the tension from those 44 guitar strings--Harry himself had to bolt metal supports under the wooden tongues to keep 'em from splitting off entirely. Moreover, the guitar tuning gears never stay in tune long. So the blasted original Partch-design Harmonic Canon was *always* going out of tune during performances. By contrast, our Harmonic Canon stays in tuen for days at a time and can support a much higher tension--thus the sound is louder, and the plucked or struck guitar strings will ring much longer than Harry's strings did. Also: avoid the wooden pegs. Bad idea. Instead, use 1/4" machine screws on the right-hand pinblock. (Make sure both pinblocks are hardened rock maple.) Under the screws, settle 5/16" washers. Between the screws and washers thread the guitar string, and voila! The brass loop end of the guitar string will automatically catch tight when you sink the screws with a screwdriver. This was Bill Wesley's inspiration, and it's infinitely simpler and less trouble-prone than Partch's original design. Q: What did Partch do when he went surfing? A: He used to "hang eleven." --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 2 Feb 1996 19:01 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id KAA16240; Fri, 2 Feb 1996 10:01:20 -0800 Date: Fri, 2 Feb 1996 10:01:20 -0800 Message-Id: <0099D528F3AA41A5.9363@ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu