source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 09:06:58 -0700 Subject: Partch, Riley, Reich From: "Jeude, James" 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. Received: from ns.ezh.nl [137.174.112.59] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Fri, 23 Aug 1996 18:45 +0200 Received: by ns.ezh.nl; (5.65v3.2/1.3/10May95) id AA30076; Fri, 23 Aug 1996 18:46:41 +0200 Received: from eartha.mills.edu by ns (smtpxd); id XA30016 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id JAA20184; Fri, 23 Aug 1996 09:46:39 -0700 Date: Fri, 23 Aug 1996 09:46:39 -0700 Message-Id: <009A74AB8C311EA0.30B9@vbv40.ezh.nl> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu