The life and work of Harry Partch (1901-1974) embody the independence and individualism of the American artistic “maverick,” the term applied by musicologist Michael Broyles to describe the line of non-conformist, outsider-artist musicians starting with William Billings and including Charles Ives. Partch’s career unfolded entirely removed from the academic institutions which nominally governed the classical music scene in the United States. He was critical of the abstract nature of European concert music, seeking instead to create a corporeal music based on the melodies and rhythms of American vernacular English. Seeking to reproduce musically — in painstaking detail — the inflections of speech, and to liberate his musical language from the constraint of equal temperament, he developed a new syntax, “extended just intonation,” which significantly expanded the role of acoustically pure intervals. Despite his itinerant disposition, the “vagabond composer” was able to personally construct an “orchestra” of novel instruments which could satisfy the requirements of his microtonal system, and to create a significant and diverse body of instrumental and vocal works.

Harry Partch was born on 24 June 1901 in Oakland (California). His parents, former Presbyterian missionaries, had fled China during the Boxer Rebellion (1898-1900). The composer grew up in the south-west of the United States. Moving to Los Angeles in 1919, he briefly studied piano at the University of Southern California (1920-1922). Despite having already composed a number of pieces, Partch was not comfortable in an academic setting, and dropped out. He subsequently continued to compose in relative isolation, performing odd jobs to earn a living.

In 1923, he came across Hermann von Helmholtz’s treatise on the psychology of music, in which the author, a luminary in several fields, described the basic principles of historical notions of acoustic consonance relative to the concept of just intonation. This proved to be a revelation for Partch, who would spend the next several decades researching the history of just intonation (going as far back as Ancient Greece) in order to expand it to include more complex intervals which were far less familiar to Western ears. In his book Genesis of a music, he introduced a 43-interval division (irregularly distributed) of the octave. All of his subsequent works employed this scale (or variants thereof).

In order to compose with this new musical language, Partch required instruments which were capable of producing fine gradations of pitch (as opposed to standard instruments, designed to produce the even temperament of the modern keyboard). To this end, his first steps were to adapt the fingerboards of a guitar and a viola. However, he quickly went on to construct specialised organs (including the “ptolemy,” “chromelodeon”, and “bloboy”), plucked string instruments similar to harps and sitars (e.g., the “kithara” and “harmonic canon”), and a range of percussion instruments of indeterminate pitch (e.g., the “diamond marimba,” “Spoils of War”, and “zymo-xyl”), which would feature prominently in his later works. These instruments, with their elegant and organic forms, which bring to mind the sculptures of Henry Moore, are as striking visually as they are acoustically.

Although the theoretical foundation of Partch’s music remained the same throughout his career, his work nonetheless evolved significantly. His earliest pieces, such as Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po for adapted viola (a hybrid instrument consisting of a cello neck attached to the body of a viola) and speaker, are characterised by their intimate nature, with instrumental material derived from the inflections of stylised speech. From 1935 to 1943, during the Great Depression, Partch periodically led the life of a drifter, an experience which would be the inspiration for a number of his works (Barstow and U.S. Highball, among others), which were grouped into the generically-titled cycle, The Wayward. In his later pieces, Partch moved away from the use of solo voice and vernacular language, becoming more interested in the ritualistic potential of theatrical/musical performance, drawing influence from a wide range of sources, from Greek tragedies to Noh theatre and various African folklores. In such works, the instruments often serve also as part of the décor on stage, and verbal interactions among instrumentalists, singers, and dancers occur frequently.

Although Partch worked outside the major currents of contemporary music throughout his career, his influence has been significant and widespread. His research inspired a younger generation of American microtonal composers (Ben Johnston, Lou Harrison, James Tenney, etc.) and attracted the attention of several major figures in Europe (György Ligeti, Manfred Stahnke, Georg Friedrich Haas, Enno Poppe, etc.). His ideas and music continue to inspire new works, never more so than at the beginning of the 21st century, when the use of microtonality became more widespread.