PARTCH Ensemble

Organ Transplant, pt.4

“Too Many Notes!”

Once Partch had created a working “Chromolodian” in Chicago in 1942, he was finally able to get to work creating the marvelous repertoire that we have come to admire. The instrument, however, was only meant to be a stop gap “instrument of expediency” until he could perfect the so-called “General Keyboard” layout that he had envisaged a decade earlier. 

The problem was that with forty-three notes to the octave, his newly adapted standard 61-key, 5-octave reed organ only produced a continuous scale with a range of little more than an octave. The limited tessitura of the “A”-stop could be expanded by pulling the “Z”-stop that engaged a second set of reeds, doubling the notes found on the lowest keys F1-E3 an octave below their initial “A” pitches while pulling the “X”-stop produced those an octave higher than keys F3-F6. Playing the keyboard with just stops Z & X open (without the A-stop) certainly produced a strange discontinous scale when played alone, but they were meant to extend the top to bottom of the initial A-scale. 

By 1945, he had adapted a 6-octave, 73-key instrument—changing the name to its final spelling “Chromelodeon”—though that only added a major third to the still rather limited gamut:

Those extra 12 keys also hadn’t solved another basic problem: with so many notes to the octave, playing a simple triad was extremely awkward, taking two hands, compared with the standard keyboard:

So in an effort to create a more hand-friendly keyboard, Partch created an entirely new design, admitting that, 

The many impossible stretches on Chromelodeon I in the common harmonic intervals—2/1, 3/2, and 4/3 [octave, fifth, and fourth]—influence the composer toward linear or voice-leading types of music. This is far from a bad influence, but the keyboard distances are limitations which are partially eliminated in Chromelodeon II. This instrument has more keys to the octave in the same octave distance.1

re-Genesis of a Music

  ~  A tale of obsession  ~
 by John Schneider

re-Genesis of a Music

~  A tale of obsession  ~
 by John Schneider

Organ Transplant, pt.3

“Have Reeds Will Travel”

Partch returned to the U.S. in April of 1935 after his extraordinary European sojourn. He hitchhiked to New York, visiting the Carnegie Corporation to ensure that his 6-month grant report had been received, and hurried on to the West Coast, eager to meet his organ at the docks where it would arrive via the Panama Canal:

Los Angeles, April 30, 1935.  My entire expenses from Malta to London to Portland to Los Angeles have been $150—food and transportation. I have 1% of my $1,500 left. 

I spend a week persuading the customs officials to admit the chromatic organ without duty. And, through friends, a way is ultimately found. Its godmother, in Santa Barbara [quartertone composer Mildred Couper 1887-1974], has offered to keep it and pay for its transportation there. Off it goes again, direct from the dock. (Bitter Music)

He ended up eventually removing all of the reeds that he had so carefully tuned in London and began making a new console in an Adult Education night class wood shop at a Los Angeles high school where he also crafted his first Kithara. He finished work on the ‘new’ Ptolemy in 1940 in Big Sur while staying at the Old Convict Camp in Anderson Creek, where he also finished writing his journal Bitter Music:

Sadly, this new incarnation of the instrument was also unsuccessful, though the reeds would travel once again, this time to Chicago where they would find a new home in what became the composer’s “Chromolodian,” the first of many instruments that would bear that colorful name.

Partch’s now famous exodus from the California coast to Illinois—as immortalized in his unforgettable U.S. Highball/A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip—was instigated by an invitation from a Chicago music lover. Years later, in his typically sardonic retelling, the composer remarked, “Having been through more than six years of California depression, I jumped at the chance to see some Midwest depression (somewhat like a prisoner in the county jail eagerly looking forward to a transfer to the county farm, or vice versa).” 

His arrival on October 1, 1941 “…in the dingy, pre-dawn smogginess of industrial Chicago (Genesis),” certainly didn’t dampen his spirits, as just seven weeks later, he was performing Barstow  and a few of his Li Po Lyrics at Chicago’s School of Design, sharing the program with a younger California composer named John Cage. 

In the coming months, he printed a promotional brochure that described—in the 3rd person—his biography, list of works and instruments. The title page read:

Presenting a Resume of
The Music Philosophy and Work of Harry Partch
Composer — Instrument Builder and Player — Theorist


A Modern Renascence of
the most ancient of civi-
lized Musical Ideals  -


SPEECH-MUSIC
In    a Flexible    Scale
Utilizing new instruments having a
gamut of 43 true tones to the octave.

In it, he describes the nascent Chromatic Organ—née Ptolemy—but goes on to describe it’s expedient surrogate:

Clearly keen to continue his compositional projects, Partch first attempted to adapt an old melodeon (a type of reed organ) that was loaned to him by two harpsichordists that he had recently met. This was, of course, the inspiration for the eventual name of this Adapted organ, in spite of the preliminary spelling, “Hence the name, a melodeon that approaches closer to the chromatic maximum of all “colors,”or gradations of tone (‘Panchromelodeon’).”

The results must have been unsatisfactory, however, as he soon obtained a standard 61-key/5-octave harmonium, replacing its reeds with those he had retuned in London, and using it to compose the second draft of Barstow between December and January. This new version added the keyboard part and another voice, and though the score has been lost, the title page of his original solo manuscript reflects the additions:

He also transcribed his Two Psalms (1932), “The Lord is My Shepherd,” and “By The Rivers of Babylon,” replacing the original Adapted Viola part with the new keyboard. 

By the end of February 1941, Partch began performing these pieces along with Six Lyrics by Li Po (voice & Adapted Viola) with two new Chicago acquaintances, organist Gilman Chase & a young tenor called George Bishop. In March, they even recorded them with recording equipment borrowed from the same kind gentlemen that loaned him the melodeon, though Partch was unhappy with the results, writing to one of the officers at the Guggenheim Fund that he, “was not able to experiment to any appreciable extent with placings of the microphones and instruments.” That was not the case the following November when his solo lecture demonstration at the Eastman School of Music produced six excellent 12-inch acetate discs that were forwarded to the Guggenheim in support of the composer’s upcoming grant application. 

Partch used the Chicago-adapted Chromolodian for another three years, in spite of shipping damage that occurred when sending it further east for lectures at Bennington and Eastman. This prompted a comment in a letter to Otto Luening, his Bennington host, “All my shipments were damaged. I’ll just have to do something about it. If I could only find a portable reed organ—one that folds up like a suitcase—to adapt, my biggest problem would be solved. I have priced them, but the cheapest I could find was $65. They’re very popular with sidewalk evangelists.”

The instrument survived all of his presentations and—after some repairs in Boston in December ‘43—was featured in his historic debut at Carnegie Hall on April 22, 1944 when The League of Composers presented

A PROGRAM OF COMPOSITIONS ON AMERICANA TEXTS
by HARRY PARTCH

Artists

Ethel Luening — Soprano        Alix Young Maruchess — Kithara

Henry Brandt — Chromolodeon, Tin Flutes and Tin Oboe

Harry Partch — Intoning Voice, Adapted Guitar, Adapted Viola,
Chromolodeon, Flex-a-tone

Notice that the keyboard formerly known as Chromolodian had changed its name, but many more changes were on the horizon. In the following decade, the rechristened  Chromelodeon would change much more that that!

re-Genesis of a Music

~  A tale of obsession  ~
 by John Schneider

Organ Transplant, pt.2

“This is no musical instrument…!”

In 1934, Partch was awarded a grant of $1,500 from the Carnegie Corporation for a year of research in Europe. It became a most amazing odyssey during which he spent many weeks at the British museum digesting ancient and modern volumes on music, visiting the South Kensington Museum where he saw the microtonal organs constructed by Colin Brown, Bosanquet, and General Perronet Thompson that he had only read about in Helmholtz’s Sensations of Tone:

Colin Brown’s Voice Harmonium

Bosanquet’s Enharmonic Harmonium

He also met early music specialists Arnold Dolmetsch and Kathleen Schlesinger, as well as the poets Ezra Pound and W.B. Yeats. As Partch reminisced in his journal Bitter Music:  

 “This is money and a consummation in the recognition of my endeavors that have been long coming—eleven years of effort and three years of begging are behind it—and I wonder if I still have the energy, having spent so much in winning the award to execute my projects:

Project 1: Completion of my Trails of Music, the theoretical basis of my work. I had rewritten this manuscript almost every year since 1926, but the historical background was still woefully deficient, and I proposed to prepare histories of intonation, and of the spoken word in music, at the British Museum in London. 

Project 2: The building of a true chromatic organ, or, if this is a misuse of the word true, an organ at least three times as chromatic as the piano. The keyboard of this instrument I had already constructed, as a model.

Project 3: the setting of the entire drama King Oedipus, version by the Irish poet William Butler Yeats, to my music, preserving throughout the vitality of the spoken words…

I could spend the whole sum of $1,500 on my chromatic organ—my beautiful dumb keyboard—in a single disbursement, and waste no part of a penny. After all, people spend a thousand dollars on a piano, which is standardized and in mass production, and think nothing extravagant in it. And yet for my keyboard, only one of its kind—parts for which have to be specially made—I can spend, at most, half that much. For my $1,500 must cover all expenses—traveling, living—for a year, and instrument building. In that case it will, by gollies.”

And so it did. He visited Yeats in Dublin, transcribing the exact pitch inflections of the poet’s personal reading of King Oedipus, also travelling to France and Italy. 

Upon his arrival in London, Partch procured some brilliantly colored celluloid and spent three weeks constructing a new keyboard in his rented room after long days at the British Museum:

One 2/1 (Octave) of the Ptolemy Keyboard Proper

One Section of the Ptolemy Diamond Keyboard

Before leaving on his travels to the Continent, he canvassed several London organ builders who politely declined the project of building a custom instrument after learning that he had only 100 pounds to spend. He finally engaged Edwin Malkin of Wimbledon who came up with an idea to simplify the mechanical difficulties, and was willing to construct the instrument for $375, providing that Partch produced the keyboard and tune the instrument:

“Shall I gamble? I this idea fails it means I will have no chromatic organ. But on the other hand, if I won’t gamble, I won’t win, and I so hate the idea of going on with only my one little viola to prove all my work.

I gamble, and I am handed a paper: “Received of Harry Partch Esq. £60 on account for organ to be built to specification at £70. With thanks…”

— Bitter Music

Upon his return from Europe three months later, Partch spent two weeks in Wimbledon tuning the reeds as promised, using a special set of tuning forks that he previously had made to specific frequencies for this very purpose. 

And the result? His diary tells us:

Wimbledon, London, March, 1935. The chromatic organ is finished! But alas! The wording has a double meaning. I spend two weeks tuning the reeds, and in its intonation it proves all of my contentions, and fulfills my finest hopes. It has forty-three tones to the octave over a three-octave extent, and 268 rainbow-colored keys in a practical analogy with tones.

But its mechanical workings—the ideas that made its construction cheap—are faulty. The action is extremely uneven, and so hard that playing a two-octave scale tires even this piano-trained hand!

But I cling to the hope that adjustments can be made, and I find that it will cost only $40 to ship it direct to Los Angeles. I get an article and a picture in Musical Opinion, the monthly magazine, as a record.

Thus ends Project 2:

Illustration from “A New Instrument,” MUSICAL OPINION—June 1935

A few days later, 

“Wimbledon, London, March, 1935. I am talking about possible difficulties with the American customs over my chromatic organ.

“Just say to them,” observes my organ builder, “Listen to this—this is no musical instrument!’”

He has no sympathy for anything post-Beethoven.“

On March 30th, projects ended, money spent, Partch boarded as the only passenger on a freighter loaded with china clay, bound for Portland, Maine, and an America deep in the grips of the Great Depression.

re-Genesis of a Music

~  A tale of obsession  ~
 by John Schneider

Organ Transplant, pt.1

Once Harry Partch had decided on a working scale of 43 ‘true tones’ to the octave, as he called them, he faced the incredible challenge of how to produce them, let alone how to write them down. He first experimented with bowed string instruments by making special paper coverings for their fingerboards, and eventually created his first so-called microtonal instrument by adapting a viola, adding a cello fingerboard onto an extended neck. He first called it a Monophone, “Monophony” being the name that he gave his particular language of just intonation, though soon it was simply called the Adapted Viola. Of course in the traditional world of music, the term monophonic refers to a single line of pitches, and while Partch was initially fascinated in instrumentally reproducing the subtleties of pitch variation found in human speech, he was equally concerned with harmony, and thrilled to the new harmonies revealed by his discovery of just intonation.

Partch’s first attempts at building a harmonic instrument were his Adapted Guitar (1935), followed soon after by the creation of a modern harmonic version of the ancient Greek Kithara (1938). But long before that, Partch dreamed of a keyboard instrument that could reproduce the pure intervals of ratio tuning. He was, after all, an accomplished pianist, and had moved to Los Angeles from Arizona to study with the renowned pianist Richard Buhlig while he attended the University of Southern California. He only lasted at USC for three months, but continued his education via public libraries where he discovered Helmholtz’s On The Sensations of Tone.  It was there that he learned about the acoustic inferiority of tempered tuning, as well as the tuning of the ancient Greek modes, scientific measurement intervals with ratios, charts with several different sizes for each of our familiar intervals, measuring units of 1/100th of a semitone (= 1¢) rather than the standard equal-tempered semitone, and most importantly, the concept of Just Intonation. 

In fact, Helmholtz had created a harmonium tuned to Just Intonation since, “The harmonium, on account of its uniformly sustained sound, the piercing character of its quality of tone, and its tolerably distinct combinational tones, is particularly sensitive to inaccuracies of intonation.” (Sensations of Tone, p. 316) He chose a two manual instrument with a set of vibrating reeds for each, and tuned them such that the true values for flats were on the upper keyboard, and the sharps on the lower. 

Harmonium Reeds pictured in Sensations of Tone

Partch would spend many hours tuning reeds in the coming decades for his numerous keyboards, but he also learned from Appendix of Sensations written by the English translator Alexander Ellis, of even more complex instruments created during the same era that used experimental “generalized” keyboards to handle all of those so-called extra notes:

Mr. Poole’s Enharmonic Organ (1850)

Bosanquet’s Generalized Keyboard (1875)

It comes as no surprise, then, that when Partch designed his first RATIO KEYBOARD in 1932, it also used a very unusual pattern…

Partch’s Ratio Keyboard design (1932)

…and also began his practice of color-coding the numerators & denominators of his ratios.

Partch was so convinced of the efficacy of this design that he constructed a model out of enameled thread spools—the ends filled with plastic wood and varnished corrugated board—and took it to the California Institute of Technology (Caltech), hoping to generate enough interest for them to construct the actual instrument:

A Partch demonstration (circa 1933)

Interested they were not, and it would take another few years and a visit to London to find out if his design would actually work.

re-Genesis of a Music
  ~  A tale of obsession  ~

 by John Schneider

Part III: “Oh, for a picture—just one picture….!”

Theoretically, I was good to go:

1. I had the score to the solo version of Barstow (1941)
2. I finally knew what actual pitches the dozens of ratios in the music referred to
3. I knew how the original Adapted Guitar I was strung and tuned

But most importantly, I had ‘crossed the Rubicon’ and decided that, in order to do the piece justice, I had to recreate not just the notes, but the actual guitar itself. But how far should I go? He couldn’t make standard fretwire work, so he had used “high, stainless-steel frets into slots in a brass plate, which was then screwed onto the neck…” I had access to luthiers who could work with regular frets…perhaps I could reverse engineer the guitar by simply finding which frets I would need to play the piece.

      While first attempting to transcribe the piece, I had already gone through the score and determined that Partch had used 39 notes to the octave, but that was for both the voice and the guitar parts. So I wrote out just the guitar notes:

and since the score was written in tablature, I knew exactly which string had to perform each note. Next step? draw a model of the fingerboard:

Looked good…but how would I know if I was right? There was no recording of this earliest version of the piece, and the famous Columbia Recording didn’t even have a guitar in it. If I only had a photograph of the guitar! 

Ironically, I knew exactly what kind of guitar it was—a 1927 Koa-wood Martin parlor guitar—as there was a picture of it in his book Genesis of a Music. But years before, Partch had removed the high frets, restrung the instrument with six equidistant G-strings, and turned it into a slide guitar by raising the strings and covering the brass slotted fingerboard with a thin board with painted lines. 

There were simply no photos of the original fretting available: I was on my own.

      BUT – I remembered that in McGeary’s catalogue, there was mention of some 1945 acetate recordings made by an amateur recordist that included the 1943 version of the Barstow with kithara, guitar, & chromelodeon…so I started making phone calls. Lots of phone calls. This was pre-internet, of course, so research meant letter writing and a huge telephone bill. I was able to track down Dr. Warren Gilson in Wisconsin who had made the recordings, and though he fondly remembered both Partch and the sessions, the details of the instruments were a blur and his records were long gone. I was, however, able to reach Partch scholar Richard Kassel, who kindly mailed me a cassette of Gilson’s recording. I listened to it over and over again,  for days on end, to get the sound of Partch’s guitar into my head.

      In the meantime, I had acquired a classical guitar that had a special fingerboard invented by the German luthier Walter Vogt that used sliding frets such that each note on every string could be individually tuned. 

If I could fret that guitar with the proposed Barstow frets that I had worked out, then I would know if I was on the right track. Since the strings of the Barstow guitar were basically three pitches Eb-G-B (doubled at the octave like a 12-strings), I tuned the 4^th string D up to Eb^+14¢ [a pure Major 3^rd below the 3^rd string G], and tuned the 2^nd string B down 14¢ to be a pure major third above the G. I then slid the frets to match the pattern I had worked out. Mind you, I didn’t have a proper electronic tuner to tune the frets, but I did have a Yamaha DX7-II synthesizer that I had tuned to the Partch scale, so I carefully matched the frets to the keyboard pitches, sliding one fretlet at a time until they were in sync.

With the tuning and fretting finally done, I gingerly played the opening chords that I had been listening to for weeks. To my amazement, the same strange chords that had been emanating from my stereo were suddenly coming out of the guitar in my lap. It worked! I rapidly went through the score and tried all of the chords, and they all checked out. Time to make some sawdust!

With incredible luck, I had been able to locate a Japanese copy of a pre-war Martin, and took it to the Los Angeles luthier Greg Brandt, who pulled the frets, and prepared the recently vacated premises for its new tenants. He then re-drilled the bridge to place the six strings in three pairs rather than the original equally spaced sextet, and we strung it up. Then, using a piece of fretwire that had the tang ground off, we slid the fret over the smooth ebony surface to mark where each fret should go, using the synthesizer to tune each note by ear. 

What a job! First I would find the right note on the synth, then step on the sustain pedal so that the pitch hung in the air while we moved the fret wire up & down until the two notes matched. The slightest move to either the right or left created beats, so the process was very exact. Three hours later, the 27 exact placements had been marked before Greg could make the precision cuts in the wood and start hammering frets:

Three days later, Greg called with the news, “The guitar is ready!” It had taken a professional to accomplish the delicately difficult job of refretting that Partch, a self-proclaimed “philosophic music man seduced into carpentry” was not able to achieve.

And so, in August of 1992, Partch’s original Adapted Guitar was reborn. There in the workshop, I picked up the instrument and began strumming the chords that I had memorized. The paired stringing made the chords very easy to play, and this time, I not only recognized the same chords as the original score, but also the same exact twanging timbres that had been buried in those crackling acetate grooves half a century before.

What a journey! The seeds that had been planted way back in 1978 and the quest that had begun in the Spring of 1991 was over: the music & guitar that I had virtually lived, breathed, slept and eaten for a year and a half was a reality once again. With boundless enthusiasm, I began to rehearse an within six weeks, I was performing the piece in public:

A year later, I had the pleasure of recording the piece for the Bridge Records album Just West Coast, giving listeners a chance to hear the piece as Partch himself had originally conceived and performed it back in the 1941-42:

It turns out that after 1942, Partch started re-orchestrating Barstow, adding new instruments as he invented them: first in 1942, with two voices and Chromelodeon, then in 1943 adding the Kithara, again in 1954 using the slide version of the Adapted guitar with Surrogate Kithara and Diamond Marimba, and finally in 1968 with no guitar whatsoever, but adding his bamboo marimba called the Boo.

But was I right…?

It wasn’t until nine years after I had completed the guitar, having performed Barstow on three continents, that I finally saw a photo of the original guitar with the original stainless steel frets. After all, the music worked – I played and sang every note in the score, but did I get the instrument right? Were my best guesses at the frets and strings correct…? 

In 2001, I produced a Harry Partch Centennial Celebration at UCLA, a 12- hour extravaganza of lectures, films, panels, and a concert. At the event, the Harry Partch Foundation presented an exhibit of photographs from the composer’s life in the lobby of Schoenberg Hall. And there, amidst dozens of unforgettable prints, to my profound relief and delight, was this photograph:

Turns out that I was right after all. (Whew!!)

Next month: “Wait, weren’t there two Adapted Guitars?”