[NewMusic] Partch

[Matthew Goodheart]

On Apr 23, 2007, at 10:35 AM, Phillip Greenlief wrote:

> That "chart" doesn't help much - you can see that the divisions between
> certain half-steps are not equal, and that much is clear.
>
> Clearly there isn't anything cheeky about the divisions - he's done 
> that
> by metering the partials,

Well, it's not the partials, it's the whole-number ratios. It's the 
just-intonation thing: each prime number gives you a new pitch, and 
then intervallic content comes from multiplying and dividing these 
prime numbers against each other. Yes, it's related to overtones, but 
partials actually vary from strict harmonicity due to string tension, 
breath pressure, or whatever. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, 
these ratios were arrived at (since Pythagoras times) from divisions of 
the string or mathematical means, not from going up the overtone series 
(at least in the West, and in China from what I understand.) Overtones 
were, and still are, occasionally used as "proof" of the "naturalness"  
of whole-number ratios.


> It's hard to tell when Partch is being serious in that book and when
> he's "taking the piss"...

Oh yeah, I think he's being deadly serious. It seems to me he's 
attempting to return music to it's origins, and that ET is a 
destructive aberration. In the introduction to Genesis of a Music he 
says:

"Traditions in the creative arts are per se suspect. For they exist on 
the patrimony of standardization, which means degeneration. They 
dominate because they are to the interest of some group that has the 
power to perpetuate them, and they cease to dominate when some equally 
powerful group undertakes to bend them to a new pattern. . . . 
Traditions remain undisturbed, uninvestigated, and therefore a culture 
of music based upon such palpably noble precepts is already senile."


> I mean, what's "emotional" about the intervals
> that live between Bb and C? What's inherently "suspenseful" about the
> intervals between C and C#???

Yeah, it's arbitrary, but not illogical: the tension of various 
intervals relates to their distance from the simpler ratios. On a 
traditional scale of consonance and dissonance, the simpler the ratio, 
the more "consonant:" but Partch doesn't talk about it in a 
consonant/dissonant dichotomy, but rather a single stream of "power;" 
the simpler the ratio, the more power it has; therefor the "octave" 
(2:1) has the most power,  the 4th and 5th (4:3, 5:4), the next most 
power. It's an interesting way of looking at it, because I think one 
can argue that the simpler ratios are definite "attraction" points. So 
the ratios surrounding them are given designations relating to their 
melodic distance from the most powerful centers.

For a clarification, it's not the "intervals between Bb and C: but 
rather the interval between those pitches and the fundamental 
generating pitch, G: this is why he calls his music "monophonic:" it's 
all based on primary and secondary relationships to G.

mg