Harry Partch, Hobo Composer

Harry Partch, Hobo Composer PDF Author: S. Andrew Granade
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580464955
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Examines the impact of Harry Partch's hobo years from a variety of perspectives, exploring how the composer both engaged and frustrated popular conceptions of the hobo.

Harry Partch, Hobo Composer

Harry Partch, Hobo Composer PDF Author: S. Andrew Granade
Publisher: Boydell & Brewer
ISBN: 1580464955
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
Examines the impact of Harry Partch's hobo years from a variety of perspectives, exploring how the composer both engaged and frustrated popular conceptions of the hobo.

Bitter Music

Bitter Music PDF Author: Harry Partch
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 9780252069130
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 532

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Book Description
Now in paper for the first time, Bitter Music is a generous volume of writings by one of the twentieth century's great musical iconoclasts. Rejecting the equal temperament and concert traditions that have dominated western music, Harry Partch adopted the pure intervals of just intonation and devised a 43-tone-to-the-octave scale, which in turn forced him into inventing numerous musical instruments. His compositions realize his ideal of a corporeal music that unites music, dance, and theater. Winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award, Bitter Music includes two journals kept by Partch, one while wandering the West Coast during the Depression and the other while hiking the rugged northern California coastline. It also includes essays and discussions by Partch of his own compositions, as well as librettos and scenarios for six major narrative/dramatic compositions.

Harry Partch

Harry Partch PDF Author: Bob Gilmore
Publisher: Yale University Press
ISBN: 9780300065213
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 492

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Book Description
Visionary composer, theorist, and creator of musical instruments, Harry Partch (1901-1974) was a leading figure in the development of an indigenously American contemporary music. A pioneer in his explorations of new instruments and new tunings, Partch created multimedia theater works that combine sight and sound in a compelling synthesis. He is acknowledged as a major inspiration to postwar experimental composers as diverse as György Ligeti, Lou Harrison, Philip Glass, and Laurie Anderson, and his book Genesis of a Music, first published in 1949, is now considered a classic. This book is the first to tell the complete story of Partch's life and work. Drawing on interviews with many of Partch's associates and on the complete archives of the Harry Partch Estate, Bob Gilmore provides a full and sympathetic portrait of this extraordinary creative artist. He describes Partch's complicated relationships with friends, patrons, the musical establishment, and the world at large. He traces Partch's upbringing in the remote desert towns of the Southwest, his explosive encounter with formal music education in Los Angeles, and his revolutionary course as a composer that began with an interest in the musicality of speech patterns. After immersing himself in hobo subculture during the Depression, Partch came to occupy a lonely and uncompromising position as a cultural outsider. Richly fascinating in themselves, Partch's compositions, writings, and life also have much to reveal about American society and the creative impulses of the artistic avant-garde.

Harry Partch

Harry Partch PDF Author: David Dunn
Publisher: Psychology Press
ISBN: 9789057550652
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
First Published in 2000. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Genesis Of A Music

Genesis Of A Music PDF Author: Harry Partch
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 9780306801068
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 544

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Book Description
Among the few truly experimental composers in our cultural history, Harry Partch's life (1901–1974) and music embody most completely the quintessential American rootlessness, isolation, pre-civilized cult of experience, and dichotomy of practical invention and transcendental visions. Having lived mostly in the remote deserts of Arizona and New Mexico with no access to formal training, Partch naturally created theatrical ritualistic works incorporating Indian chants, Japanese kabuki and Noh, Polynesian microtones, Balinese gamelan, Greek tragedy, dance, mime, and sardonic commentary on Hollywood and commercial pop music of modern civilization. First published in 1949, Genesis of a Music is the manifesto of Partch's radical compositional practice and instruments (which owe nothing to the 300-year-old European tradition of Western music.) He contrasts Abstract and Corporeal music, proclaiming the latter as the vital, emotionally tactile form derived from the spoken word (like Greek, Chinese, Arabic, and Indian musics) and surveys the history of world music at length from this perspective. Parts II, III, and IV explain Partch's theories of scales, intonation, and instrument construction with copious acoustical and mathematical documentation. Anyone with a musically creative attitude, whether or not familiar with traditional music theory, will find this book revelatory.

Harry Partch

Harry Partch PDF Author: Harry Partch
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 536

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Book Description


The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF Author: Alex Ross
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1429932880
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 640

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Book Description
Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

The Arithmetic of Listening

The Arithmetic of Listening PDF Author: Kyle Gann
Publisher: University of Illinois Press
ISBN: 0252051424
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 344

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Book Description
"Tuning is the secret lens through which the history of music falls into focus," says Kyle Gann. Yet in Western circles, no other musical issue is so ignored, so taken for granted, so shoved into the corners of musical discourse. A classroom essential and an invaluable reference, The Arithmetic of Listening offers beginners the grounding in music theory necessary to find their own way into microtonality and the places it may take them. Moving from ancient Greece to the present, Kyle Gann delves into the infinite tunings available to any musician who feels straitjacketed by obedience to standardized Western European tuning. He introduces the concept of the harmonic series and demonstrates its relationship to equal-tempered and well-tempered tuning. He also explores recent experimental tuning models that exploit smaller intervals between pitches to create new sounds and harmonies. Systematic and accessible, The Arithmetic of Listening provides a much-needed primer for the wide range of tuning systems that have informed Western music. Audio examples demonstrating the musical ideas in The Arithmetic of Listening can be found at: https://www.kylegann.com/Arithmetic.html

Forces in Motion

Forces in Motion PDF Author: Graham Lock
Publisher: Courier Dover Publications
ISBN: 0486824098
Category : Music
Languages : en
Pages : 467

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Book Description
Based on interviews from a 1985 tour, this book profiles one of jazz's most important figures. Anthony Braxton discusses the expression of his musical visions and related ethical, political, and spiritual beliefs. "Absolutely essential reading." — The Wire.

The Shape of Content

The Shape of Content PDF Author: Ben Shahn
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 9780674805705
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
"A modern painter discusses meaning and form in contemporary painting and offers advice to aspiring artists."--