Eventually, reading Helmholtz's treatise On the Sensation of Tone, he was appalled to find that the system was rotten in its very foundation – its implementation of tonality, whose justly intoned purity had been sacrificed to the practical convenience, for the keyboard, of equal temperament.
Just intonation - based on ratios of small, whole numbers - is nature's mode of harmonic vibration. Our ears and voices are attuned to it. A vibrating piano string's harmonics are necessarily justly intoned – but they're not playable on the piano.
Partch was provoked, beyond endurance, to an unimaginably bold decision: consigning all his existing compositions to the tender mercies of a pot-bellied stove, he would create from scratch an entire music, which (unlike any "crackpot") he would justify both scientifically and practically.
His ambition, absolutely staggering in scope, was to derive from first principles a just-intonational system, build instruments working within that system, develop notations, compose music, develop performing skills, train players, put on performances, make recordings, and write a full account.
There's more! In parallel, working from an ancient Greek model, he evolved a philosophy of "corporealism", wherein all the arts become the servants of one supreme art – drama. More staggering still is that, although perpetually poor and often homeless (even a Depression hobo), he fully achieved his ambition, through 50 years of unceasing dedication and effort.
Partch's choice of a 43-tone scale wasn't arbitrary but based on the just intonational 11-limit, which corresponded to the human ear's discriminatory abilities – in his early "speech music" musical tones could thus support and intensify the natural emotive speech-tones.
He overturned virtually every commonly accepted fact regarding just intonation, elucidating the true relationship (first stated by da Vinci) between dissonance and consonance, discrediting that purportedly God-given justification of equal temperament, the circle of fifths, by showing the supposedly perfect fifth to be anything but.
He unearthed the precise relationship, fudged by all musicologists, between major and minor, a relationship that's essentially intact (and therefore properly explicable) in equal temperament.
He also clarified the turn of the 20th century's so-called breakdown of tonality. The number of degrees in a justly intoned octave derives from its defining prime number, which demands for increased expressive potential had pushed from three to five by the 1600s, whereafter the emergent tempered scales effectively crystallised it.
The late Romantics were battering at the walls of this intonational prison, not (as they imagined) to escape from tonality, but in reality to penetrate the wider expanses of the 7-limit. So equal temperament was to blame for dodecaphonism.
Clearly, by following this lonely path, Partch marginalised himself.
But this doesn't make him irrelevant. His contribution to our understanding of the stuff of music is inestimable, his courage and tenacity an example to us all. Nevertheless he did find fame in his lifetime, but not as a musician. His weird and wonderful instruments were more wonderful than weird. His imagination, artistry and craftsmanship won him considerable acclaim – as a sculptor!
What, you may ask, does his music sound like? Well, "far out, man" springs to mind. Partch, however, claimed that his instruments and intonational system were blameless: "I am the guilty party, not 43 tones."
Actually, much of his music has a vaguely hippy flavour, so Partch evidently invented the "hippy sound" 10 years before the hippy generation was even a twinkle in its fathers' eyes. Right on!
❏ Want to hear some Partch? A legendary LP is freely available (three FLAC files) from Avant-Garde Project website. Go to http://dream.cs.bath.ac.uk/AvantGardeProject/agp57/index.html, right-click download link, select "Save link as".
