MEIRION BOWEN - Articles & Publications

Harry Partch

'I am not an instrument-builder, but a philosophie music-man seduced into carpentry.'

AMONG CONTEMPORARY MUSICIANS, the three B's - Britten, Boulez and the Beatles - represent only a few of those fascinated and stimulated by Eastern music. To varying degrees they are all attempting to tap the rich resources of the orient, without selling out on their Western inheritance. One man in America, however, has been working on this issue for over 40 years, and he has come up with some compelling answers. Thus, though now little-known, there is no reason why Harry Partch should remain in relative obscurity. It is true that outside his native California - where he was born in 1901 - his work has received scant attention, even within the USA, yet it is no exaggeration to say that he is something of a phenomenon. Had he not lived, Nature would have been hard put to it to invent anyone comparable. Even a cursory examination of his career, his output as a designer of instruments and as a composer, takes one's breath away.

His case is not always helped by critics and music-historians, who have rarely recognised the centrality of his work to modern music. He is usually placed among the 'experimentalists' (cf Joseph Machlis' Introduction to Contemporary Music; or Gilbert Chase's America's Music). Even Wilfrid Mellers, in his brilliant, persuasive, although pessimistic chapter in Music in a New Found Land, errs in ascribing perhaps too much financial backing for Partch's work to American universities and foundations. In the last 44 years, since Parteh began work in his present direction, he has been supported by universities and foundations for exactly a decade. For eight years, he lived almost entirely on the sale (by mail order) of his own records (see appended list). For another eight years, during the Depression, he was a hobo, living in jungles and skidrow rooming-houses, working on the ranches of three Pacific Coast states. In the remaining 18 years, he had more jobs than he can recall apprentice seaman, newspaper offices, and so on.

For the greater part of his career, he has remained isolated from contemporqry music. No other modern composer has influenced him, nor can he thus be considered in relation to figures like Cage and Varese, although, of course, we can draw parallels between his work and other modern movements. His childhood and youth were sipent in the remote deserts of Arizona and New Mexico, bringing him into contact with American Indian rituals. He was also impressed by Chinese music, and Chinese lullabies - which he heard live - and early records of Christian hymns, African rituals and oriental drama. Partch underwent no formal musical education: he stud,ied prodigiously by himself. Around 1923-8 he found himself out of sympathy with existing musical conditions, and decided to explore on his own. It was at this time that be began the first draft of his book, Genesis of a Music (University of Wisconsin, 1949), which embodies his theories about music, notational systems and instruments.

Partch made a systematic study of ancient theoretical writings, especially Greek. He found the Greek concept of drama congenial as an art-form that drew together poetry, music, action and drama into a whole. It was from this that he derived his notions of 'Abstract' and 'Corporeal' musie. Corporeal music is music in a form true to its primitive origin in speech intonation. Abstract music 'grows from the root of non-verbal "form", how "pure" being a matter of individual opinion... It is always "instrumental" even when it involves the singing of words...' Partch, in the early chapters of his book, traces the gradual invasion into Western music of Abstraction - from the chants of the Roman church, sung in a language ineomprehensible to the congregation, to the 19th-century symphony - which has all but obliterated the Corporeal. Thus the music of the West is no longer emotionally tactile: it is a denial of the unity of mind and body.

The admiration Partch felt for Greek and Chinese drama, the Japanese Noh and Kabuchi theatre reinforced his belief in Corporeality. He classifies as Corporeal: 'Stories sung or chanted, including some folk music. Poems recited or intoned, including some folk music and some, but not all, popular music. Dramas, such as the early 17th-century Florentine music chramas, for example. Music intended specifically for dances which tell a story ar describe a situation; both ancient and modern'.

First, then, Partch was concerned to re-establish the primacy of the Word. Tihis meant returning to vocal techniques outside the European, post-Renaissance tradition wherein the meaning of the words becomes unnaturally subservient to the musical rendering. It was this that brought him to abandon traditional scales and instruments. 'Having decided to follow my own intuitive path, I began to write miusic on the basis of harmonised, spoken words, for new instruments and in new scales, and to play it in various parts of the country. I set lyrics by the eighth-century Cllinese poet Li Po, intoning the words and accompanying myself on my Adapted Viola, scenes from Shakespeare, biblical psalms; later drawing on my experienees as a wanderer, I wrote music exploiting the speech of itinerants (Bitter Music), hitch-hiker insoriptions copied from a highway railing (Barstow), a cross-country trip using an ensemble of my own instruments.'

In his musical treatment of the Li Po poems (1931-33), Partch thus birought new life to the words in ways that do not unhinge them from their ancient origin. So, too, with his setting of Psalm 137, By the rivers of Babylon (1931): the wailing voice-intonation lends an age-old, timeless quality to the lament, enhanced by comparable sounds from the instrumental accompaniment of chromelodeon, kithara, and adapted viola. The ideal Partch had in mind was 'to disclose a manner of impressing the intangible beauty of tone into the vital power of the spoken word, without impairing either!' He has pursued this ideal throughout his work: eg in Intrusions (1949-50), settings of five poems, two by Ella Young, two translations from the Japanese, and one translation of Ungaretti; and as late as 1961, in Bless this home (poem by Vincent Prockelo).

Partch points out that such treatment of words follows a trend that can be observed in hillbilly, cowboy and popular music - to which people turn for refuge from the dominant Abstract forms - for it all 'breaks the formal barriers in the direction of Corporeality'. In an eloquent passage, he displays faith in the expressive range of,speech: 'By mere control of the lips, mouth, tongue, palate, glottis, and diaphragm under emotional stimulus, the human voice is ready to express all the feelings and attitudes which the cumulative centuries have symbolised in words and poured into the dictionary - from joyful spite to tragic ecstasy, from ecstatic melancholy to hedonistic fatuity, from furtive beatitude to boisterous grotesquerie, from portentous lechery to obdurate athanasia - prescience, felicity, urbanity, hauteur, surfeit, magnilo- quence, enravishment, exeoration, abnegation, anguish, riot, debauch, hope, joy, death, grief, effluent life, and a lot more'.

Experiments with word-intonation led Partch into further experiments with intonational systems on musical instruments. What soon became apparent from his studies was that a form of Just Intonation w'as the tuning system best suited to his purposes, a tuning limited to small-number ratios that produces unequal intervals. Explorations of musical-acoustical theory led him to build instruments appropriate to his intentions: 'I am not an instrument-builder, but a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry'. He chose, primarily, pleetra and percussion instruments, because, clearly, strings are easily tuned to new sy,stems as well as capable af providing gliding-tones; and percussion instruments make a direct, physical impact upon player and listener alike: both have a long history of association with Corporeal music. TO these he added chromelodeons (harmoniums), adapted viola and Blo-boy (Spoils of War), which add some kind of sustaining power.

With all this came his abandonment of Equal Temperament, the tuning system that has been the root basis of Western music for more than 300 years. Those who were brought up in awe of the well-tempered scale, as something sacrosanct, have generally tended to regard Partch as a crank, even a dangerous crank, a threat to the established systems of musical education. Many have not even bothered to listen to his music, which is never 'difficult' or esoteric. We are now accustomed to hearing all kinds of inflexions of the scale in the contexts of jazz and oriental music, let alone avantgarde circles, and adjustment is not as hard as it seems.

Those who want a full and detailed account of Partch's system of Just Intonation procedure - which he calls 'Monophony' after the Greeks, who scientifically measured and determined pitches by means of a monochord, a one-stringed experimental instrument - can find this in his book. But a short summary is worthwhile at this stage.

The Greeks expressed their findings in number-ratios, and so, too, does Partch. The small-number ratios represent comparative consonanee from 1/1 (unison), absolute consonance; to 2/1 (octave), the first step in the direction of dissonance; 3/2 (perfect fifth), the second step; and so on. The ratio-number gives the relationship ~between two pitches, heard or implied. With 2/1, two vibrations of the upperr note to one in the lower are needed before both vibrations come into phase. The progxess from consonance towards dissonance is aehieved by using the nearest available small-number ratio, while moving in the direction of more dissonant larger-number ratios. The identity of the pitch is determined by the odd number in the ratio. All pitches are obtained from divid- ing the string into three parts, then 5, then 7, and so on which is just what the Greeks did - using odd-numtber divisions. Thus a series of ratios becomes available. 1/1 and 2/1 are identical in Equal Temperament theory; the unison and octave respectively. 3/2 and 4/3 are approximations in Equal Temperament theory, but are the perfect fifth and fourth, respectively. 5/4, 8/5, 5/3 and 6/5 are approximations in Equal Temperament theory of the major third, minor sixth, and minor tbird, respectively. 7/4, 8J7, 7/6, 12/7, and 10/7 are approximations in Equal Temperament theory of the minor seventh and major second; the first two are very close to the minor third and major sixth; and the last two are septimal tri-tones. 9/8, 16/9, 10/9, 9/7 and 14/9 are approximations in Equal Temperament theory of the major second and minor seventh. (Comparison with Equal Temperament from here on becomes more and more irrelevant.) Partch also uses 11/8, 16/11, 11/6, 12/11, 11/10, 20/11, 11/7, 14/ll, 11/9, and 18/11.

Partch stopped here, since it opened up enougih biasic xesources for his musical needs. A total of 29 pitches is available, although between some ratios there exist some comparatively large intervals. Thus Partch added 14 new pitches to even out his scale, and provide for symmetry. The result: a 43-tone scale. This is no more an inflexible system, however, than is Schoeniberg's 12-note technique and it has always annoyed Partch that people have thought of it that way. In his own words: 'That precise 43 is the one-half of the one-fourth truth. This is a system of acoustic intervals and an expandable source-scale of more than 40 tones to the so-ealled octave'. Thcse 43 pitches provide 'a new range of melodic resources, a new series of tonality relationships and a new perspective on con,sonance and dissonance'.

Equal Temperament suPers from what he calls the 'Three-Idea Paralysis'. With this system (dating back to Pythagoras), the string is divided into three equal parts: the 3/2's are piled on top of one another in a cycle of fifths, then transposed down within a single octave, giving 12 different pitches to the octave. This scale became established during the Renaissance with the use of keyboards constructed with 12 notes: the tuninj of the notes was adjusted to facilitate key-modulations, and thus an acoustieally untrue scale became dominant in Western musie. (Compare the Monophonic System favoured by Partch, with the Equal Temperament system, in the table.) The triads of 18th-century music are already full of falsities to the ear; and Schoeniberg's chromaticism Partch regards as 'the ultimate folly', the culmination of Three-Idea Paralysis. (He was equally scathing aibout the so-called avantgarde in a lecture last year at Los Angeles: 'Qne way in which musicians have endeavoured to break out of the monolith is by so-called "improvisation". There are some exceptions to what I am se,ying, but, generally, the improvisors use the same instruments that were develaped by this monolithic culture - the same harps, celestes, pianos, vibraphones, woodwinds; they even use the same chord progressions we have been hearing for 100 years! The only difference is that now these things are improvised! ') Only abandonment of Equal Temperament - and of the instruments which enforce it, especially the piano - allows music to move from preseet stagnation. Monophony, in any case, does not rule out the pitehes of Equal Temperament, wihich can be approximated with monophonic system. Henee it was possible for Partch, eg in Revelation in a Courthouse Park and Ulysses at the Edge, to use eonventional wind-instruments an 'off- key' band in the former; an alto saxophone in the latter. He has not, incidentally, adapted wind instruments to Monophony for the simple reason that 'I do not have time, I would need another lifetime'. The auestion of modulation, too, does not arise, since, with his 43-tone scale, there are 28 possible tonalities, all deriving from the single 1/1 Unity.

Having rejected both the philosophical criteria of Western Music (Abstraction) and its teehnical roots (Equel Temperament), Partch set out, with ineredible single-mindedness and courage, to create within an older tradition (Corporeality) and an appropriate tedhnical adjunct (Monophony). As he wenf. along, he built and rebuilt (one of them seven times) the instruments he needed. 'My instruments belong to many traditions, especially includinig Che present ones...' So too, with his art, and we may consider them together.

The Wayward (1943) is rooted in his experience as a railroad bum. In this first large-scale conception (falling into six parts, including Bitter Music and Barstow mentioned above), the insirumenialists are not just players but aotors. In US Highball, fer instance, they are the bums, the characters on the journey - the main bum is Mac - intoning or singing names of railrond stations, sometimes whimsically distorted, a few of Mac's thoughts, bits of boxcar conversations, signs in havens for dereliets, and hobo inscriptions. At the start, each of 10 instruments involved is introduced, one sound at a time. They are the sounds of modern life, his conception embraces noise as well as musical sounds.

In Kdipus (1951), Partch produced the first of a series of theatre pieees on nwre timeless themes. Originally its text was W B Yeats' version of Sophocles' CEdipus the King. Permission to use this text on records was denied, so Partch subsequently brought out a version of his own, and rewrote the music. Again the musicians are also actors: they are now in costume, and the instruments become the stage set. 'The music is conceived as emotional saturation, that it is the particuler province of dramatic musie to achiieve... in critical dialegue the music enters almost insidiously, as tensions enter. The words of the players continue as before spoken, not sung. but are a harmonic part ef the music'. Musically, the piece reaches an apex in the instrumental commentary in which a messenger announces the suicide oif Jocasta. Here music and movement 'recreate the palace of madness'.

With Plectra and Percussion Dances (1953), Partch attained more completely his co-ordination of music, mime and drama. The instruments are in the foreground of action, but never lose their conneetioe with the parent- speech. Partch calls these dances 'Satyr-play music for dance theatre'. They me both satyr-plays in the original sense of closely integrated medleys of music, dance, and drama - and satirical in the modern sense. Castor and Pollux, described as 'a dance for the twin rhythms of Gemini', depicts the encounter of Leda and the Swan, the hatching of first Castor, then Pollux. This instrumental birth-allegory falls into two sections, each consisting of four dances: three pairs of Partch instruments are mated with each other, and in the fourth danees all join in the Chorus of Delivery from the egg. 'From the moment of insemination, each egg uses exactly 234 beats in cracking. All the rigiht heaveely houses are in conjunction and misfortune is impossible'. Ring around the moon is a 'Dance for here and now', a 'satire on singers and singing, on concerts and concert audiences, on music in 43 tones to the octave, on grand flourishes that lead to nothing'.

Even Wild Horses is called 'Dance music for an absent drama', wherein 'Music and dance enter the consciousness through the gate to illusion, lost recollections, and dimly ~een prophetic projections'. This falls into three short acts, each subdivided into three or two scenes. The titles of Acts II and III - Nor these eyes upon your eyes and Had I not once a lovely youth are taken from Rimbaud's Season in Hell. Each scene is based on a popular dance-form, which links up neatly with the farcical element in the drama itself. Partch sug~gests that 'the music might be considered autolriographical by almost anyone in darkly humorous moments. Gne's beginning is a Decent and Honorable Mistake...' and so om. Amongst the samba, rum'ba, Cuban fandango, Conga etc, we find a delicious Afro-Chinese minuet, based on Happy birthday to you.

Partch gave his satirical bent greater dramatic scope and significance in his later stage-works, The Bewitched (1957), Revelation in the Courthouse Park (1961) - based on the Baccha. of Euripides and Water! Water! (1961). These contrast the decadent, mechanised world of fake with the instinctual, magical world represented in The Bewitched by a group of 'lost musicians', and in Water! Water! by a Negro jazz band. These works have been amply discussed by Mellers, wiho, nevertheless, unfairly infers a lack of musical substance, on the basis (presumabily) of the recorded excerpts.

Immense practicality has, of couirse, been a prerequisite for Partch: he could never, otherwise, have brought all this work to fruition. One fascinating section of his book is devoted to the methods by which he has taught people to play and sing within a 43-note scale - not as daunting a task as it would seem.

Singers are the easiest to deal with, especially those relatively untrained, in the European sense, who do not have to un-learn the habits of singing in Equal Temperament. Greater faithfulness to the habits of ordina.ry speech is all that is basically necessary: the extra pitches come with extraordinary fluency and facility. Boulez declared in MUSIC AND MUSICIANS (February) that he would like to investigate all the Noh schools, to make a thorough study in J,apan of the techniques, and to take lessons long enough to discover the secret of the Japanese, the ease with whieh they pass from speech to singing'. He could clearly learn much from Partch.

Keyiboard players take to the chromelodeon after getting used to the unfamiliar sounds from the familiar arran,gemenit of keys and notation. Others come to such instruments as the Harmonic Canon with (relatively speaking) virgin minds, and can learn to play from ratio-numbers instead of notes. Basically, each instrument has its own characteristic notation; and when current instruments, such as cello and woodwinds, are employed, they are notated by means of a colour analogy. There are, for instance, four C sharps, distinguished by coloured lines above or below the notes - purple, blue, orange, red. Partch has made a film demonstrating the instruments he built or adapted (see Appendix). On the whole, Partch has tended to limit his rhythmic explorations in all these pieces, simply because, as he says in the preface to his most reeent work, 'I feel that new instruments, new notlations, new intonations, new concepts as to the place snd purpose of music in the American culture, provide perhaps more than enough for musicians and singers to d.hew over'.

Despite such practicality, it is still hard for Partch to get enough players borth dedicated and capable enougih to cope with these demands. In major productions he has to supervise details of staging, look after insrtruments, repaiir them, tune over 400 strings for each rehearsal, train the musicians, or singers, and conduct when necessary. At 67, he finds, not surprisingly, that his energies are beginning to deeline. Not all his projects have come out satisfactorily. Windsong (1958), his only film-score, is a compulsive use of collage, but visually its realisation was inadequate. He is unlikely, as Mellers seems to suggest, to turn to film as his most congenial medium.

Major works are often preceded by technical explorations, like his Studies on Ancient Greek scales (1946). This applies also to And on the seventh day petals fell in Petalurna (1963-4: hereafter Petals) 34 short studies in rhythms, timbres, poly-tonality, poly-rhythm, and instrumental techniques. This has been recorded and the score published (see Appendix) - the first, in fact, of his works to be published. It consists of 23 one-minute duets and trios, which later become 10 quartets and quintets, and one septet, through electronic synthesis or through use of the musicians' headphones. The duets were successfully recorded, but the cross-rhythms Partch hoped to achieve in the quartets and sextets were never fully realised, because of the absence of technical help and/or an adequate number of competent musicians. They are scored for an immense ensemble of 23 Partch instruments, including some of the most recent, eg the Gourd tree (11 dharma bells with gourd resonators); cone gongs (aluminium cones from the salvage section of Douglas aircraft); Zymo-Xyl (17 liquor bottles - Zymo - and 14 oak blocks - Xyl - over a single resormtor, two hubcaps, and a kettle-top). Due to the excessive breakage of cloud-chamber bowls at the University of Illinois .in 1961, Partch had to re-organise these for this latest work. Tihe variety of textute and sonority in this 24 piece are enough to make it a riveting experience. Partch displays masterly command of tempo-gradation, and rhythmic contrast; and far from wearing thin, the piece grows in stature.

Petals was written in preparation for his latest theatre-work, Delusion of the Fury - a ritual of dream and delusion (1965-6, hereafter, Delusion). This runs to about an hour and a half, and has not yet been performed. A production may be forthcoming in January next year at the University of California in Los Angeles. Partch says of it: 'The concept of this work inheres in the presence of the instruments on stage, the movemenits of musieians and chorus, the sounds they produce, the actuality of actors, of singers, of mimes, of lights; in fine, the actuality of truly integrated theetre'. The musicians' (23 in all) are in costume to 'convey a sense of magic of an olden time, but never of a precise olden time': basically, they wear a huge pair of pantaloons, wrapped round the waist in East Indian fashion. In Act I, they also wear a poncho-like garment - a single, full piece of cloth with a neckhole; this is discarded at the end of the Sanctus (entracte between the two acts of the work). Durinig Act II, the musicians are bare from the waist up. As well as this simple unadorned costume, each musician will wear a fantastic headpiece. As in previous pieces, the instruments are the set, with only a cyclorama behind. The principals are essentially dancers and mimes, who also sing. They are clad in more imaginetive costumes - with wigs, possibly, but not head-pieces. In both acts, the musicians (with conduotor) cons4itute a large part of the chorus - as was the case in The Bewitched. Although there are 25 instruments on stage ('excluding 20 or so small hand-instruments), they never play simultaneously, and often only a small ensemble is used. Thus, the tacet musicians can become actors and dancers, as the drama requires. Partch also wants the musicians to memorise their parts, so that music-stands, whose lights would spoil the stage-lighting, can be dispensed with. A tall order, perhaps, but actors, singers and dancers have always memorised their parts, se why exempt instrumentalists? The score of Delusion incorperates all the instruments used in Petals, with two new ones: Quadranigularis Reversum, a new marirnba with 57 blocks and resonators (hormigo and bamboo); and Eucal Blossom, consisting of 33 sections of Californian bamboo arranged in three horizonital and overlappinig rows of eleven each. Petals, as was mentioned before, was a preliminary reconnoitre for Delusion, and most of its duets are iniroduced into the stagework - either copied exactly, or in a different permutation, or with amplified scoring. For instance, the very first duet reappears in the course of the opening Exordium (Ex 2).

Set in 'olden time, but neither a precise time nor a precise place', Delusion starts with an Exordium, 'the beginmng of a ritualistie web'. Aet I is a music-theatre portrayal of release from the wheel of life and death a recurrent theme of Neh plays. A pilgrim searches for a particular sbrine, where he may do penance for murder. The murdered man appears as a ghost, sees first the assassin, then his young son, looking for a vision of his father's face. Spurred to resentment by his son's presence, he relives the ordeal of death, but finds reconciliation at the end, with the supplication 'Pray for me! '

Act I is tied to Act II by the Sanctus, an epilogue to the one a prologue to the other. Act II (like Act I, it is in six seetions) involves a reconciliation with life. A woman searcihing for her lost child eneounters a hebo cooking a meal over a fire in some rocks. She eventually finds the child but, due to a misunderstanding caused by the hobo's deafness, a dispute ensues. Villagers gather, and during a violent dance, force the quarrelling couple to appear before a Justice of the Peace, who is both deaf and near-sighted. He passes judgment 'Young man! take your beautiful young wife and child, and go home! Never let me see you in this court again! ' - whereupon the chorus sings in unison 'O how did we ever get by without justice? ' A celebration dance follows, but at the end 'the pantheistic deities of pre-colonial Africa, Asia, America and Australia come to life - smile divinely, decide that human delusion must be countered by heavenly riot; they invoke thunder and lightning and instil "A Strange Fear" '. In this final section, the offstage voice of Act I - the Ghost, synonymous, now, with the Justice of the Peace - reverts to the supplication 'Pray for me! ' again.

This clarity of dramatic presentation goes hand in hand with the vivid aural imagination manifest within the score. A mere reading of the score suggests that Delusion would have an instantaneous and lasting appeal. The prepavations for the work make it seem esoteric, but this - in the light of his previous pieces - is far from the truth. Nor, with an experienced cast, would it be more difficult than, say, Moses und Aron, or more expensive. Different, yes; possibly even easier, and more rewarding!

There is no real reason why the work of Partch should not reach a wider audience, outside the United States. Transporting the Partch instruments is not insuperable, as Mellers would infer. In fact, it was estimated that to fly instruments, musicians and dancers to Paris to perform The Bewiitched at the Paris Festival (a project never realised), would cost less than flying a symphony orchestra. With the present surge of interest in oriental music, with large audiences turning up for avantgarde programmes at London halls, surely the time is ripe? After all these years in the wilderness, Harry Partch can still exude confidence and positive values, on which composers, caught between the Scylla of Schoenberg and the Charybdis of Cage, might well ponder: 'It is not necessary to assume anti-music or non-music attitudes. It is not necessary to resort to noise or non-rhythmic music, or even excessive dissonance to achieve dynamism in creative art. We have done no more than scratch the surface of possilble hairmonic music; we have certainly done no more than scratch the surfaee of possible rhythmic music... I suggest that the answer is not in improvisation, not in lighthearted chance, but in the contribution of several lifetimes of lonely dedication'.

APPENDIX

Gramophone records of music by Harry Partch are avail- able on the (private) Gate 5 Label:

Issue A: Thirty Years of Lyrical and Dramatic Music (contains Poems by Li Po; Windsong; Two Studies on' Ancient Greck Scales; Intrusions; Cloud-Chamber Music; Bless this home; By the rivers of Babylon)

Issue B: The Waywerd - excerpts (contains US High- ball; The Letter; Ulysses at the Edge)

Issue C: Plectra and Percussion Dances excerpts (contains Castor and Pollux; Ring around the Moon; Even Wild Horses)

Issue D: K'dipus excerpts

Issue E: The Bewitched excerpts

Issue F: Revelation in the Courthouse Park - excerpts (Issue G, now deleted, contains Water! Water!) These are abtainable at US $6.50 each (customs duty payable on receipt) direct from Harry Partch, Music Dept, University of California at San Diego, La Jolla, California, 92037, USA.

On the commercial label, Composer's Recording Inc, the following are available:

CRI 193: Castor and Pollux; The Letter; Windsong; Cloud-Chamber Music; The Bewitched (Seene 10 and Epilogue)

DB 213: And on the seventh day petals fell in Petaluma. The film Music Studio: Harry Partch, in which the composer demonstrates his musieal instruments, is available from Cinema 16, Film Lib'rary Inc, 80 University Place, New York, NY 10003.

The magazine SOURCE Musie of the Avant-Garde' has in its first two issues (January and July, 1967) features on Partch. Issue I contains his in,troduetory lecture, preceding a concert at California University last year, and six pages of photographs. Issue II contains an essay on Partcih, to which the above article is indebted; and the beautifully produced score of Petals. T4e annual sub- scription is US $12 (single issue US $7), and it is obitainable from 330, University Avenue, Davis, California, 95616.