I never really loved indie to begin with

I have decided to start writing about music that I love. Here's my take on Harry Partch.

There's a great essay at the start of Harry Partch's book "genesis of a music" which discusses what he calls corporeal vs abstract music. For him, the main difference is that the melodies of corporeal music derive naturally from the rhythms and inflections of speech. Imagine a singer who delivers the line "I love the way you talk to me", each syllable held over several notes in the manner of Christina Aguilera showing off. "I-I-I... lo-oh-ovvve the, waaay-y-ayy you tttttalk-o-ah-alk to meeeee". This kind of singing is a very poor reflection of the way that you would say this to someone in conversation. It's the message subsumed to the delivery. For Partch, the most beautiful music is an extension of the body, singing being the way humans have explored the inherent beauty of language from the beginning of music. I recall the author Milan Kundera writing about the composer Leos Janacek in his book "the art of the novel". He speaks about the way that even Janacek's instrumental works are completely recognizable as extensions of the language of the Czech people, that everything he wrote contains the spirit of the people because it contains the life of their language within it. The wonder of melody deriving naturally from the spoken word seems historically intuitive. Many of my favorite singers of all time have seemed to be speaking the words to me, and although there may be other factors involved, my favorite singing has always seemed to me like really inspired speaking more than simply putting words to notes.

Partch was a product of the western academic music tradition, which he saw as the antithesis of corporeal music. At the time, post-romantic music and the influence of Wagner was everywhere. This music he considered to be largely concerned with pure form. Form is often at the root of classical music, which has never been an appealing approach for me. The idea is an old one, likely preceding but certainly finding it's voice in ancient greek thought. There exists, so the theory goes, immutable laws of aesthetics that we can derive mathematically and receive from general rules handed down which should govern our attempts at creating beauty. Anyone unfamiliar with the classical tradition can listen to the works and remain largely unaware of the formal restrictions that have gone into creating it, but there is a serious scholarly background to all of this, as evidenced by the tremendous complexity of harmonic theory in the western tradition. For Partch, to approach music from this direction misses the point entirely. The starting point for music should be the sounds of speech in the world, and not an extensive formal theory. He also rails against the excessive technical displays which had become an integral part of the music experience. Music for him was about more than simply showing off the contralto's range or the ability to score for hundreds of instruments to blow people away, as much as these tactics might appeal to the concert going audience of the time.

So what did he do to escape? Like any self-respecting outcast of the 20's he became a hobo. Partch rode the rails across America. This experience would later lead to one of his major works, which is a setting to music of various collections from his experiences, including hitchhiker graffiti, newsboy shouts, and letters and sayings picked up from fellow hobos on the trip.

He also went to the library, and in doing so he single handedly revived an incredibly important aspect of music theory that may have disappeared altogether.

We live in a world of 12 notes. Anyone can look at a piano and see that there are 12 different kinds of notes, 7 white ones and 5 black. Each note is the exact same distance from any adjacent note. It seems as though music-god himself handed it down and said "here you go... 12 notes. Go crazy". A bit of research however shows that the process of getting to these 12 notes was a long and messy one. It turns out that the whole thing goes back to Pythagoras. In his studies on numbers he became interested in music and he discovered an interesting thing about taut strings. Using a tool called a monochord he discovered that a string divided in half will produce a note exactly an octave higher. You can see this on a guitar, where the octave fret is exactly halfway down the string. He tried other divisions, divide the string in three and you get a perfect fifth (the distance from c to g, or 7 frets on a guitar). He found that all different notes could be found by dividing up the string by different numbers. We now understand that these notes sound musical to us because sounds have harmonics in them. In a sense every note contains many other notes. A c, for example, will also have an octave higher c, a note a fifth higher, one a third higher and so forth. You can see for yourself on a guitar. Pluck an open string and then gently place you finger on the 12th fret. You will hear an octave harmonic. Now raise your finger and pluck the string again and you should be able to hear the higher note in the open string, you can do the same for the 7th fret and many others.

You can arrange the notes of the harmonic series into a scale and you'll have something sort of like the scales we have on our pianos, but not quite.

The problem is that the notes of the harmonic series are all different distances from one another. They are based off of a single note, so if C is your beginning note, and you derive a scale from it, it's all good as long as you are playing in C, but if you try to switch and play in G the ratios are all screwed up and it will no longer work. Nobody in Pythagoras' time knew why this was and they tried very hard to fix the problem. Pythagoras tried to derive all the notes by taking a note as a root, then it's fifth (2/3) then that note's fifth, then that note's and so on, thinking that he would eventually come back around to the same note (only many octaves up). It turned out that this will never happen. After 12 times through the cycle you get pretty close, but not quite back where you started. I guess he thought that that was good enough. He calculated the difference between the 12 fifths and the nearest octave and called that distance a comma. He shifted the pitches around a bit and created the Pythagorean scale which is the basis of our 12 notes system that we have today. Rather than being handed down from high, the notes come from the fact that it takes 12 x 2/3 to reach a power of 2.

The Pythagorean a scale was not the scale that we now use, it was still weighted on the note that you use to derive the scale. You could switch to scales that were close to you on the cycle of fifths, but not far away scales. After several hundred years humans invented the keyboard instrument, the organ, the harpsichord etc... This presented a problem because unlike in vocal music, or with string instruments like violins or wind instruments, you had to pick a tuning and stick with it. For centuries musicians had been making subtle tuning adjustments by ear based on what scale they were playing in but with the keyboard this was impossible (with the organ especially, since tuning a note meant cutting a huge metal pipe). This was a time when temperament really came into it's own. A temperament in music is the way that you shift the notes around from their natural place to make a scale. Bach was a major investigator of temperament and many of his students were especially influential in developing some of the most famous historical temperaments. He even wrote one of his masterworks "the well-tempered clavier" as a celebration of a new temperament, which was called "well temperament" (it's not such a clever title I guess).

The Development of temperaments follows the development of western harmony (or leads it?). Bach was so interested in them because he was a keyboardist and he liked to change key with freedom. This love of key change in western music only increased and increased. By the time we get to Partch's day we have composers like Wagner's disciples changing key 6 times before the first melody is finished. The progress of Science had brought us the ability to use the scale system that we all know and love, the one that every piano you see is tuned to, the one that a "tuner" will tune your guitar to. This is equal temperament, we've figured out how to smooth out the comma over the entire scale such that every note is the exact same distance from it's neighbor. This means that composers can switch to any key they want, and the scale will be exactly the same.

But, it also means that none of our intervals are actually in tune anymore.

The fifth, you remember is 2/3 of the note it's based off of, this is true of string length. but the inverse ratio applies to the frequency of the note, so a perfect fifth of a note the vibrates at 200hz is 300hz (sorry if this is confusing, I didn't sit down with the intention of writing all this so you'll have to bear with me, anyways 3/2 instead of 2/3 when dealing with frequency) . G is the fifth of C, but on a piano the G note is not quite 3/2 of the C, it's about 2/100 of a semitone off. A semitone for anyone who doesn't know is the name for the distance between two adjacent notes on a piano, or a frets on a guitar. It gets worse when you try other intervals. The distance between C and E, which is a very common interval to use, is more than 1/10 of a semitone from where it should be. It's way off.

Our ears are totally used to the equal tempered scale, it's what we all grew up on. It's what the Beatles used, what Glen Gould used, what Bruce Springsteen uses, what Daft Punk and My Chemical Romance and whatever other bands that people listen to use. We are accustomed to it's inharmonic notes. It's the sound of western music at this point. It was in Harry Partch's time too.

He spent a lot of time at the library as I said, and it seems like he spent some of that time listening to music from other cultures. Many westerners find the scales and melodies of music from other cultures to be "sour", "out of tune" and generally can't make sense of them. Until recently, when western culture took over the entire world, 12 note equal temperament didn't exist anywhere else. China had developed several different scales, mostly based on a 5 note system, India had developed extremely sophisticated scales sometimes with hundreds of notes in them, Indonesia had it's own scales for different gamelan ensembles. all over Africa, the middle east, Australia, the South Pacific, Eastern Europe, every place had it's own subtly different scale systems. The consensus among ethnomusicologists at the time, and to a large part today still, was that these were primitive forms of music which lacked the depth western music enjoyed. The reason for this pronouncement? These other cultures hadn't developed the rich harmonic language that western music had, which is to say, they don't change key that much.

This of course brings us back to the beginning, to his essay at the start of his book. What these non western music traditions have that the Wagnerites lacked was melody derived from natural speech patterns. They didn't have the need for key change because they weren't trying to expand the harmonic language, they were trying to sing their own language. You can hardly call Indian classical music, Balinese gamelan, or the polyphonic chant of the bibayak pigmies unsophisticated, it's just not trying to do what Mozart was trying to do.

So Partch created what is known as "just intonation" which is a scale system based on the natural notes of the harmonic series. In place of key changes he simply divided the scales into more notes (why stop at 12?) and in doing so he started a revolution in music that, well, isn't that popular. But it has influenced many of my favorite musicians, who I will write about in further installments of "I never really loved indie to begin with".

But what's important is that it all comes from wanting singing to be beautiful speaking, which I think is a beautiful thing to say.