Harry Partch's Corporeal Music

Harry Partch has undoubtedly always followed his own muse when it came to music. Whether it be thinking outside of the box in creating a new music scale or inventing new instruments. Partch is best known for his philosophy of music. He views music as having two “givens”, but his most famous theory is that music is separated into two independant and distinct poles: there is abstract and there is corporeal. According to Partch, music whether it is “good” or “bad” has two God-given aspects. The first of Partch’s givens for music is that music must have a capacity of certain bodies to vibrate in certain ways to produce sound. The second of his givens in that music must have mechanisms by which the human ear registers the sound. Everything else …show more content…
Florentines were a quite popular form of corporeal music as they showed much emphasis on natural spoken inflections, accents, and rhythm of the word. When creating music, Partch was more prone to write corporeal music. This is due to the idea that corporeal music gives the listener more than just the feeling that it is entertaining or uplifting: it provides actual encouragement and instruction in dealing with the world as we know it. Partch was more active with corporeal music because he found inspiration in ancient, near-ancient, and non-European cultures. He created four large theatre works that included dance, sculpture, drama, and music. In an effort to take away the idea of “specialization”, all performers contributed to each form of art. While Partch had coalesced into creating his theory of abstract and corporeal, he had created his own scale. His new scale divided the octave into 43 unequal steps which almost all have names. He also created his own instruments to play on this scale. When thinking of these terms of abstract and corporeal he began to feel confined within the given selection of tones. He then decided to find a broader selection of tones within the