The American maverick who rejected the Western scale entirely and built his own sound-world from scratch: a 43-tone microtonal system and a whole orchestra of self-invented instruments · the patron saint of the self-built and home-made in experimental music.
Harry Partch is the great American maverick, and the Bureau files him as a Forms figure for a spirit more than a direct line: he is the supreme example of the composer who rejects the entire inherited apparatus of music and builds his own from scratch, tuning, instruments and aesthetic together. That impulse is one the industrial and noise traditions share at their root.
Born in 1901 and largely self-taught, Partch rejected the Western twelve-tone equal-tempered scale outright, considering it a compromise that falsified the natural relationships of sound. In its place he built his music on just intonation and a microtonal scale of forty-three tones to the octave, a complete sound-world incompatible with any existing instrument.
So he built the instruments. Partch constructed an entire orchestra of original creations to play his scale, the Chromelodeon, the Diamond Marimba, the Cloud-Chamber Bowls (made from cut glass carboys), the Kithara, the Spoils of War, instruments that are sculptural objects as much as sound-makers. He championed what he called "corporeal" music: bodily, theatrical, rooted in the melody of speech, set against the abstract "cerebral" concert tradition he despised.
His relevance to this archive is as an ancestor of the self-built and the home-made. The instinct to construct one's own sound-making apparatus rather than accept the given (the home-built machines and amplified scrap of Einstürzende Neubauten, the custom electronics and modified turntables of the noise scene) shares Partch's founding refusal. He proved a composer could reject the whole system and make their own, instruments included.
The Bureau files Harry Partch at Forms · Figure as the patron saint of the self-built: the microtonal outsider who rejected the Western scale, constructed an orchestra of invented instruments, and embodied the make-your-own-apparatus ethos that runs, transformed, through the industrial and noise traditions.