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The architect Bruce Goff (1904–82) is often associated with Frank Lloyd Wright and Organic Architecture, but his concept of organicism was equally influenced by his interest in modern music, and in particular the work of Claude Debussy. Goff maintained correspondence with musicians throughout his life—including with composers Edgard Varèse and Harry Partch—and in the 1920s and 1930s, he actively composed works for piano and player piano. In Tulsa and then Chicago, Goff developed connections to other writers, artists, and musicians (notably Richard San Jule and Ernest Brooks) who cultivated modernist sensibilities across the arts. Following close consideration of his papers at the Ryerson and Burnham Libraries at the Art Institute of Chicago, I examine Goff’s approaches to music and architecture as expressed not only through his correspondence, pedagogical writings, and architectural designs, but also through the analysis of some of his musical compositions. I also discuss a piece by Burrill Phillips that was inspired by the house Goff designed for John Garvey, violist of the Walden Quartet. By investigating the manifold contexts of these artworks as revealed by archival research, we can shed light on the divergent use of the term “organicism” as it is applied across the arts.

Ben Johnston’s just-intonation music is of startling aural variety and presents novel solutions to age-old tuning problems. In this paper, I describe the way that Johnston reoriented his compositional practice in the 1980s as evidenced in his musical procedures. Johnston became aware of the disconnect between Western art music composers and their audiences. He therefore set about composing more accessible music that listeners could easily comprehend. His String Quartet No. 9 gives an instructive example of the negotiation between just intonation and comprehensibility. By integrating unusual triadic sonorities with background tonal relationships, Johnston reveals an evolution of just-intonation pitch structures across the work. This paper provides an example of an analytical method for exploring Johnston’s works in a way that moves beyond simply describing the structure of his system and into more musically tangible questions of form and process.

During the summer of 1955, Harry Partch went through a thorough artistic transformation. His musical style, dramatic sensibilities, and philosophical approach all pushed him from the Intoning Voice-based works of his early career toward the percussion-based Corporeal works that defined his post-1955 output. While both of these artistic phases have been studied, the short period between is worth considering as a phase of growth so expansive that it cannot be ignored. During this time, Partch found the full dramatic capabilities of the Intoning Voice; he discovered how to use the instruments and players as dramatic components; and he learned the importance of dramatic intent, coherence, and pacing. This dissertation is a synthesis of scholarship and practice, focusing on The Bewitched, in two versions: A Ballet Satire (January 1955) and A Dance Satire (September 1955). Part I considers Partch’s development as a dramatic composer. The two versions of The Bewitched frame the study, which traces Partch’s compositional transformation over the period, by way of his work with Summer 1955 and The Wayward. This study engages with the works as inherently dramatic—conceptually and musically—focusing on dramatic intent and coherence. This section relies on a close analysis of musical scores, performances, and archival materials. Part II is a practicum, exploring the direct application of scholarship and embodied engagement with Partch’s music and instruments as a scholar/performer, including performance interpretation, “tactile” preservation work, and a detailed account of the world premiere performance of The Bewitched: A Ballet Satire from April 2019.Supplementary Materials Included: marimba_eroica_test.aiff Recording of the Marimba Eroica bars, corresponding with figures 4.1-4.4.

Largely because of its troubled publication history, Bitter Music—Harry Partch's journal of a portion of his travels as a hobo—has attracted little scholarly or popular attention. This article aims to help elucidate Bitter Music by examining the influence of hobo philosophy on its creation and reception. Certain aspects of the historical and current hobo subculture's ideology—particularly bricolage, anarcho-syndicalism, radical egalitarianism, and non-hierarchical temporal perception—appear to motivate various factors in Partch's creation of the journal and his later attempts to destroy it. Additionally, I examine how hobo philosophy animates Partch's approach to speech, song, and instrumental music, culminating in a close reading of the journal's longest musical-textual entry. The article concludes with an examination of how Bitter Music’s publication history further enhances the resonance of hobo philosophy with the ways in which the journal is apprehended by readers and, in the current century, listeners.

Georg Friedrich Haas (b. 1953) has been recognized as a major second-generation “spectralist” composer, but that designation ignores the substantial influence on his music of earlier microtonal composers, especially Ivan Wyschnegradsky, a pioneer of microtonal equal temperaments, and Harry Partch, who developed a system of extended just intonation based on the intervals of the overtone series. Haas’s recent works Blumenstück (2000) and in vain (2000) create large-scale form by dramatizing the opposition between equal temperament and just intonation.

Granade talks about Harry Partch's Water! Water! The show remains a curio in Partch's output, comparable to Benjamin Britten's Paul Bunyan and Aaron Copland's The Second Hurricane for its place in the composer's oeuvre as a piece for student productions. Despite being generally ignored by scholars and its creator, the show was as close as he ever came to writing a Broadway musical. As such, it offers insights into this experimental composer's relationship to American musical culture in the mid-20th century and reveals that his disdain for musical elitism in the classical musical realm extended into the popular one as well. Like all of Partch's theatrical creations, Water! Water! exists in a multitude of tensions.

Alive with the exuberance, contradictions, and variety of the Golden State, this Depression-era guide to California is more than 700 pages of information that is, as David Kipen writes in his spirited introduction, \"anecdotal, opinionated, and altogether habit-forming.\" Describing the history, culture, and roadside attractions of the 1930s, the WPA Guide to California features some of the very best anonymous literature of its era, with writing by luminaries such as San Francisco poet Kenneth Rexroth, composer-writer- hobo Harry Partch, and authors Tillie Olsen and Kenneth Patchen.

Schneider features Harry Partch, one of America's most colorful and original composers. Though trained as a concert pianist, Partch's dissatisfaction with the scales and instruments of Western music inspired him to design and build an orchestra of over two dozen hand-crafted microtonal instruments that were tuned to what he called his monophonic scale of 43 tones per octave. He also composed dozens of vibrantly singular musical works of all sizes, and authored theoretical statements of lasting significance in his book Genesis of a Music.

The author discusses composer Harry Partch, tracing the development of his failed film projects, his aesthetic approach to film music, and his work with Madeline Tourtelot. Granade attempts to demonstrate what Partch desired in his film music, the collaborative means by which he realized that desire, and the consistency of artistic vision between his stage and film projects. Granade argues for a reassessment of Partch's film music within his oeuvre.