Birthday: Harry Partch

Born June 24, 1901; died September 3, 1974. For my earliest exposure to this great iconoclastic American composer, inventor of dozens of unique instruments, theoretician of micro-tonal intonation, explorer of the American underlife, I have to thank someone at Columbia Records, which in 1969 and 1971 put out two albums of Partch's music, The World of Harry Partch and Delusion of the Fury. The latter included a helpful demonstration disk of Partch's array of instruments (with names such as Xymo-Zyl, Spoils of War, Boo II, and Mazda Marimba), often constructed from discarded industrial materials. These albums were purchased for the excellent music collection at the Julius Forstmann Library in my hometown of Passaic, New Jersey, which during my youth was curated by music librarian Irwin Heilner, a composer in his own right who once had a piece recorded on Composers Recordings, Inc. I found the records during my numerous borrowing raids on the classical holdings, listened to them countless times, and was hooked.

Most of Partch's music was recorded on his own Gate 5 record label; he is one of those creators -- Sun Ra is another -- who went the do-your-own-distribution route very early on. But it is unlikely that those records would have found their way to the Passaic library -- in fact, none ever did -- so the availability of some Partch music at a macro-commercial level was crucial to my learning about him when I did. Columbia, like other mainstream media outlets, was experimenting a bit at the time to capture the youth crowd, for some of whom Partch in his ornery independence definitely possessed an appeal.

I am proud to know that all the original Partch instruments are now housed, and frequently played, at Montclair State College in New Jersey, just a few miles from Passaic.

In addition to setting hobo lyrics brilliantly in a piece like "Barstow" -- which is on The World of Harry Partch and is a great introduction -- Partch went in for large-scale ritual music dramas based on ancient Greek classics. I always felt that he had an affinity with Carl Orff, who was similarly inclined, and it turns out that "Partch admired Orff's neo-archaic musical style, melismatic and percussive" (Daniel Albright, Modernism and Music).

POSTSCRIPT: While I'm shouting out libraries for their music collections, I should also note the Rutherford Public Library across the river from Passaic. Rutherford, of course, was the residence of the great poet and pediatrician William Carlos Williams, and has always had a nice library. While the strength of the Passaic music collection dates from the mid-Sixties -- we got every Bernstein Mahler recording, for example -- Rutherford was weaker in acquisitions at that time but had absolutely amazing holdings from the early LP era, the Fifties and early Sixties, seemingly including every obscure European composer who had been recorded at a major label. Some fool later de-accessioned all of these LPs, ruining the efforts of a pioneering and sensitive music librarian; but during my high school years the collection was intact, a real treasure trove for exploration.

I was, you will have detected, a true library junkie at an early age. My mom arranged for me to have an adult library card in Passaic by the time I was in 6th grade, as I'd already been reading adult fiction and non-fiction for years at that point, and the librarians trusted me. Since the Rutherford and Nutley Public Libraries were easily accessible to me on my bike and by bus, I paid small yearly fees to gain borrowing privileges at each of those fine institutions. I have the happiest memories of all this!

Unsurprisingly, my first paid job was at the Passaic library, for which I worked throughout my high school years and during college summers, usually but not always in the Children's Room (one of the best I've ever seen anywhere). While I was at Yale, my "financial aid" job was at the Yale Forestry Library, a fascinating place; not many people realize that Yale has one of the world's great graduate forestry schools (now known as the Yale School of Forestry & Environmental Studies).