Word: kithara
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Feeling hemmed in by tradition, Partch added 31 tones to the twelve possible in the existing octave, then built entire orchestras out of cloud chambers, shell casings and auto exhaust pipes. With casually carpentered but poetically named instruments (the Boo, Whang Gun and Surrogate Kithara), Partch played compositions bearing such provocative titles as Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room...
...chicken hatchery in Petaluma to the ballroom of San Francisco's Sheraton-Palace Hotel. Not until evening, when delegates to the Ameri can Symphony Orchestra League's convention began drifting into the room, were all the instruments ready. There stood the "Spoils of War," the "Sur rogate Kithara," the "Harmonic Canons I and II," the "Chromelodeon" -and there stood Harry Partch, quietly examining the tolerant smiles that have confronted him all his life. "This re minds me of an old Chinese proverb " Partch told his 400 listeners. " 'I agree...
...confessed to whatever musical eccentricities his audience had already convicted him of, Partch sat down at Harmonic Canon II and began to play, aided by a disciple who had flown down from Tacoma, Wash., for the occasion. "You exclamation-point Jim," Partch chanted to the rhythm of the Surrogate Kithara's ponderous clucks, "get your semicolon asterisk out o this yard." It was music the likes of which few in the audience had heard before, but it forced upon everyone in the Palace a new and respectful opinion of Harry Partch: Harry may be nuts but Harry...
Alive with his mission, Partch was soon busy building instruments to play his special music; he was, he said, "a philosophic musicman seduced into carpentry." He put a long neck on a viola to give it "microtonal capabilities"-then he built his Surrogate Kithara, a two-deck, 16-string zither that looks like a pair of overgrown abacuses without the beads. Next came the "Bamboo Marimba" (which Partch affectionately calls "the Boo"), a 64-piece, six-tiered assembly of bamboo rods to be struck by sticks padded with felt. Rising to the grandeur of his tasks, he finally produced...
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