Word: whang
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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...
...mind is somewhere else, his hands are not. His hands, his hands, look at his hands. Old hands, as old as his face. His left hand stiffly fingers the notes, his right hand bangs out the beat on the side of the guitar. Occasionally it slides down to whang out a chord...
When he hits Darwin and mutations, Miner yanks at his front teeth. "The saber-toothed tiger," he says, "was noted for its eyeteeth. They grew and grew, giving the tiger a tremendous bite. They could just WHANG on that prey." He claps his hands together. "But this mutation kept recurring and the eyeteeth grew longer and longer, till they came down like this"?he drapes his forefingers down over his lower jaw?"and then what happened? They couldn't get a bite. So now there are no more saber-toothed tigers...
...finally produced the Spoils of War-a big and ugly one-man band strung up on a gallows and made from artillery shell casings, cloud-chamber bowls (from the Radiation Laboratories at Berkeley), a blow-boy (composed of bellows, a 1912-auto-exhaust horn and three organ pipes), a whang gun ("WHANG-OOOO," it hoots when struck), and a raspidor that sounds like mice scratching inside a wall...
...around and over the swords in a crescendo of movement that usually sets the crowd to whooping, yelling and stomping. Toward the end, a solo piper-spotlighted on a platform as though he were walking a battlement-softly plays Lights Out, and with a final scream of pipes and whang of drums the Watch marches...