The BBC documentary "The Outsider: the Story of Harry Partch" (2002) is available on Youtube:
For those of you who don't know of Harry Partch, the documentary can explain his work and his life far better than I can. He's best known for his unique, handmade instruments, and his interest in alternate tunings. The two combined yield music that is truly unlike any other.
The website for American Mavericks, a 2003 radio series produced by American Public Media with the San Francisco Symphony, includes a virtual collection of Partch instruments so you can play with them yourself.
My orals are on Tuesday. To mark the occasion, here are three of the six pieces I've been working on for the past semester or so. Luckily, I still love them. I also still love the other three, which I couldn't find on Youtube: Toru Takemitsu's riverrun, John Cage's Two (no superscript), and Kaija Saariaho's Amers.
Saturday, I was silly enough to ask someone at Amoeba Records if they carried any copies of La Monte Young's The Well-Tuned Piano, and got laughed at (not unkindly). Apparently, recordings of his work are notoriously difficult to get; the original releases were generally (completely?) done through small, now-defunct labels. The thing was, I had seen a copy of it for sale at the Amoeba in Hollywood, years and years ago. It had cost a lot, but not the $500 or so that Amazon's third-party sellers want for it now.
However, it's on Youtube! All five hours of it (!!), in thirty parts. If you're short on time, you can at least get a sense of the sound world of the piece by leafing through the sections.
If you don't know the piece, The Well-Tuned Piano is a work for solo piano that has been tuned in just intonation (the term given to any tuning system in which intervals are determined using integer ratios). The exact tuning system used for the piece is published on Kyle Gann's website with permission from Young. Gann also has a short, lucid explanation of just intonation itself available here. (If you happen to be an academic type with access to JSTOR, you can read Gann's article about the piece from Perspectives of New Music vol. 31.1 here.)
One of my favorite effects of the tuning is the "buzz". The first time I heard this piece, I thought the piano was being subtly electronically processed because the timbre of it was so unlike my idea of what a piano could produce. It's just the buzz. In sections where the music is spare, there's a subtle "crunch" to the sound. In sections where the music is really loud and active (like Part 11/30), there's this sense of a low, steady drone that arises as a result. (That section also makes use of pitches that aren't-quite-in-unison to wonderful effect.) While I've never heard this piece live, I have heard justly-tuned piano with a similar texture live, and it's the kind of sound that fills a hall and reverberates in a completely stunning way.
I'm a bit too sleep-deprived to say as much about this piece as it deserves, so, in conclusion: ♥
