At 9'22" the camera shuddered. I luckily have experienced these bodily vibrations 5 times in Bochum and Amsterdam at Musikfabrik performances of Delusion of the Fury. I sat in a different part of the auditorium for each performance as suggested by Paul Jeukendrup, their Sound Designer. All astonishing sounds, plus the instrument(s) and musician(s) also wonderful to see.
In the winter of 1962, a friend and I attended a performance of Harry Partch’s “Water! Water!” at the University of Illinois. His brother, a jazz trumpeter, was part of the band that wandered onstage during the play. After it ended, the audience was invited up to examine the instruments, and I climbed up behind the Marimba Eroica. My dim memory tells me that that particular instrument had two tone bars, one mounted at a slight angle to the other; I don’t recall if it had one or two resonating boxes. I had a six-foot red-and-black scarf rolled up in my coat pocket; it turned out to be a perfect mallet to make the instrument speak.
There's another video, in which several Partch instruments are onstage, and when the lowest note on the Eroica is played and the player asks the audience "can you hear that?" they acknowledge that they can, and one volunteers "it sounds better the farther you are from it." That pitch would be close to F below the bottom A of the piano. It's so low that most speakers or headphone can't reproduce it.
Regardless of the microphones' or speakers' response ability, there's not enough space in that room for resonance to be picked up by the devices. The sound wave never develops. With those instruments (and others) we don't hear the instrument, per se (which would be a "knock"), we hear the resonance of the sound wave.
Yes, Jamie, that’s exactly right. One of those happy accidents he discovered while working with the slide rod on the instrument, and he decided to craft the piece around that sound. And it does create that same mysterious effect as a bowed cymbal, lots of overtones and collision of harmonics. Thanks for checking it out!
Right on, Matt. Subscribe to the channel and stay tuned, we have more videos coming up about Harry’s instruments, our particular set of instruments and where they came from, and much much more!
That was an absolutely amazing performance. Stunning. At some point, when we start to feel normal enough to have live concerts again, I'm going to travel to the bay area the next time your ensemble performs, just so I get to see it really done live. Really brilliant. You bring Partch to life. Thank you for what you do.
Thank you, James. We would love to have you at a concert...we are headquartered out of Los Angeles, so hopefully that’s not too far out of your way to come see a concert. In the meantime, please enjoy our other videos, and visit our website partch.la
