Top 5 Quotes & Sayings by Harry Partch

Explore popular quotes and sayings by an American composer Harry Partch.
Last updated on November 21, 2024.
Harry Partch

Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of unique musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales, alongside Lou Harrison. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described the method behind his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).

Life is too precious to spend it with important people.
The profession of music is lacking in horse sense, not only because the commonplace variety of horse is absent from its operations, but because parts of the horse are noticeably present.
Life's too short to spend with important people. — © Harry Partch
Life's too short to spend with important people.
Originality cannot be a goal. It is simply inevitable. The truly pathbreaking step can never be predicted, and certainly not by the person who makes it at the time he makes it. He clears as he goes, evolves his own techniques, devises his own tools, ignores where he must. And his path cannot be retraced, because each of us is an original being.
Having decided to follow my own intuitive path I began to write music on the basis of harmonized spoken words, for new instruments and in new scales.
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