Harry Partch Istrumentarium

I'm practically certain that none of you have ever heard Harry Partch's music in concert.
And yet Harry Partch (1901-1974), an American composer, is one of the most innovative, iconoclastic, and individualistic musicians of all time. To make this clear to pop fans, his position in classical music is, in a certain sense, similar to that of Frank Zappa in pop. The adjectives used to describe them are the same, and so is the irony.

At times brilliant, but isolated because his music is impossible to perform with a traditional orchestra. Partch, in fact, does not use the equal-tempered system, but the natural scale, strictly based on the harmonic series (while the equal-tempered system makes a series of adjustments). To write with this system, Partch, in addition to often using non-traditional notation, built his own instruments. He created dozens, enough to organize an entire orchestra. His creations, original and/or reconstructed, include percussion instruments, string instruments, and various types of pipe or reed organs. Today, they form the Harry Partch Instrument Collection and are used for recordings and concerts.
Thus, it is not uncommon to see an ensemble like this in his pieces:

tenor-baritone, soprano, bass, adapted guitar, 2 chromelodeons, 2 kithars, surrogate kithara, 5 harmonic canons, bloboy, koto, crychord, diamond marimba, quadrangularis reversum, bass marimba, marimba eroica, boo, eucal blossom, gourd tree, cone gongs, cloud chamber bowls, spoils of war, zymo-xyl, mazda marimba, ugumbo, waving drums, Bolivian double flute, mbira, ektara, rotating drum, belly drums, gourd drum, 6 bamboo claves, 4 eucalyptus claves & rhythm boat

And this instrumental ensemble is part of his two-act opera "Delusion of the Fury" (A Ritual of Dream and Delusion) (1965-66), which you can listen to by clicking on this post.

His life was also unconventional. A precocious musician (he played clarinet, harmonium, viola, piano, and guitar as a child, and was composing before the age of 20, winning scholarships), he went through a very difficult period during the Great Depression, reduced to living as a hobo (a vagabond musician with no fixed abode), traveling for free on freight trains and surviving with odd jobs in various places.
Throughout this 10-year period, he continued to write down his experiences in a journal called Bitter Music, often in the form of snippets of overheard conversations, notated on a staff based on the pitch of the various voices.

Examples from the Harry Partch Istrumentarium

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