The Rest Is Noise Series: Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

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Alex Ross. The Rest Is Noise Series: Beethoven Was Wrong: Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG. Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists. From The Rest Is Noise by Alex Ross

14. BEETHOVEN WAS WRONG. Bop, Rock, and the Minimalists

Bebop

The California Avant-Garde

Feldman

Uptown, Downtown

West Coast Minimalism

New York Minimalism

Rock ’n’ Roll Minimalism

NOTES. Abbreviations Used

Beethoven Was Wrong

SUGGESTED LISTENING AND READING. Five Recommended Recordings

Beethoven Was Wrong

Read the full book. The Rest is Noise

Copyright

About the Publisher

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This is a chapter from Alex Ross’s groundbreaking history of 20th century classical music, The Rest is Noise.

It is released as a special stand-alone ebook to celebrate a year-long festival at the Southbank Centre, inspired by the book. The festival consists of a series of themed concerts. Read this chapter if you’re attending concerts in the episodes

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Partch was a true child of the Wild West. He spent much of his childhood in the railway outpost of Benson, Arizona, where his father was a government inspector. According to Bob Gilmore’s biography, young Harry caught glimpses of old-school outlaws on the edge of town. Moving to Los Angeles in 1919, Partch studied at the University of Southern California and made money as a movie-house pianist. Stylish, handsome, and gay—homosexuality is a common thread among composers of this time and place—Partch fell in love with a struggling actor named Ramón Samaniego, whom he met when both men were ushers at the Los Angeles Philharmonic. Samaniego ended the affair shortly after changing his name to Ramon Novarro and finding world fame as a silent-movie idol. That experience apparently cemented Partch’s determination to reject the mainstream in favor of the companionship of outcasts.

One day Partch asked himself why there are twelve notes in an octave, and couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. He buried himself in a study of the history of tuning, paying particular attention to Helmholtz’s On the Sensations of Tone. He emerged with the conviction that the modern Western system of equal-tempered tuning had to go. In its place, Partch would revive the tuning principles of the ancient Greeks, who, at least in theory, derived all musical pitches from the clean integer ratios of the natural harmonic series.

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