Partchworld: The Life, Music, and Legacy of Harry Partch

PART TWO: REDISCOVERY AND RENEWAL

1. The Bewitched • REDCAT, 27 June 2026 (Photo: Felix Salazar).

JOHN SCHNEIDER

John Schneider is a Grammy® Award winning and four-time Grammy® nominated guitarist, composer, author and broadcaster. He holds a Ph.D. in Physics & Music from U.C. Cardiff (UK), music degrees from the University of California and the Royal College of Music (London), and is past-President of the Guitar Foundation of America. Schneider is a specialist in contemporary music, and his The Contemporary Guitar has become the standard text in the field. He hosts Global Village on Thursdays, 11am-1pm (Pacific Time), on KPFK FM, Los Angeles.

In Part One of this article I outlined the unique career of California-born Harry Partch (1901-1974): composer, deviser of a new personal musical syntax, and inventor of an extraordinary array of instruments without which it is impossible to play his equally remarkable works. I also discussed my own growing fascination with and exploration of the full range of his creative output, which brought me to the point in 1999—after hearing his own ensemble in San Francisco—of needing to perform his works myself.

This meant one thing: I had to recreate the instruments for myself. With that in mind, I and an extraordinary team of various artisans have spent the last 25 years doing exactly that.

LA’s PARTCH Ensemble began in the 1990s as the trio “Just Strings,” playing guitar, harp, and percussion in the pure-intervals just intonation favored by Partch and his colleagues Lou Harrison (1917-2003) and James Tenney (1934-2006). The only authentic Partch instrument we had was the Adapted Guitar I pictured above, though I arranged some of his music for retuned harps to mimic his Harmonic Canons.

By 2001, with the addition of my new Adapted Guitar II, a copy of the Diamond Marimba and the gracious loan of Partch’s Kithara I from the Harry Partch Foundation, we were finally able to perform an entire concert of the composer’s early works. That program concluded the 12-hour Harry Partch Centennial Celebration that I produced at UCLA’s Schoenberg Hall, which featured scholarly presentations, panel discussions, the composer’s films, and even an instrument “petting zoo.”