page_title: List of instruments by Harry Partch
section_title: Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs
hierarchical_section_title: List of instruments by Harry Partch / Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs
caption_attribution_description: English: Harry Partch's Gourd Tree and Cone Gongs. Photographed at the Harry Partch Institute at Montclair State University.
context_page_description: The American composer Harry Partch composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, derived from the natural Harmonic series; these scales allowed for more tones of smaller intervals than in the standard Western tuning, which uses twelve equal intervals. One of Partch's scales has 43 tones to the octave. To play this music, he built many unique instruments, with names such as the Chromelodeon, the Quadrangularis Reversum, and the Zymo-Xyl.
  Partch called himself "a philosophic music-man seduced into carpentry". The path towards Partch's use of many unique instruments was a gradual one. Partch began in the 1920s using traditional instruments, and wrote a string quartet in just intonation. He had his first specialized instrument built for him in 1930—the Adapted Viola, a viola with a cello's neck fitted on it.
  He re-tuned the reeds of several reed organs and labeled the keys with a color code. The first was called the Ptolemy, in tribute to the ancient music theorist Claudius Ptolemaeus, whose musical scales included ratios of the 11-limit, as Partch's did. The others were called Chromelodeons, a portmanteau of chrome and melodeon.
context_section_description: Twelve temple bells bolted to gourd resonators on a bar of eucalyptus, and two Douglas Aircraft bomber nosecones.  First built in 1964.
caption: Gourd Tree & Cone Gongs
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