page_title: List of instruments by Harry Partch
section_title: Adapted Viola
hierarchical_section_title: List of instruments by Harry Partch / Adapted Viola
caption_attribution_description: Tuning of the four strings of Harry Partch's Adapted Viola. It also shows the ratios in which each string is tuned (G=1/1).
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: The Adapted Viola is the earliest extant instrument created by Partch. It is made from a cello fingerboard neck attached to the body of a viola. It also includes a changeable bridge which allows triple stops, i.e. full triads, to be sustained. Partch hammered brads into the fingerboard to aid with finding fingerings. The Adapted Viola was constructed in New Orleans with the assistance of an Edward Benton, a local violin maker. Partch originally called it the Monophone, but by 1933 it had become known as the Adapted Viola.
  Partch tuned the Adapted Viola an octave below the violin and the brads inserted into the instrument fingerboard are placed at ratios commonly used in Partch's works. In playing the instrument, Partch called for a "one-finger technique," which is "much closer to the spirit of Indian vina playing than it is to the pipe organ." Specifically, he desired that notes should be approached by gliding from tone to tone:
  The finger may start slowly on its move, increase speed, and hit the next ratio exactly. It may move very fast from the first ratio, and then move slowly and insinuatingly into the next—so slowly, sometimes, that one is not sure as to the point where rest has been achieved. Or, all this may be reversed. What the bow is doing meanwhile, in its capacity of providing an infinitude of nuance, is supremely important.
  — Harry Partch, Genesis of a Music, page 202
  As Partch's first instrument, the Adapted Viola is used heavily in many of his early mature compositions. In works such as Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po and Two Psalms the music is scored only for Adapted Viola and intoning voice.
caption: Tuning of the four strings of Harry Partch's Adapted Viola. It also shows the ratios in which each string is tuned (G=1/1).
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