Harry Partch Quotes & Sayings

I have thrown the petty respectable life with all is comforts behind me after the effort to broaden and beautify it has destituted me and drained my stamina. All right--let me throw it behind without guile, without hoping either for a return to it or for a constant absence. After all, it did not request my efforts. The normal live body hopes for the respect and love of others, and enough of the world to bestow largesse. He hopes and he abandons hope by turn. In the first there is fire to live, but in the second there is greater peace. — Harry Partch

Life's too short to spend with important people. — Harry Partch

Life is too precious to spend it with important people. — Harry Partch

Having decided to follow my own intuitive path I began to write music on the basis of harmonized spoken words, for new instruments and in new scales. — Harry Partch

Originality cannot be a goal. It is simply inevitable. The truly pathbreaking step can never be predicted, and certainly not by the person who makes it at the time he makes it. He clears as he goes, evolves his own techniques, devises his own tools, ignores where he must. And his path cannot be retraced, because each of us is an original being. — Harry Partch

The profession of music is lacking in horse sense, not only because the commonplace variety of horse is absent from its operations, but because parts of the horse are noticeably present. — Harry Partch