The Hatchery Sessions

By 1962, Harry Partch had been at it for thirty years. He had burned every note he wrote before age twenty-eight, ridden freight trains through the Depression, invented a forty-three-tone scale, and built the instruments to play it from whatever the twentieth century threw out: Pyrex carboys salvaged from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory, Ford hubcaps, the nose cones of Douglas bombers, an aluminum ketchup bottle.

He needed somewhere to keep them. He found an abandoned chick hatchery in Petaluma, California, and moved in. Rent was forty-five dollars a month. There was no heat.

For two years he lived there with thirty self-built instruments, including a marimba whose lowest bar hummed at around twenty-two cycles per second, which is less a note than a feeling in the chest.

Then the building came down.

In May 1964, with the demolition crew already arriving, Partch set up microphones and recorded a piece called And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma. The bulldozers worked around him. He taped between strikes. There is a moment on the recording where the wall actually comes down, and the only question is whether you can make out the instruments underneath it.

His own production note, written afterward in flat administrative prose, reads:

"A bulldozer supplied the climax on May 17. I think we actually have a take with the sounds of a collapsing wall."