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The most original musician of all time is....


Hard Truth

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Lee Flier wrote (in another forum): "I guess everybody has someplace they draw the line in terms of what "original" means, but you know... unless you personally invented all the musical instruments you use and the scales you compose in, everything is built on the back of something else"

 

The only composer/musician I know of that invented both his own scales and his own instruments is Harry Partch. By now there may be another experimental musican who has done the same, but they probably got the idea from Harry, so they can't top him.

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Lee Flier wrote (in another forum): "I guess everybody has someplace they draw the line in terms of what "original" means, but you know... unless you personally invented all the musical instruments you use and the scales you compose in, everything is built on the back of something else"


The only composer/musician I know of that invented both his own scales and his own instruments is Harry Partch. By now there may be another experimental musican who has done the same, but they probably got the idea from Harry, so they can't top him.

 

Me??:rawk::badump::rawk: :rawk: :blah:

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Now that's a really difficult one. It might be someone who melds two or more different kinds of music into one thing that just utterly defies anything else ever heard. But yeah, that's really really difficult, and I don't hear about things like this very often (if ever - maybe I'm forgetting someone).

 

The knee-jerk thing, of course, is within Western music, to say that it's Jimi Hendrix or Michael Hedges or whoever, who are within the guitar/Western music framework, very gifted and very original artists.

 

And in Western music, maybe people like the RCA people who invented the first synthesizer or Pierre Schaeffer or Donald Buchla or Bob Moog or Leon Theremin or some of the avant-garde people who translate electric impulses from plants or Q.R. Ghazala might be among the more original.

 

Aphex Twin almost qualifies because he does make his own equipment. But if you were to hear it and not know that he made his own equipment, you'd probably think, "Well, okay, that sounds fairly original..." but still think that it was essentially synthesizer-based music. So while he does make his own equipment, it's not quite there, in my opinion.

 

There are some other people - I have a compilation of this but am too lazy to get up to look at the name of it - in which people have invented their own musical equipment, such as the guy who has made a keyboard that makes car horns honk, and other things like that, but they still sort of sound like previously existing things.

 

As you can tell, I'm fascinated by this. I've often thought, "How can I create something that no one has ever heard before (and is optimistically really ear-pleasing)?" And I haven't been able to think up something like that. People always say, "Wow, your Eleven Shadows music is so original! I've never heard anything like this before!!" which is really great, but if they only knew HOW original I wanted to sound... :D

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Laurie Anderson. What an amazing career she's had. Just calling her a musician would be an injustice... she's one of the most diverse and original artists of our time. She's invented many instruments that she's used. My favorite album is "Strange Angels" but a great way to introduce yourself to her music is via her "Anthology" two-CD album. And if you want to really listen to an original performance then I recommend her four-night concert album "United States Live Part 1-4" or the VHS video of her concert movie "Home of The Brave".

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I won't say they're THE most "original", but I have to put in a plug for The Blue Man Group. The musical instruments they've come up with using PVC pipe, piano frames, anvils and pingpong paddles, and the incredibly musical results they get with them, place them very high on my "original" list.

A lot of their appeal comes from showmanship, but as a rock and roll dabbler myself, I count that as a factor in "musicianship".

 

This thread is going to be fun to follow, great query!

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All right then, Harry Partch!

 

I think blindingly original work can be done in very traditional forms, so I guess I regard "original" as meaning something other than "without precedent," but I'm not sure exactly what.

 

I'm also of the mind that every piece of art exists in potentia before its point of creation, so even the most original work isn't original...

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Kraftwerk. Think about the influence they've had, and whether anything remotely like them existed before they did. Stockhausen is a distant relative, perhaps, but he sure wasn't funky enough to be quoted by Afrika Bambaata (yeah I know it's misspelled, I'm too tired to look it up right now).

 

I don't know if Kraftwerk would be the most original musicians of all time, but their influence and originality is undeniable.

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Hmmmm. I just re-read. One who creates his own instruments?


How about Chapman and his Chapman Stick? Then Ben Franklin and his Glass Armonica. Cage and the prepared piano.

 

 

It's not just that Partch created his own instruments, he created his own musical world. What if one person invented enough instruments to staff a symphony orchestra and also created a whole new microtonal tuning system for those instruments to play? That's what Partch did.

 

As far as I know, no one else has come close. And now that synthesis has made creating new timbres and tuning systems easy and commonplace, I wonder if anyone will try it again.

 

Best,

 

Geoff

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John
, you beat me to it. Harry Partch easily gets my vote!


For those who don't know about Partch,
.



Geoff

 

 

Geoff, I wasn't the one who nominated Partch -- it was Hard Truth, in thethread's innagural post. I can only claim passing familiarity with the name and its avant garde associations, but when I get a break from work, I plan on enjoying the link you provided.

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30 years ago when I was into my jazz studies at college we were lucky enough to receive a demonstration of Partch's music complete with the original instruments. I was completely clueless at the time.

 

"But why would you want notes between the keys? Those notes are wrong aren't they?"

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