Biography
As a youth, Phillip Arnautoff had a chance encounter with a recording of Harry Partch's modern dance
drama King Oedipus. Inspired by the timeless music of Partch's
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homemade instruments, he was soon studying the composer's book
Genesis of a Music. Before long, Arnautoff was in correspondence with
Partch and when the composer moved the instruments to Peteluma,
California, the young man made trips to study with Partch. When
Partch moved on to Southern California, they kept up their letter
writing. A few years after Partch's death, Arnautoff built a
66-string variation on the Harmonic Cannon zither. He built his
version in 1976, but redesigned it again in 1998. It is on the
redesigned instrument that his first recording was performed.
'Soliloquy' is a meditation in sound, a sixty
eight-minute excursion into an ancient twenty one-note microtonal
just intonation scale.
Biography text from Last.fm, available under CC BY-SA.