The thing about revolutionaries is they never send you a memo. Harry Partch didn't wake up one morning and decide to overthrow Western music. He just stopped pretending the piano made sense. Paulo Freire wasn't trying to be the Che Guevara of literacy when he sat down with Brazilian peasants. He was trying to figure out why the people who harvested the country's food couldn't read the word 'harvest'.
One of them had a vendetta against twelve-tone tyranny. The other was fighting an entire apparatus designed to keep people stupid and grateful for it. Put them in a room together and you'd have either a fistfight or the most interesting dinner party in the history of pedagogy. Since that never happened, we'll have to make do with putting their books side by side and watching the sparks fly.
Partch was born in 1901 to missionary parents who'd seen through the con and got out. Grew up in Arizona eating sound the way most kids eat dirt. Chinese lullabies from railroad workers. Yaqui ceremonial music. Whatever sonic detritus the frontier had lying around. At twenty-eight, he burned fourteen years of his own work in an iron stove. Not in a fit of pique, mind you. Methodically. With the cold satisfaction of a man who'd finally figured out what he'd been getting wrong.
What was wrong, as far as Partch was concerned, was that he'd been trying to write music that respectable people would respect. The stove cured him of that. What crawled out of those ashes was something the academy has never quite forgiven: a composer with no credentials claiming he'd heard something they'd all missed. The nerve of it. The absolute bloody cheek.
Freire came at liberation from a different angle entirely. Born in Recife in 1921, where poverty wasn't a statistic but the weather. The traditional classroom wasn't teaching people to read; it was teaching them their place. Teacher talks, student listens. Teacher knows, student doesn't. The whole apparatus humming along, producing obedient workers and citizens who'd learned not to ask awkward questions.
He saw through it the way Partch saw through equal temperament. Both men had the same talent for recognising institutional sadism when it was wearing its Sunday best.
Freire had this idea he called the banking model of education. Teacher makes deposits, student stores them, retrieves them on exam day, everyone goes home satisfied. Knowledge flows one direction. The hierarchy never gets questioned because questioning the hierarchy isn't on the syllabus. It's a closed system. Keep the circuit running and nobody needs to think about who built the circuit or why.
Partch, working three thousand miles north and in a completely different medium, had arrived at the same diagnosis. Western music education doesn't teach you music. It teaches you obedience to a system that pretends to be the laws of physics. The piano exists, therefore the twelve-tone equal-tempered scale is natural. The ear likes it because we've trained the ear since infancy to accept it as inevitable.
This is the con, and both men saw it clearly. Equal temperament isn't physics. It's politics. The banking model isn't pedagogy. It's domestication. Call it what it is.
When Partch writes in the preface to Genesis of a Music that music schools are only valuable 'in the possible rebellion against them,' he's saying what Freire spent a lifetime elaborating: the institution exists to replicate itself, not to liberate you. Freedom, if it comes at all, comes through refusal. Through recognising that the emperor is naked and the scale is a lie and the teacher might be wrong.
Now, most people who see through the con just complain about it. Write angry essays. Drink too much. Die bitter. Partch and Freire didn't do that. They built alternatives.
Freire called his version problem-posing education. No more banking. Instead, you've got students and teachers working together, puzzling through the world as equals. The world isn't finished, isn't static. It's a problem to be solved, collectively. The classroom stops being a site of domination and becomes something like a conversation between people who respect each other enough to argue.
Partch built instruments. Forty-three of them, if you're counting. The Harmonic Canon. The Adapted Viola. The Surrogate Kithara. And he documented everything obsessively. Genesis of a Music isn't just a treatise on just intonation theory, but an invitation into the workshop. Here's how I think. Here's why I made this choice. Here's the mathematics, the physics, the moment where Western music decided to lie to you about what the ear can hear.
He's showing you the machinery. Demystifying it. Saying: you can do this too, or you can do it differently, but you can't do it if you don't understand how it works.
That's the pedagogical move, and it's the same move Freire made. Both men took knowledge-making and put it on display. No secret handshakes, no guild mysteries. If you want to challenge me, here's everything you need to challenge me with.
The alternatives they built operated at completely different scales.
Freire's literacy circles could travel. The method was portable. A literate peasant could teach ten others, who could each teach ten more. The idea moved like language because it was language. You didn't need to import anything except the willingness to sit in a circle and treat each other as fully human. Brazilian favelas, Chilean villages, African townships. The method adapted because it was designed to be given away.
Partch's instruments didn't work like that. They were objects. Physical, particular, fussy. The Surrogate Kithara weighed what, seventy pounds? You couldn't photocopy it. You couldn't learn to play it from a book. For decades, if you wanted to hear Partch's music played properly, you needed Partch, or you needed someone Partch had personally taught, or you needed to be mad enough to attempt reconstructing the entire instrumental menagerie from photographs and obsessive descriptions in a very thick book.
That's the nature of working in wood and metal instead of ideas. Freire's pedagogy spread like fire. Partch's spread like cathedrals.
Both modes liberate, but they liberate differently. One creates movements. The other creates traditions of obsessive reconstruction. Freire enables masses. Partch enables individuals crazy enough to spend five years building a Chromelodeon.
There's a beautiful naïveté at the core of both projects, the kind of naïveté that drives institutions mad because it refuses to be cynical. Both men believed, actually believed, that understanding how something works could set you free. Not metaphorically free. Concretely, materially free.
Freire didn't just teach literacy. He taught people to recognise that illiteracy wasn't personal failure but political strategy. Someone benefited from you not reading. Here's who, here's how, now here's how to read anyway.
Partch didn't just propose different tuning systems. He showed you the sleight of hand that made equal temperament seem natural.
Neither wanted disciples. Disciples are easy. Disciples agree with you and do what you did. Partch and Freire wanted something infinitely more dangerous: they wanted collaborators, antagonists, people who'd take the method and use it to prove them wrong.
The academy loathed this. Still does. Partch got called a crank so many times the word stuck to him like old cooking grease. Some music functionary in a bowtie once allowed that Partch might have talent but lacked seriousness. Imagine saying that about a man who spent fifty years building instruments by hand because the instruments he needed didn't exist. Imagine thinking that's not serious.
Freire got exiled. The Brazilian government decided his literacy work was too dangerous to allow. American universities offered polite, chilly distance. Radicals are always inconvenient. They ask questions that require answers, and answers cost money and reputations and the comfortable assumption that things are fine the way they are.
Twenty-five years after Genesis of a Music first came out, Partch went back and added something to the preface. There's this passage in the original edition where he'd suggested that recordings might let a composer work like a painter. Paint the canvas once, discard the brushes, walk away. The recording captures everything. Job done.
He couldn't let that stand. Had to come back and say: no, I got that wrong. Bodies matter. The musicians in his theatre works weren't just playing instruments. They were actors in the full, physical sense. Sweating, breathing, bodies in space defying convention in real time. You can't record that. You can capture the sound, but the sound isn't the event. The event is corporeal.
This is what Freire meant by conscientisation. It's not an intellectual exercise. It happens in bodies, in rooms, in the physical act of speaking your word into a world that would prefer you stay quiet. Liberation isn't abstract, it's lived. The recording might be useful, but it's also a compromise, and Partch knew it. The moment you press play on a recording, you've lost the thing that mattered most: the bodies, making choices, together, now.
By the end, both men had become patron saints of liberation movements, which would have irritated the hell out of them. Saints are dead and therefore safe. You can cite a saint without arguing with him. That's precisely what Partch and Freire were trying to prevent.
The insight both men had, and it's the insight that makes them still worth reading, is that you cannot liberate someone you're also trying to control. The moment you tell people what to think, you've betrayed the entire project. Both built systems, yes, but systems designed to self-destruct, to be modified or discarded by whoever came next.
Genesis of a Music is full of this. Partch doesn't want you to accept just intonation on his authority. Authority is the problem. He wants you to question it, test it, break it if you can. Freire's literacy primers were written in the language of the people who'd use them, because knowledge that doesn't speak your language isn't knowledge. It's performance, and you're the audience, not the participant.
This is the pedagogical relationship that actually liberates: not teacher to student, but collaborator to collaborator. Not Partch to disciples, but Partch to anyone crazy enough to pick up just intonation and say, 'Right, but what if we did it this way instead?' Not Freire to pupils, but Freire to communities who might use his methods to challenge things he never thought to challenge.
The work survives because it was built to be surpassed. Partch spent fifty years building instruments someone else would have to rebuild. Freire spent decades teaching people to read so they could read books telling him he was wrong. Neither asked for loyalty. Both demanded argument.
That's the test of whether your pedagogy actually liberates. Does it produce disciples, or does it produce antagonists? Does it replicate itself, or does it mutate? The music being played now on instruments Partch never imagined, in tuning systems he never mapped, that's the victory. The literacy movements in places he never visited, articulating truths he couldn't predict, that's Freire's real monument.
You can't teach freedom in the language of control. You can't liberate through finished systems. The moment you complete the work, you've failed, because completion means there's nothing left for the next person to argue with.
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Freire, P. (1973). Education for critical consciousness. New York: The Seabury Press.
Freire, P. (1985). The politics of education: Culture, power, and liberation. Boston: Bergin and Garvey.
Freire, P. and Macedo, D. (1987). Literacy: Reading the word and the world. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
McLaren, P. (1997). Revolutionary multiculturalism. Boulder, CO: Westview Press.
Partch, H. (1949). Genesis of a music: An account of a creative work, its roots and its fulfillments. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press.