The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 4

Editorial Reviews
Album Description
NEWLY REMASTERED FROM THE ORIGINAL MONO MASTER TAPES!!!

*** The Bewitched was Partch's first work solely intended for dance (and mime-dance at that; he was not overly enamored in his lifetime of so-called "modern dance"). Drawing heavily from his deep affection for the music-theatrical performance traditions of Greek theater, as well as those from Africa, Bali, and Chinese opera, Partch conceived of a contemporary American music ritual-theater where musicians not only play, but also function at times as movers-singers-actors. Such is the case of The Bewitched, where the instruments are the set, in front of (and around) which dancers "dance," but where the onstage musicians also move and sing.

"The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre. It is the opposite of specialized. I conceived and wrote it in California in the period 1952-55, following the several performances of my version of Sophocles' Oedipus. In spirit, if not wholly in content, it is a satyr-play. It is a seeking for release--through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry--from the catharsis of tragedy. It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity, in the feeling that the modern spirit might thereby find some ancient and magical sense of rebirth. Each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease, or--a diametric reversal, which has the effect of underlining the complementary character, the strange affinity, of seeming opposites." --Harry Partch

Tracks:

PrologueThe Lost Musicians Mix Magic
Scene 1Three Undergrads Become Transfigured in a Hong Kong Music Hall
Scene 2Exercises in Harmony and Counterpoint Are Tried in a Court of Ancient Ritual
Scene 3The Romancing of a Pathological Liar Comes to an Inspired End
Scene 4A Soul Tormented by Contemporary Music Finds a Humanizing Alchemy
Scene 5Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room
Scene 6Euphoria Descends a Sausalito Stairway
Scene 7Two Detectives on the Trail of a Tricky Culprit Turn in Their Badges
Scene 8A Court in its Own Contempt Rises to a Motherly Apotheosis
Scene 9A Lost Political Soul Finds Himself Among the Voteless Women of Paradise
Scene 10The Cognoscenti Are Plunged into a Demonic Descent While at Cocktails
Epilogue 2:07

Product Description

NEWLY REMASTERED FROM THE ORIGINAL MONO MASTER TAPES!!! *** The Bewitched was Partch's first work solely intended for dance (and mime-dance at that; he was not overly enamored in his lifetime of so-called "modern dance"). Drawing heavily from his deep affection for the music-theatrical performance traditions of Greek theater, as well as those from Africa, Bali, and Chinese opera, Partch conceived of a contemporary American music ritual-theater where musicians not only play, but also function at times as movers-singers-actors. Such is the case of The Bewitched, where the instruments are the set, in front of (and around) which dancers "dance," but where the onstage musicians also move and sing. "The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre. It is the opposite of specialized. I conceived and wrote it in California in the period 1952-55, following the several performances of my version of Sophocles' Oedipus. In spirit, if not wholly in content, it is a satyr-play. It is a seeking for release--through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry--from the catharsis of tragedy. It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity, in the feeling that the modern spirit might thereby find some ancient and magical sense of rebirth. Each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease, or--a diametric reversal, which has the effect of underlining the complementary character, the strange affinity, of seeming opposites." --Harry Partch

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The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2

Manufacturer: New World Records
ProductGroup: Music
Binding: Audio CD

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The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1
The Harry Partch Collection Volume 3
The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 4
Genesis of a Music: An Account of a Creative Work, Its Roots and Its Fulfillments (Da Capo Paperback)
Harry Partch: Enclosure 7

ASIN: B00064AF8M
Release Date: 2004-10-04

Tracks:

The Wayward - U.S. Highball-A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip (1943, rev. 1955)
The Wayward - San Francisco--A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties (1943, rev. 1955)
The Wayward - The Letter (1943, rev. 1972)
The Wayward - Barstow--Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California (1941, rev. 1968)
And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma (1963-64, rev. 1966)

Album Description

Harry Partch's compositions of the 1940s—and to some extent his work in general—have remained until recently an unwritten chapter in the history of American music. And yet it was these very pieces—the collection of four works he would later collectively entitle The Wayward—that brought him to the attention of the New York musical world. His concert of these pieces for the League of Composers (April 22, 1944) established for him a small but permanent reputation as a musical maverick who had wandered off well-worn tracks and had developed a sort of lateral extension of his art, independently of any of the main circles of American music.

The musical starting point of the compositions of The Wayward is the inflections and rhythms of everyday American speech. From the beginnings of his mature output in 1930 Partch had been devoted to what he called "the intrinsic music of spoken words," and these four works capture something of the spontaneous musicality of the conversations of the hoboes he befriended during the Depression. In their original form these pieces used only the small collection of instruments Partch had built or customized by 1943: Adapted Viola, Adapted Guitar, Chromelodeon, and Kithara. The versions recorded here are all later reworkings, sometimes with only small changes (as in the case of San Francisco), and sometimes involving a substantial amount of recomposition (as in the case of U.S. Highball).

The final work on this disc dates from twenty years later than the compositions of The Wayward, and represents one of the high points of Partch's later instrumental idiom. And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma was composed in Petaluma, California, in March-April 1964, and revised at various times and places until the completion of the final copy of the score in San Diego in October 1966. It marks a radical departure from the theater works he had written at the University of Illinois in the early 1960s, and shows a renewed concentration on technical innovation and on fusing his activities as composer and instrument-builder within the context of a single composition. Newly remastered.

Of related interest:
80621 The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1

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