Customer Reviews

Bitter Music: Collected Journals, Essays, Introductions, and Librettos (Music in American Life)

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This collection is a great insight into the thought and creative process of one of America's most fascinating composers. Passionate, original, non-academic, this collection exemplifies a mind committed to the working out of ideas. The early journals, essays mostly from the middle years and librettos from later work - it's not necessarily a cohesive body of work but it's a welcome antidote to the memoirs of more academic composers whose work slices smaller and smaller into a worked ground. Parallel with Partch's search for the sounds between the notes, is his search for the ideas between the ideas. Partch continually questions, continually searches, as if trying to resynthesise concept and sound world in a vital performance art. You can dip into this collection repeatedly and continue to come up refreshed.

Bitter Music (as well as the other writings in the collection) reads like a journal, a storybook, and a score simultaneously. The pages are riddled with colorful characters, bizarre situations, and wondrous insights into the musical mind of a brilliant transient.