The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2

Harry Partch (Composer), Gate 5 Ensemble (Orchestra), Harry Partch, Danlee Mitchell, Elizabeth Gentry , Harry Partch, David Dunn, Dennis Dunn, Randy Hoffman, Ben Gate 5 Ensemble (Performer), Betty Johnston (Performer), The Harry Partch Ensemble, Danlee Mitchell, music director , The Gate 5 Ensemble, Harry Partch, director Donald Pippin (Performer) | Format: Audio CD

Product Details

• Performer: Harry Partch, Danlee Mitchell, Elizabeth Gentry , Harry Partch, David Dunn, Dennis Dunn, Randy Hoffman, Ben Gate 5 Ensemble , Betty Johnston, The Harry Partch Ensemble, Danlee Mitchell, music director , The Gate 5 Ensemble, Harry Partch, director Donald Pippin
• Orchestra: Gate 5 Ensemble
• Composer: Harry Partch
• Audio CD (October 4, 2004)
• SPARS Code: DDD
• Number of Discs: 1
• Label: New World Records
• ASIN: B00064AF8M
• In-Print Editions: MP3 Download
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #65,394 in Music (See Top 100 in Music)

Editorial Reviews

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

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Genius or Fraud?, March 15, 2010

By 

Giordano Bruno (Wherever I am, I am.) - See all my reviews
(HALL OF FAME REVIEWER)    (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2 (Audio CD)

I guarantee you'll have an opinion, an answer to that question, once you hear the music of Harry Partch. And you should at least listen. This is my favorite volume of the "Harry Partch Collection", the volume that presents his musical thought at its most 'developed'. No, the samples will NOT be adequate to evaluate him.

Partch is a musical experimenter, an inventor of new and Rube-Goldbergish instruments that only his disciples can play, an advocate of microtones and mathematically outlandish scales. At times, his music sounds very much like "hippy gamelan", or like a pop group getting 'zoned out' -- Phoenix, for instance, or Massive Attack -- and at other times it sounds like John Adams or Philip Glass or some other earnest minimalist. But is Partch ever earnest? Don't trust him! He's a leprechaun or a troll at heart. Nobody has more fun with music, and nobody's music is more fun to play, when you're 'in the zone'.