Harry Partch: The Bewitched

With his system of monophony and its 43-unit "microtone" set leading him to build his own instruments to play the strange and wonderful music he created, Harry Partch was a musical iconoclast of the highest order.  He was also remarkably contrarian, dismissive of the "abstract" practices from the Middle Ages onward that tore music away from dance and drama as was and is still done in other societies, and not at all shy about condemning those who differed from his views.  Still, while he worked largely in obscurity, Partch had a small devoted coterie of supporters, followers, and musicians who did what they could to present his music where possible when he was alive and do so today nearly a half-century after his death.

In 1955, when The Bewitched was completed and soon performed at a music festival at the University of Illinois, Champaign-Urbana, it would hardly be expected to be on the radar of all but the most devoted of alternative music lovers.  65 years later, it would certainly sound bizarre and out of tune to newcomers, but, with some exposure to the music of other parts of the world, including gamelan from Bali, so-called "Peking opera" from China, and so on, what Partch was doing does make more sense.  

It isn't opera, but has a structure somewhat reminiscent of it, with twelve scenes bearing wonderful titles like "The Romancing of a Pathological Liar Comes to an Inspired End" (hmmm . . . ), "Visions Fill the Eyes of a Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room," and, my favorite, "The Cognoscenti Are Plunged into a Demonic Descent While at Cocktails."  Instruments included standard ones such as clarinet, piccolo, and cello, though there is also a Japanese koto, as well as Partch's bamboo marimba, or "boo," cloud-chamber bowls, harmonic canon, kithara, spoils of war, bass marimba, and chromelodeon.  Percussion is central to the music here, as in much of Partch's remarkable work.

Here are some excerpts from Partch in the liners about this amazing musical journey: "The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre.  It is the opposite of specialized . . . 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 . . . each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease . . . we are all bewitched, and mostly by accident: the accident of form, color, and sex; of prejudices condition from the cradle on up, of the particular ruts we have found ourselves in or have dug for ourselves because of our individual needs."  Given that the nation had just emerged from the McCarthy "witch trials" and the "man-in-the-gray-flannel-suit" mentality was very much holding sway, Partch's jeremiad against conformity is striking if not specified.  This 1990 release on CRI (Composers Recordings, Inc., a non-profit for the promotion of contemporary music) is a stimulating, if very challenging, example of Partch's stunning music.