CRI’s four-disc anthology encompassing all the recordings that outsider composer, instrument inventor, and maverick theorist Harry Partch made for his own Gate 5 label gain a new lease on life via New World. Volume 1 begins with Eleven Intrusions, a cycle of eight songs, two instrumental preludes, and an instrumental postlude. Partch vocalizes song and prose over accompaniments where slithery bended notes from the Adapted Guitar gently collide with the Cloud-Chamber Bowls’ church-bell resonances.
The Plectra and Percussion Dances involve three larger pieces. The first, Castor and Pollux, is made up of two sections, each consisting of three dances for two instruments, followed by the three played simultaneously by all six players as a fourth piece. Part two, Ring around the Moon, features Partch’s nimble mallet instruments and string family chattering away, with long chords from the Chromelodeon wheezing in the distance. The music is shattered by strange, nonsensical texts. Partch subtitled the third and longest part, Even Wild Horses, as “dance music for an absent drama”. It consists of short “scenes” that evoke the work’s widest variety of moods, textures, and metric patterns.
Ulysses at the Edge makes considerable intonational and rhythmic demands upon non-Partch instruments (baritone and alto saxophone) that ride in tandem with the composer’s ritualistic percussive aggregation. Although the recording quality varies from muffled to excellent mono, the consistency and fervent commitment of these composer-supervised performances make a strong impact. Partch biographer Bob Gilmore’s exemplary and extensive notes tell all you need to know about these works.
