Stuffed: a 1971 documentary; a 1969 filmed performance of Delusion Of The Fury; something from Revelation In The Courthouse Park from 1961; various hippies; and Partch himself, at 72, ranting and raving.
This is a great way into Partch, revisiting with gusto three well-known, relatively-compact works — a highly rhythmic dance piece, a cross-cutting film score, and Barstow, with HP intoning hitchhiker graffiti.
The original 1957 performance — kotos and marimbas alongside HP varieties like the Chromelodeon and the Harmonic Canon — with splendid artwork including rare documents and photographs.
‘A diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road’. A collage of readings and musical fragments, this long-lost journal of HP’s wanderings during the Great Depression (from cleaning sewers to tea with W. B. Yeats) is ‘an extraordinary musical portrait of an American pioneer, chronicling his occasionally hilarious and often heartbreaking struggles to forge a new music system outside the classical tradition.’
Thirty-four verses of expanded duets, the prototype of Delusion Of The Fury, thrashed out with the Gate 5 Ensemble over a three year period starting late in 1962, in a too-small space within an abandoned chick hatchery in Petaluma, California.
Plus a section of a rehearsal session, with HP himself giving direction, ending with a fine performance by Danlee Mitchell and Michael Ranta.
And finally a previously unreleased recording of Partch playing Adapted Viola, in one of the Verse 17 duets excised from the final opus.