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Partch:Sonata DementiaMusic of Harry Partch, Volume 3

1) Ulysses at the Edge of the World (6:18) – A Minor Adventure in Rhythm (1962)

Study #1 on Olympus’ PentatonicStudy #2 on Archytas’ EnharmonicThe Rose The CraneThe WaterfallThe WindThe StreetThe LetterLoverSoldiers—War—Another WarVanityCloud Chamber Music

Twelve Intrusions (1950) (26:46)(1:17)(2:29)(1:52)(1:46)(1:10)(1:53)(3:17)(2:54)(2:22)(2:53)(0:50)(4:04)

2)3)4)5)6)7)8)9)

10)11)12)13)

NarrationWindsong

Windsong (1958)* Original Version (19:04)(1:13)(17:51)

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Abstraction & DelusionScherzo SchizophreniaAllegro Paranoia

Sonata Dementia (1950)* (9:23)(3:03)(2:05)(4:14)

16)17)18)

— BONUS TRACKS —

19) Canción de Los Muchachos (1:46) (trad. Isleta Indian chant, Edison cylinder, 1904)

IntroductionBarstow

Barstsow: Eight Hitchhikers’ Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California (1941)* (11:45)

[live performance, Eastman School, NY, 1942](2:45)(8:59)

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pand c 2019, Bridge Records, Inc. • All Rights Reserved • Total Time: 75:07

Erin Barnes (Diamond Marimba, Cymbal, Voice), Alison Bjorkedal (Canons, Kitharas), Matt Cook (Canon, Cloud Chamber Bowls, Spoils of War), Vicki Ray (Canons, Chromelodeon, Surrogate Kithara), John Schneider (Adapted Guitars, Bowls, Canons, Spoils, Surrogate Kithara, Adapted Viola, Voice), Nick Terry (Boo, HypoBass), T.J. Troy (Adapted Guitar II, Bass Marimba, Voice), Alex Wand (Adapted Guitar III, Canons, Surrogate Kithara)

Guest Artists: Ulrich Krieger (Baritone Saxophone), Dan Rosenboom (Trumpet)

* first recordings

PARTCH

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High on the chilly, sparsely populated coast of Northern California outside the tiny town of Gualala, Harry Partch began composing

a most extraordinary work. The year was 1949, and what had begun earlier in the decade as an exploratory keyboard exercise called “Progressions Within One Octave” on his 43-tone per octave Chromelodeon became the seed for his first abstract instrumental work, a clear departure from all of his earlier compositions that were inextricably tied to the human voice.

The piece was initially called Tonality Flux, a term from Partch’s newly completed book Genesis of a Music that he coined to describe

“the potentialities of tonality interplay in the Monophonic fabric.” It was meant to replace the more traditional tonal terminology of key modulation that could hardly begin to describe both the subtlety and complexities of his 43-tone scale. But soon, a new title emerged: Sonata Dementia, with the movements “Abstraction & Delusion,”

“Scherzo Schizophrenia,” and “Allegro Paranoia.” The fraught psychological titles surely reflected the composer’s own emotional fragility, having summed up the loneliness of his reclusion in a letter, “I don’t know what’s happening to me. I’m getting touchy like a hermit…incipient psychosis.” After the Sonata’s completion in 1950,

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he was not convinced of its viability, and wrote to his dear friend and collaborator Larry Marshall,

This composition is an experiment, in several ways, and I deliberately made it somewhat difficult, for the both of us. Three of the six instruments involved (there is a tentative part for the bass marimba) I have never used in compositions before, and to get any facility in writing for them I must know what they sound like together. I just threw a lot of ideas into the thing, without trying to integrate them. It is an exercise.

Consequently what I would like to do, when we get started again, is to go right through the thing, giving a minimum of concern either to recording quality or to performance standards. Then I will know whether I have a composition, whether to rewrite it or throw it out altogether.

The resulting recording—which still awaited overdubbing of Adapted Guitar II, Kithara and all important Voice parts—evidently didn’t pass

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muster, as the Sonata was not included in the five 12” 78rpm discs that Marshall released in 1951 as “Partch Compositions.” But Partch neither rewrote it, nor threw it out altogether.

Two years later, it became the second movement of the Plectra & Percussion Dances (1952) under the new title “Ring Around The Moon—A Dance Fantasm for Here and Now” with only the slightest revisions. The spoken titles were removed, the three sections were divided into four “Phases,” the new Marimba Eroica replaced the Hypo-Bass, and the Adapted Guitar III was added to 12 bars in the Allegro Paranoia section, measures that were also repeated two bars before the ending. At the premiere in 1953, he described the piece:

I am always a little hard-pressed to find words to give any verbal validity to this piece of music. On the jack-et of the record that the Gate 5 Ensemble made of the music, I call it a satire on concerts, on the world in general, and on people who write music in 43-tones to the octave, among a lot of other things…But I do want to say that it is a serious expression of a phi-losophy unfamiliar to most lovers of classical music.

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In 1974, he added, “The nonsense phrases by the singer-speaker — ‘Well, bless my soul!’; ‘Shake Hands now boys, and at the sound of the bell come out fighting’; ‘Look out! He’s got a gun!’—all suggest the satire and the title.”

And so, there are two versions of this music. But this is usually the case with Partch’s music, not the exception; in fact, every work on this album exists in at least two forms.

The Intrusions

It was also during his somewhat forlorn seclusion on the North Coast that Partch wrote his intriguing song cycle of Intrusions as well as creating his Bass Marimba and Cloud Chamber Bowls, which feature heavily in these pieces. There are three sets of three ‘songs’ framed by instrumental works that prelude and postlude the texted compo-sitions. The vocal writing is a clear continuation of his speech-song compositions of the 1930s that resonated with W.B. Yeat’s belief in a union of words and music in which “no word shall have a intonation or an accentuation it could not have in passionate speech,” a subject that he and the poet discussed during Partch’s 1934 visit to Dublin.

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The first four Intrusions are all re-workings of earlier compositions, the opening Studies on Ancient Greek Scales first written as demonstration pieces in 1946 for the newly invented Harmonic Canon when the composer was in residence at University of Wisconson-Madison. As Intrusions, the addition of an obbligato Bass Marimba part transforms the pair into charming compositions that still manage to retain their expository function while achieving new levels of musical expression.

The three songs that follow pair two other Madison-born instruments, the 10-string Hawaiian–type Adapted Guitar II and the Diamond Marimba. Though the first two texts came from Partch’s rejected triptych December, 1942 for voice and re-fretted Adapted Guitar I, their mood is considerably darkened in these new settings by the haunting gliding tones of the slide guitar whose open strings are tuned to a minor Utonality and harmonized by the murmuring marimba. The falling petal from “The Rose” by Irish Bay Area poet Ella Young inspires the intoned vocal melody that also slowly descends in microtonal increments, a musical gesture that is cleverly recapitulated by the downward marimba arpeggios at the piece’s close. The mournful cries of 9th century Tsurayuki’s “The Crane” that were only short glissandi in 1942 become elongated vocalises

interwoven with sinewy lines of sliding guitar, accompanied by the marimba’s gently rocking pure major triad whose 5th subtly sharpens and resolves throughout, ending with a quiet question mark.

In the final guitar/diamond piece, the clouds part and sunshine sparkles on the cascading “The Waterfall” described by Ella Young’s evocative poem. The guitar’s strings are retuned to a ‘major’ Otonality, matching the six hexads of the diamond that idiomatically mimic falling water as it splashes (cymbal crash!) to the waiting pond below.

The next two Intrusions were written just as Partch was finishing his Bass Marimba. The 44 bridges of the Harmonic canon that were previously set to articulate the scales and chords of Ancient Greece were rearranged to produce the continuous 43-tone one octave scale. Running one’s finger across any section of this scale uncannily resembles gusts of wind, an effect that surely inspired Partch’s choice of texts. Ella Young’s “The Wind” contrasts gentle early morning rustlings (solo canon) with the howling gusts of nighttime (enter the marimba), as Partch suddenly switches from the objective to the subjective by quoting music from his memoir Bitter Music (1936) that sets Lao Tse’s image of the winds blowing a wanderer from place to place.

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In “The Street,” the chilly winds that blow over the Chicago jail yard & streetcar tracks swirl over the city, taking us on a tour of the bleak, immigrant neighborhoods of Willard Motley’s 1947 best-seller Knock on Any Door. The voice intones the book’s epilogue, introducing us to the underclass inhabitants whose grim futures seem sealed and as hopeless as Nick’s, the novel’s ill-fated protagonist.

“The Letter” is the second version of an excerpt from Bitter Music, the first being “Letter from Hobo Pablo” (1943) for voice, Guitar I and Kithara that Partch had never performed or even rehearsed before recasting it as an Intrusion. The original fretted Guitar I was replaced with a new amplified fretless f-hole guitar that he had also created in Madison, which now swooped up, down, and around the vocal melody, while the original Kithara ritornello was fortified by tremoloing Bass and Diamond Marimbas. He wasn’t done yet, though: in 1955 Pollux (canon) and Surrogate Kithara replaced the guitar, while other parts were also re-orchestrated, etc., but then in 1972, he added a hand drum part (and a new Kithara) for a scene from the film The Dreamer That Remains. However, in 1970, he had penciled a note on the original, “In retrospect, I think this is a better version than the re-writing, summer 1955…,” so the version on this recording adds the 1950 marimba parts to the 1943 original to retain, arguably, the

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best of both worlds. The second version was included in the 1951 recording of “Partch Compositions,” and only later removed in the 1962 recopying of the pieces, reducing the number to the now more familiar Eleven Intrusions.

The last three songs owe their existence to Circle Magazine, a quarterly literary magazine based in Berkeley (1944-48) that featured many important voices from the nascent ‘San Francisco Renaissance’ including Henry Miller, Kenneth Rexroth, and Anäis Nin. The editor George Leite’s “Lover” provided the text for the first work to use the new Cloud Chamber Bowls as well as the recently re-purposed Guitar III (the old Guitar I stripped of its frets, strung with unison G-strings and played with a slide). Once again, the gliding tones of spoken speech are doubled and even harmonized by the sliding notes of Guitar II, while Guitar III doubles the soprano vocalise in the rhythmic second half.

Circle’s final issue contained Partch’s article “Show Horses in the Concert Ring” as well as “Eight Poems” by G. Ungaretti. The Italian poet’s experiences in the trenches of The Great War produced three separate haiku-like poems that Partch put end-to-end in “Soldiers—War—Another War,” capturing in tones the dreadful isolation and

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despair so deftly rendered by the text. Strangely, this piece also exists in two versions that differ only in tuning the top half of the Harmonic Canon. The original version—used here—matches the exact contour of the intoning voice, whereas the fair copy from 1962 uses the continuous scale from The Wind, often in contrary motion with the words.

The final song of the set uses all three of Partch’s Adapted Guitars, the two slide guitars (II & III) glissing back & forth while the tremoloing fretless electric Guitar I is in unison with the voice. In “Vanity,” Ungaretti describes a man gazing into the water, Narcissus-like, as his shadow is shattered by undulating ripples that are mimicked by the duo of gently oscillating guitar chords.

The grand concluding “Cloud Chamber Music” is the largest and longest Intrusion of the set, adding Adapted Viola & Native American deer-hooves rattle to the ensemble of Marimbas, Bowls, Guitar III, and Kithara. After a rousing convocation on the Bowls, a yearningly microtonal Viola/Guitar duet is followed by an up-tempo rendition of the traditional chant “Canción de los Muchachos” from the New Mexican Isleta tribe that Partch had transcribed from an Edison

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cylinder at Pasadena’s Southwest Museum in 1933 [Bonus Track 19]. It first appears as a viola solo, is then sung by solo voice doubled with guitar, and finally by the entire ensemble, ritual deer hooves and all. Partch described it as,

The first music in which the Cloud-Chamber Bowls were seriously used. It is thus the vehicle for the introduction of a new sound; it is also a study in moving or gliding tones, and is finally an expression of tribal unity (exulting voices at the close).

Ben Johnston, who recorded the work with Partch in Gualala, has ascribed a subtext to the piece; “Bearing in mind the origin of the Bowls in the atomic energy program and the role of the Southwest in that development, Partch’s exhortation to the downtrodden is not hard to read…The future is, in a certain sense, the past. We are not to be saved by science fiction become fact but rather by ancient myths and rituals, which retain intact the dignity of human life as an inseparable part of nature.”

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Ulysses

After the period of isolation in Gualala, Partch moved south to Mills College (Oakland) in 1951 for a successful few years that saw premieres of both his first opera King Oedipus and the Plectra & Percussion Dances. By 1953, he had moved a bit further north and installed his instruments in a 200-foot-long shed at the section of abandoned shipyards in Sausalito known as GATE 5, a title that would soon name his record label. Nearby, one of GATE 4’s residents was the

percussionist/drum-maker/recording engineer Bill Loughborough who helped Partch design and build his Marimba Eroica, and whose Boo-Bams (“bamboo spelled sideways”) inspired Partch’s Boo. Bill also played with famed jazz trumpeter Chet Baker, and suggested that Partch write a piece for him, which became:

Chet Baker

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Ulysses Departs from the Edge of the World— A Minor Adventure in Rhythm —

Scored for three sets of Bill Loughborough’s BOOBAMS,String Bass, and Bb Trumpet

Baker liked the idea, but never played it due to scheduling problems, after which the piece went through three more reincarnations. Within six months, Partch had finished his own bamboo marimba, rewrote the piece for Bb Clarinet, cello, Diamond Marimba, & Boo, premiering it in November of 1956 after he had moved to Illinois. Soon it was re-scored again, this time adding the Bass Marimba and a baritone saxophone with the famed Chet Baker/Gerry Mulligan duo specifically in mind. Sadly, no performance resulted, but it was recorded in Evanston (1958) with alto saxophone replacing the trumpet, including a punchline at the end. When the definitive trumpet/baritone version was finally recorded for Orion Records in 1971, the record jacket included these words:

At the time I was writing it the feeling of my hobo years was strong. As a wanderer myself (like Ulysses) I had often been asked the question, “Have you ever been arrested before?” and it struck me as very

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humorous to be able to ask another wanderer the same question.

Actually, he had always had a punch line in mind for the end of the piece. The original 1955 trio version ended with,

Voice from the orchestra: Wha’d’ya make of it, Charlie?

Another voice from the orchestra (Charlie, of course): Don’t ask me. Ask my sister. She’s in-TOO-itive.

Windsong

In late 1957, Partch moved to the Old Town section of Chicago to work on the first of three projects with filmmaker Madeline Tourtelot. Their initial contact was the plan to make a film version of U.S. Highball, but when she showed him some rushes from a piece she was currently working on—she and a friend cavorting amongst the sand dunes at Lake Michigan—Partch immediately thought of the Greek myth of Daphne and Apollo, and they decided to work on that first. It was a true collaboration, too, with the composer writing sections of music

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that were timed exactly to the film edits. Partch performed all the ‘cues’ himself, as the music was,

Conceived and scored for a single instrumentalist on all parts, through multiple recording techniques, with no more than three simultaneous parts at any time (with) brief exceptions, that is, a first recording with two additions.

As reported to a friend, he worked fourteen hours a day for three weeks, totaling thirty hours of recording and sixty hours of editing.

When an excerpted version of the soundtrack was released on Gate 5 Records (Issue A), Partch wrote, “The music, in effect, is a collage of sounds. The film technique of fairly fast cuts is here translated into musical terms. The sudden shifts represent nature symbols of the film, as used for a dramatic purpose….,” but the score was by no means simple background music, or ‘sound design’ in modern parlance. Rather, it included specific leitmotifs for the characters, the chase scene (the virtuosic solos by the Bass Marimba representing the pursuer and the Boo the pursued), as well as the climactic moment when Daphne is transformed into a tree by her father in order to

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protect her virginity. One of the recording techniques that Partch used was doubling the tape playback speed of some parts (kithara, harmonic canon, and a Diamond/Boo duet) which, of course, not only doubled their tempo but dramatically changed the instruments’ timbre, which gave him new colors with which to paint. Tourtelot was so taken by the entire process that she proposed a documentary on Harry’s creation of the score, which became the film “Music Studio, Harry Partch 1958.”

At the end of the score, Partch proudly proclaims, “Written, rehearsed, recorded, edited and copied at 1801 North Orleans St., Chicago, January 16 to March 2, 1958,” though no one has ever heard the entire piece as he wrote it. Even though the score bears meticulous notes as to which passages match what imagery, the actual soundtrack often differs from the written page. The score also included an introductory spoken Narration punctuated by Boo, Bowl, and Diamond Marimba accents, but the film only showed the written text. The full version is recorded here for the first time. A decade later, he created a third version by expanding the piece into a dance-drama under the title Daphne of the Dunes (“…since this is essentially her story”), adding parts for his recent Gourd Tree &

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Cone Gongs, and recording it for the LP The World of Harry Partch (Columbia Records) along with “Castor & Pollux” and the final version of “Barstow.”

— Bonus Tracks —

Canción de Los Muchachos (1904-08?)

In 1933, Partch was living in Pasadena, California and performing some of his new works for voice & Adapted Viola with a local soprano. While there, he was hired by the Southwest Museum to transcribe a dozen Native American songs that had been recorded on Edison wax cylinders by the founder of the Museum, ethnologist Charles Lummis (1859-1928). One of those pieces found its way into The Bewitched (1955), while this Canción was paraphrased in the final Intrusion

“Cloud Chamber Music.”

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Barstow (1942)

The legendary 1969 Columbia recording of Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California imprinted the work in the imaginations of a generation, but it—like all of the titles on this recording—underwent several re-orchestrations before it reached its final form. It was long thought that the earliest surviving recording of the work was of the 1943 trio version (voice/guitar, chromelodeon & kithara) that was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1944, and recorded the year after.

Not so! Partch previously performed it often in its original version for Adapted Guitar I & voice (1941), and legend had it that there was a 1942 recording of a lecture demonstration given at the Eastman School of Music that may well have been the only recording of the work. The lecture was captured on six 12” glass-base acetate discs, but they were thought to be long lost……until now. It turns out that the discs have been languishing at Eastman the whole time. Since the 1941 manuscript of the original solo version of Barstow is not really a score as much as a rough reminder for live performance, many es-sential performance details are missing, making the discovery of this

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recording a real revelation, especially for those who have taken up the considerable challenge of re-fretting an instrument to perform it.

Hitchhiker graffiti is put to music, telling the tale of eight wanderers - some funny, some sad, but always engaging when seen through the lens of Partch’s re-telling. He gives us an earthy and poignant first-hand account that is unique in the world of music, one that is sure to become a permanent part of our American cultural landscape. Taken along with the rest of his Americana from the 1940’s, Partch has created a body of work that places him shoulder to shoulder with the two best-loved storytellers of the era, John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie. —J.S.

PARTCH, the Grammy winning & twice Grammy nominated new music ensemble, specializes in the music & instruments of the iconoclastic American Maverick composer Harry Partch, who created some of the most alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century. He composed music for drama, dance-theater, multi-media, vocals and chamber music—all to be performed on the extraordinary orchestra of instruments that he designed and built himself.

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PARTCH has performed for the LA County Museum of Art, UCLA’s Partch Centennial Celebration, Sacramento’s Festival of New American Music, Minnesota Public Radio’s American Mavericks, Mills College, UNM Albuquerque, the Getty Center, Repertory Dance Theatre RDT Salt Lake City, Carlsbad Music Festival, Jacaranda Music, Guadalajara International Book Fair, Grand Performances, Brooklyn’s Roulette, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, and the San Francisco Symphony. In 2004, they made their Disney Hall/REDCAT debut premiering Harry Partch’s Bitter Music, and have returned every year since. Their recent collaboration with Philadelphia’s Prism Saxophone Quartet include Lisa Bielawa’s Emmy-nominated 12-episode opera for TV/Internet VIREO: The Autobiography of a Witches Accuser and a CD of newly commissioned works Color Theory (XAS Records). This is their third release on Bridge Records.

Daniel Aaron Rosenboom is a creative and prolific trumpet artist, composer, producer, and Los Angeles studio musician. Described as a

“phenomenon” by the Los Angeles Times, he has been recognized with grants and awards from ASCAP, the Yvar Mikhashoff Trust for New Music, the American Composers Forum, and the Meet the Composer foundation, and has been featured on renowned stages and festivals around the world, from the Monterey Jazz Festival to Madison Square

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Garden, the Hammersmith Apollo, and the Hollywood Bowl. As a classical free-lance musician and noted interpreter of modern and avant-garde music, he has performed with some of the elite groups and musicians in Los Angeles, including the Los Angeles Philharmonic, Los Angeles Opera, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra, Monday Evening Concerts, Southwest Chamber Music, the Long Beach Opera.

Ulrich Krieger is well known as a saxophone player in contemporary composed and free improvised music as well as a composer of chamber music and electronic music. His recent focus lies in the experimental fields and fringes of contemporary Pop culture: somewhere in the limbo between Noise and Heavy Metal, Ambient and Silence. He has collaborated with Lou Reed, LaMonte Young, Phill Niblock, Ensemble Modern, Berliner Philharmoniker, Soldier String Quartet, and MusikFabrik, just to name a few. He can be heard on more than seventy CDs.

For additional information about this recording, including text, photos, and other archival material, please visit http://partch.la

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Producer: John SchneiderRecording Engineer: Nick TippEditing: John SchneiderMixing & Mastering: Nick Tipp (Soniferous)Additional Mastering: Ben Maas (Fifth Circle Audio)Liner Notes: John SchneiderGraphic Design: Casey SiuPublishers: Schott Musik, MainzPhotographs: Harry Partch - Front & Back Covers by Fred Lyon, used by permissionPartch with Guitar (Ithaca, 1943) - photographer unknown, Agnes Albert Collection of the San Francisco Symphony, used by permissionCop (John Schneider) & Daniel Rosenboom - by Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman Chet Baker - Jazz City, Hollywood (July, 1956) ©Howard Lucraft Collection/CTSImages, used by permissionRecording Dates: Ulysses, Windsong - Disney Hall/REDCAT, Los Angeles: June 25, 2017 Intrusions, Sonata Dementia - Crean Recital Hall, Chapman University, Orange, CA: January 11-12, 2018. Session producer: Scott Worthington Canción de Los Muchachos - performed by Ramon Zuni, recorded by Charles Lummis at his home El Alisal (Los Angeles): March 10, 1904Barstow - Kilbourn Hall, Eastman School of Music: November 3, 1942

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Partch’s 1942 live performance of Barstow made available with kind permission of the Eastman School of Music.

“Canción de los Muchachos” – courtesy of the Library & Archives of the Autry Museum, with approval of the Isleta Pueblo of New Mexico.

Partch/Marshall correspondence from Blackburn, P. Enclosure 3: Harry Partch. American Composers Forum (1997) used with permission of the author.

Thanks, as always, to the artisans who have created our instruments:Skip Abelson (Diamond & Bass Marimbas, Cloud Chamber Bowls, Spoils of War)

Kent Arnold (Chromelodeon), Chris Banta (Boo, Spoils of War)Greg Brandt (Adapted Guitars I & II), Paul West (Adapted Guitar III)

Scott Hackleman (Harmonic Canons, Kithara, Surrogate Kithara)Robert Portillo (Adapted Viola)

Special Thanks to Royer Labs, Stefani Starin, Ivan Johnson, Tim Yalda, Bing Yeh, & Abby Sher for their invaluable help, without which this recording would not exist.

This recording is a sponsored project of the New York Foundation for the Arts.It was funded in part through a grant from the Aaron Copland Fund for Music, Inc.

For Bridge Records: Barbara Bersito, Doron Schächter, Casey Siu, and Robert StarobinRobert Starobin, webmaster | Email: becky@bridgerecords.com

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