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Eleven Instrusions VII: The Street

from The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1 by Harry Partch

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    This newly remastered reissue marks a welcome return to the catalog of the first volume of the classic 4-CD collection that was formerly available on the CRI label. The works recorded on this disc span the first six years of what Harry Partch (1901-1974), slightly tongue-in-cheek, called the "third period" of his creative life. They show him moving away from the obsession with "the intrinsic music of spoken words" that had characterized his earlier output (the vocal works of 1930-33 and 1941-45) and towards an instrumental idiom, predominantly percussive in nature. This path was to take him through the "music-dance drama" King Oedipus (1951)－the culmination of his "spoken word" manner－to the "dance satire" The Bewitched (1954-55), in which his new percussive idiom manifests itself. The three works on this disc show Partch before, during, and after this period of transition.

    In their quiet, forlorn way, the Eleven Intrusions are among the most compelling and beautiful of Partch's works. The individual pieces were composed at various times between August 1949 and December 1950, and only later gathered together as a cycle. Nonetheless they form a unified whole, with a nucleus of eight songs framed by two instrumental preludes and an essentially instrumental postlude.

    Although foreshadowed by the dance sequences of King Oedipus, the Plectra and Percussion Dances (1952) are the first of Partch's major works to be wholly instrumental in conception. They stand in relation to Oedipus as a satyr play in relation to a Greek tragedy－hence the work's subtitle, "Satyr-Play Music for Dance Theater." He felt that after the prolonged period of composition and production of Oedipus it was "almost a necessity to give vent to feelings and ideas, whims and caprices, even nonsense, that seem to have no place in tragedy."

    The final work on this disc is Ulysses at the Edge, written at Partch's studio at Gate 5 in July 1955. Ulysses, which Partch describes as a "minor adventure in rhythm," is unique among his mature compositions in that, in its original form, it did not call for any of his own instruments. The version recorded here, for alto and baritone saxophones, Diamond Marimba, Boo, Cloud-Chamber Bowls, and speaking voice, is considered the third version of the piece.

    Includes unlimited streaming of The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1 via the free Bandcamp app, plus high-quality download in MP3, FLAC and more.     ... more
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lyrics

The Street (Willard Motley)

Over the jail the wind blows, sharp and cold. Over the jail and over the car tracks the cold wind blows. The streetcar clangs east, turns down Alaska Avenue, and at a diagonal crosses Halstead Street. North and south runs Halstead, twenty miles long. Twelfth Street. Boys under lampposts, shooting craps, learning. Darkness behind the school where you smarten up, you come out with a pride and go look at all the good clothes in the shop windows and the swell cars whizzing past to Michigan Boulevard and start figuring out how you can get all these things. Down Maxwell Street where the prostitutes stand in the gloom-clustered doorways. Across Twelfth Street either way on Peoria are the old houses. The sad faces of the houses line the street like old men and women sitting along the veranda of an old folks' charity home.
Nick? Knock on any door down this street.

credits

from The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 1, released January 1, 2004
Harry Partch, principal vocals; Ben Johnston, Betty Johnston, Harry Partch, Donald Pippin, Bill Snead, instrumentalists Recorded in 1950–51 in Gualala, California, by Harry Lindgren. First released on Partch Compositions, a five-record 78 rpm set by Lauriston C. Marshall, Berkeley, California.

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Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.

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