Harry Partch Collection, Volume 3

They Say...

Review by "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Music Guide

A collection of four rare and super-rare works by Partch for film and stage played on his original instruments. The Dreamer That Remains -- A Study in Living (1972) was created as a soundtrack for Stephen Pouliot's film of the same name, a documentary about Partch's life including a poetic protest against the prohibition of public displays of homosexuality (a gentle sequence with two men in a park). Windsong (1958) for ten of Partch's instruments, was written for a film by Madeline Tourtelot on the subject (suggested by Partch) of Daphne and Apollo; it is a "collage of sounds...fast cuts... translated into musical terms...dead trees, driftwood, falling sand, blowing tumbleweed, flying gulls, wriggling snakes, waving grasses." Rotate the Body in All Its Planes -- Ballad for Gymnasts (1961) was in fact written for a gymnastic exhibition at the Huff Gymnasium of the University of Illinois which was elegantly filmed by Madeline Tourtelot. Water! Water! -- An Intermission with Prologues and Epilogues (1961) is a rarely heard evening-long satirical farce based on Partch's conviction that the intermission, with the audience rushing out for "water!" or other libation, was the real focal event of a concert or theatrical event and that the two halves were prologues and epilogues to this break. There's a great libretto set in the mythical city of Santa Mystiana where the scheming mayor tries to get the Jazzmen, who travel with water witches, to make it rain and stop the drought and fill the dam, but they won't do it because the gods have not been properly propitiated; the baseball game is cancelled, there's a trial, ghosts of Indian runners report on calamity in the Caucasian world, and the dam is destroyed in a deluge.