Harry Partch

Featuring: Michael Ranta

condition (record/cover): NM / EX

One of the most significant and most elusive figures in the history of American music receives here his first proper commercial LP release. Harry Partch - who had spent his adult life as an itinerant, building his own instruments tuned to a 43-tone just-intonation scale, composing music that could only be performed on those instruments, surviving on the margins of American musical life - did not enter the commercial record market until 1966, when Composers Recordings Inc. issued this LP. The work, And On The Seventh Day Petals Fell In Petaluma (1963-64, rev. 1966), was recorded in an abandoned chick hatchery in Petaluma, California, where Partch had assembled his instruments. It consists of 34 duets - played on instruments Partch designed and built, including the Chromelodeon, the Spoils of War, the Cloud Chamber Bowls made from Pyrex carboys from the Berkeley Radiation Laboratory - that function as the verses of a complete work, "assembled with a minimum of players" as Partch described it. Performed by the Gate 5 Ensemble under Partch's direction, with the legendary percussionist Michael Ranta among the performers, it is a work of rippling rhythmic complexity and tonal beauty - strange, ancient-sounding, categorically unlike anything else. The CRI pressing is the original, the document closest to Partch's own hand. Among the most important records in this collection.