Harry Partch Enclosure Two 4cd

4cd
1995/1943-92
new
Partch was driven into inventing his own microtonal system & building oversized fake-Grecian instruments to play it because he wanted to mimic the inflection of voices better than an ordinary piano keyboard could do. The result is some very off-kilter operas that have raw gongs & feathery strings behind a forced-but-incisive dialogue, alot like those early David Mamet movies or a good Garland-Rooney musical. Here's a big chunk of the stuff that was inspired by the speech of the homeless, which Partch discovered while riding the rails around the US himself, writing down favorite quotes complete with musical notation, for about ten years. Majority of the recordings are mid-1940s, with a few previously unrecorded works done in the early 90s. Tracklisting: I Am Harry Partch, By the Rivers of Babylon, Texts and Music: A Wagnerian Wrestling Match, A Dream, An Encounter in the Field, On Hearing the Flute, The Intruder, I Am a Peach Tree, With a Man of Leisure, A Midnight Farewell, Before the Cask of Wine, On the Ship of Spicewood, By the Great Wall, The Use of English in Serious Music, Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers' Inscriptions from A Highway Railing, San Francisco: Newsboy Cries, Life Is Too Precious To Spend It With Important People, US Highball: A Musical Account of Slim's Transcontinental Trip, While My Heart Keeps Beating Time, San Francisco II, I'm Going To Start Right Off By Giving You Some Sounds, Isobel, Annah the Allmaziful, Dark Brother, A Quarter Saw Section of Motivations and Intonations, Bitter Music, Yankee Doodle Birds, YD Fantasy: On the Words of an Early American Tune, O Frabjous Day, You Are Charged With Being Guilty Are You Drunk Or Not Drunk, Ring Around the Moon, Bless This Home, Harry's Wake.