Partch: Castor and Pollux

Day 192

Harry Partch: Castor and Pollux

Harry Partch was one of the most innovative of the American modernists. He rejected almost all of the standard apparatus of western music - he was interested in microtone and designed and built his own instruments on which to performed his music. He made primitive recordings of some of his pieces uses multi-track tape recordings, but others have gone on to recreate his sound world. This piece is for an ensemble including marimba like instruments, glass bowls of various sizes and large plucked string instruments broadly related to the dulcimer.

I enjoyed the sonorities in this 15 minute piece. Some of it was very reminiscent of the Gamelan music from Bali and reminded me at times of the effects that Britten contoured up with conventional instruments in The Prince of the Pagodas. At other times use of short repeated melodic patterns reminded me of the minimalist music of Steve Reich and others from much later in the 20th century.  Structural the piece is a set of duets which are played separately and then combined in large ensembles. There was a real musical imagination underpinning the piece and it certainly has whetted my appetite to hear more of Partch’s music.