[NewMusic] Partch

[George Cremaschi]

PG wrote:

>And what was with tossing in eight measures of music with one woman on
>one jump rope?

I missed that...at a certain point I closed my eyes so as to focus on
the music. Dancer friend who was there said that it is absolutely
certain that the dance was some kind of parody or joke.

Ha ha, funny.


>The music is so extraordinary

It was nice to hear a lot of that early hobo blues stuff - in
a lot of ways, it's his furthest out music, even if it's undeveloped,
even naive, in comparison with his incredible later music.
To me, 'Castor and Pollux' now sounds like a forerunner to prog rock
more than anything, which just makes me like it even more.
In any event, who's more sui generis than Partch? Nobody.
I'm really curious if there's any record of what his US contemporaries
of the time (Feldman, Cage, etc) thought of him... I would
imagine Morty, in particular, really hating the music.

And I wonder if Sun Ra ever heard Partch? 'Strange Strings', 'Atlantis'...?
And the costumes, and theatricality, and interest in language, and
faux mythology - interesting parallels.

-George

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