[NewMusic] Partched

[Matthew Goodheart]

I won't give a judgment on the dance. . . because I really don't have 
one. I really don't know. But what did occur to me was that there might 
have been an attempt at a quality of movement that matched the "folky" 
part of Partch's music. What I mean is most clear in the sung pieces, 
where the singing is very talky, where it seems to me that Partch is 
making a connections between the microtonal nature of the music and the 
microtonal nature of speech; another "natural" aspect of it. (Actually, 
the woman in front of me asked if all his sung work was "sprechstimme" 
- at which I'm sure Partch rolled over in his grave. . . ).  Anyway, 
those pieces like December 1952 and Eight Hitchhiker Transcriptions 
evoke a certain sub-culture from a certain era, in what might be 
conceived of as a sonic language reflective of that culture. The words 
"like a drunken hobo singing on an out of tune guitar," or something 
like that, were mentioned. So even though Castor and Pollux had no 
singing,  I wondered if the pretext of the movement in the dance was 
the same: purposely awkward or unskilled movement to parallel that 
elaborately theoretical "unskilled" sound that those particular pieces 
have; an anti-dance for an anti-music.

But maybe not. It was just a thought.

mg

On Apr 24, 2007, at 12:33 AM, Tim Perkis wrote:

> The dance was probably not that different than the original.  There's a
> century long tradition of girls-prancing-around-the-maypole type 
> dancing
> at Mills, and that show was firmly in the tradition;  the irony level 
> is
> hard to determine.
>
> T
>
>
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