Harry Partch:Oedipus private Gate 5 microtonal instrmnt

$

126

Harry Partch: Oedipus (1952 microtonal opera for unique instruments and intoning voices) ["Second Edition, Excerpted for one 12-inch LP"]


label & cat no.:
Gate 5 Issue No. 5 pressed in:
USA date:
195? format:
LP Vinyl: vg+ (few minor marks; plays with some crackles but has nice dynamics, with gorgeous bass response on the super low tones from the various marimbas)
Cover: vg- (top-opening envelope-style cover has paper tears on the front and along the edges though no splits; some sticker residue; probably an ex-library copy from which a previous owner removed stickers) Ultra rare original private pressing artifact released on the composer's mail-order-only label featuring Partch's sound-sculpture instruments played in his 43-notes-to-the-octave microtonal scale. This music theater piece began as a collaboration with William Butler Yeats in 1933, but lack of funding and Partch's own "lost years" spent wandering as a hobo delayed its production until the 50s after Yeats' death. The unique Partch instruments heard here include Adapted Cello, Adapted String Bass, Adapted Viola, Adapted Guitars, Harmonic Canons, Kithara, Chromelodeons, Cloud-Chamber Bowls, Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, and Marimba Eroica. The performers are the Gate 5 Ensemble of Sausalito directed by the composer, Allan Louw as Oedipus, and conductor Jack Hohensee. From Partch's notes: "Tone of word and tone of instrument combine in a compact expression, each providing its singular ingredient. I am bringing human drama, made of words, movement, and music, to a level that a mind with average capacity for sensitivity and logic can understand and therefore evaluate..." The back cover is stamped "Harry Partch / Box 557, Station A / Champaign, Illinois."

From the late 1930s onward, after living as a transient hobo, Partch developed instruments based on his own revolutionary just intonation tuning theories (considered the first in the field since Pythagoras). He composed in isolation within the musical universe he created, but he blazed the same trails as Alois Haba, Julian Carrillo, Ivan Wyschnegradsky, and Charles Ives, drew from percussive eastern music such as gamelan, American folk, Native American, and African music, Hebrew and Christian hymns, and "lumber yards and junk shops," and would become influential to experimental and microtonal composers like John Cage, Steve Reich, Lou Harrison, La Monte Young, Ben Johnston, Easley Blackwood, Glenn Branca, Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, Terry Riley, John Eaton, James Tenney, Rhys Chatham, Tony Conrad, Henk Badings, and others from the avant garde; his instruments relate to the 'Structures Sonores' of Bernard and Francois Baschet and Jacques Lasry and the sound sculptures and homemade instruments of Harry Bertoia, Max Neuhaus, Z'ev, Donald Knaack, Paul Panhuysen, Bill Fontana, Mario Bertoncini, Bruce Nauman, Robert Rutman, etc. Check out my other auctions this week for more Partch/Gate 5, avant garde/experimental, early electronic/electroacoustic/synthesizer, 20th century classical, microtonal, audiophile, vintage jazz, and sound sculpture/sound art records. Note: New increased USPS shipping rates as of May 2007!
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