The Wayward, Part 2: San Francisco (1943/55) — by Harry Partch

Описание: PARTCH Ensemble performing Harry Partch’s San Francisco—A setting of the cries of Two Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties at REDCAT on June 16-17, 2023.

Voices ~ Cello ~ Chromelodeon ~ Kithara II

“A collection of musical compositions based on the spoken and written words of hobos and other characters—the result of my wanderings in the Western part of the United States from 1935 to 1941.” ~ Harry Partch on The Wayward

Program note by John Schneider:

Setting the gliding contours of real human voices had partly inspired Partch’s famed microtonal scale, and the opening viola lines of San Francisco do, in fact, wordlessly depict the curbside sales pitch with uncanny accuracy. So accurate, in fact, that when reviewing the 1944 Carnegie Hall premiere for the New York Tribune, Lou Harrison wrote, “Mr. Partch has woven a spell of about the foggiest and dampest music I have ever heard. I got homesick”.

About PARTCH Ensemble:

PARTCH Ensemble, the Grammy® Award winning & triple Grammy® nominated new music group, specializes in the music & instruments of the iconoclastic American Maverick composer Harry Partch, who created some of the most alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century. He composed music for drama, dance-theater, multi-media, vocals and chamber music—all to be performed on the extraordinary orchestra of instruments that he designed and built himself. They have performed for the LA County Museum of Art, UCLA’s Partch Centennial Celebration, Sacramento’s Festival of New American Music, Mills College, UNM Albuquerque, the Getty Center, Repertory Dance Theatre of Salt Lake City, Carlsbad Music Festival, Jacaranda Music, Guadalajara International Book Fair, Grand Performances, Brooklyn’s Roulette, Philadelphia’s Kimmel Center, the San Francisco Symphony, and South Korea’s Tongyeong International Music Festival. In 2004, they made their REDCAT debut premiering Harry Partch’s Bitter Music, and have returned every year since. Their recent collaboration with Philadelphia’s PRISM Saxophone Quartet include Lisa Bielawa’s Emmy Award winning opera for TV/Internet VIREO: The Autobiography of a Witches Accuser, and the CD of newly commissioned works Color Theory (XAS Records). SONATA DEMENTIA, Volume 3 of their award- winning Bridge Records “Music of Harry Partch” series, was released in 2019, the same year they premiered the complete The Wayward.

This performance is made possible in part by a grant from the City of Los Angeles Department of Cultural Affairs.