Sunday Afternoon at the Opera - Partch: Delusion of the Fury

Sunday Afternoon at the Opera host Keith Brown writes:

Now for an extraordinary lyric theater piece by America's great musical eccentric of the twentieth century, Harry Partch (1901-74). This will not be the first time I have featured one of his theatrical works. A recording of Revelation in the Courthouse Park (1960) went over the air on Sunday, February 8, 1991, and thereafter came Partch's Oedipus (1951) on Sunday, November 19, 2000. Now comes Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion (1966), a species of pantomime drama with ritualized action, some costuming, and some vocalization that qualifies it for lyric theater programming. Its first act builds upon the concept of Japanese Noh drama. The entire work is accompanied by instruments in microtonal pitch designed and made by Partch himself. Reconstructions of these "original" instruments, on display at the University of Washington State School of Music were employed in the 2015 recording of Delusion of the Fury made in Cologne, Germany by the Ensemble Musikfabrik and released to the public in 2022 through the German Wergo record label.

Another iconic rebel of Harry Partch's era--the mid-twentieth century--was America's beatnik poet extraordinaire, Irwin Allen Ginsberg (1926-97). Ginsberg was recorded live in performance, delivering his rants and laments for the "beat generation", and singing, too, as he had done for my Allen Ginsberg special on Sunday, July 9, 1995. I worked from a three-CD compilation of Ginsberg's recorded voice. Holy Soul, Jelly Roll: Poems and Songs, 1949-1993 (Metro Word Beat/Rhino Records, 1994). Ginsberg howls again this afternoon.