PARTCH, Harry: Enclosure 8
Producer:
Blackburn, Philip
Producer:
Kaye, Peter
Composer: Partch, Harry
Music Studio: Harry Partch
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Television Director: Tourtelot, Madeline
Composer: Partch, Harry
Windsong
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Television Director: Tourtelot, Madeline
Composer: Partch, Harry
US Highball: a Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Television Director: Tourtelot, Madeline
Composer: Partch, Harry
Rotate the Body in All Its Planes
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Television Director: Tourtelot, Madeline
Composer: Partch, Harry
The Music of Harry Partch
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Producer: Kaye, Peter
Television Director: Steen, Paul
Television Director: Marshall, Paul
Composer: Partch, Harry
Barstow (1968 version)
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Conductor: Mitchell, Danlee
The San Diego Harry Partch Ensemble
Television Director: Yamamoto, Carl
Composer: Partch, Harry
Castor and Pollux, a Dance for the Twin Rhythms of Gemini
Television Director: Schneider, John
Producer: Blackburn, Philip
Partch Ensemble
Hoefner, Liz
Comboul, Maud
Donguez, Melissa
Fox, Kate
Lazos, Liana
Leddy, Sarah
Choreographer: Hoefner, Liz
Dancer:
Comboul, Maud
Dancer:
Donguez, Melissa
Dancer:
Fox, Kate
Dancer:
Hoefner, Liz
Dancer:
Lazos, Liana
Dancer:
Leddy, Sarah
Year of Production: 2007
Playing Time: 02:27:15
Catalogue Number: INNOVA399
UPC: 726708639990
In 1985 Philip Blackburn climbed the stairs to an attic in Iowa City and started trying to make sense of the boxes piled up there. They contained a composer's life's work: scrapbooks, tapes, photos, letters, scores, and film reels - fragile treasures documenting the twentieth century from a most unusual viewpoint, that of perhaps the world's most original musician: Harry Partch.
The idea was to publish them and reveal Harry to the world on his own terms. Not as the crabby, homeless, self-taught microtonal musical weirdo and instrument maker, but as that most American of all artists, a truly independent thinker. With Enclosure 8, the work of bringing them to public attention reaches its apotheosis.
The Enclosures series (named for the extras Partch wanted to add to his life-long letter to the world) started appearing in 1995 with a VHS video of four films made in collaboration with the Chicago-based filmmaker Madeline Tourtelot. Four CDs, two years and one book later, Enclosure 4 appeared featuring his later films: Delusion of the Fury (his culminating ritual-theater work) and a San Diego Public TV documentary, also on VHS. Now the time has come for these to be issued on DVD, extensively restored, resynched and digitally remastered from the extant original prints. Until books and CDs become as obsolete as VHS, the Enclosures series is complete and, taken together with the Harry Partch Collection on New World Records, Partch's entire work is available for the first time.
Enclosure 8 offers not only a chance to see higher quality versions of previously-available material, but it also includes two performances made after Partch's death in 1974: a 1981 staged production of his hitchhiker piece, Barstow, directed by Danlee Mitchell, and a 2006 choreographed version of Castor & Pollux, performed by John Schneider's Ensemble Partch using replicas of Partch's original set of instruments.
