Daphne of the Dunes, by Harry Partch, is here recorded for the first time live. Originally the sound track for Madeline Tourtelot’s film Windsong, Partch recorded it alone, by the process of overdubbing. The film, a modern rendering of the ancient myth of Daphne and Apollo, is a classic of the integration between visuals and sound. Partch explains his approach to the score:

“The music, in effect, is a collage of sounds. The film technique of fairly fast cuts is here translated into musical terms. The sudden shifts represent nature symbols of the film, as used for a dramatic purpose: dead tree, driftwood, falling sand, blowing tumbleweed, flying gulls, wriggling snakes, waving grasses.”

Melodic material is short, haunting, and reoccurs motivically. Arpeggiated harmonic texture contrasts melodic sections. Meter is ever changing, almost measure for measure, with pulse sub-divisions of five, seven, and nine common. A trio of the Bass Marimba, Boo. and Diamond Marimba written in 31/16 meter is structured with 5 unequal beats per measure, the beats sub-divided into sixteenths of 5-5-7-9-5. A duet of the Boo and Harmonic Canon is written in a polymeter of 4/4-7/4 over 4/8-7/8. – Notes by Danlee Mitchell

The instruments heard in this recording:

DAPHNE OF THE DUNES

Adapted Viola
Spoils of War
Kithara II
Gourd Tree
Surrogate Kithara
Diamond Marimba
Harmonic Canons II and III
Boo (Bamboo Marimba)
Chromelodeon I
Bass Marimba
Cloud-Chamber Bowls
Pre-recorded Tape
(Note: No more than four instruments are used simultaneously.)

Found on YouTube the Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury original video (1969). Quality could be better, but here it is…

We have already written about Harry Partch on these pages. A very personal artist, between the historical and contemporary 20th century (1901-1974), able of conceiving and building his own instrumentation which is not based on equal temperament. For this reason Partch has always been isolated, but nevertheless he was always present to himself and aware of his being a composer (remember that during the great depression he wandered like a homeless and yet was able to publish a little magazine entitled Bitter Music). Partch has always carried out his challenge to current aesthetics, whatever it was.

With his music, not tonal, not atonal, but rather completely external to this dualism, (developing that purely American attitude that we already find in Ives and others), Harry Partch reaches levels of great power, as in this last work from 1965 -66, performed only once while he was still alive.

Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual Of Dream And Delusion, for 25 instruments (never played all together), 4 singers and 6 actors/dancers/mimes, combines a Japanese drama in the first act with an African farce in the second, realizing that concept of total theater that integrates music, dance, scenic art and ritual that has always been important for the author.

The opera does not have a real libretto, in the narrative sense of European opera. All the action is danced and/or mimed.
In Partch’s words, the first act is essentially an exit from the eternal cycle of birth and death represented by the pilgrimage of a warrior in search of a sacred place in which to serve penance for a murder, while the murdered appears in the drama as ghost, first to relive and make his killer relive the torment of the murder, finally finding reconciliation with death in the words “Pray for me!”.
The second act is instead a reconciliation with life that passes through the dispute, born from a misunderstanding, between a deaf hobo and an old woman looking for her lost son. In the end, the two are dragged in front of a confused, deaf and almost blind judge who, misunderstanding himself, mistakes them for husband and wife and orders them to return home, while the choir sings an ironic hymn in unison (“How could we go forward without justice?”) and the dispute dissolves into the absurdity of the situation.
The opera ends with the same invocation as the finale of the first act (“Pray for me, again”), launched from off stage.

Look at the original video here