The Bewitched

Harry Partch - The Bewitched-A Dance Satire (1955)

This is a recording of the first performance of Harry Partch's dance-satire, THE BEWITCHED, which took place at the University of Illinois' Champaign-Urbana campus in 1957. The performance featured musical instruments designed and built by the composer and played by the University of Illinois Musical Ensemble. This recording was originally released on Partch's own label, Gate 5.

Excerpted notes and synopsis by Harry Partch:

The Bewitched is in the tradition of world-wide ritual theatre. It is the opposite of specialized. I conceived and wrote it in California in the period 1952-55, following the several performances of my version of Sophocles' Oedipus. In spirit, if not wholly in content, it is a satyr-play. It is a seeking for release - through satire, whimsy, magic, ribaldry - from the catharsis of tragedy. It is an essay toward a miraculous abeyance of civilized rigidity, in the feeling that the modern spirit might thereby find some ancient and magical sense of rebirth. Each of the 12 scenes is a theatrical unfolding of nakedness, a psychological strip-tease, or - a diametric reversal, which has the effect of underlining the complementary character, the strange affinity, of seeming opposites.

Generally, the Witch occupies a throne near the front of the stage, facing the opposite entrance, draped in robes which assume different colors with the changing lights. She is frequently a dark silhouette, creating the illusion of a presence which the dancers hear but cannot see. She sits immobile, she stands, she moves rhythmically on the throne. Singing wordlessly in a male and female voice, she occasionally assumes command of her Chorus as ostensible conductor.

The instruments dominate the set. They are on risers of different heights, the risers being connected by a stairway, or a nexus of stairways, which mature into an ascent without evident end, at one of the far corners of the rear. This is a true story.

Gravitating to my instruments and to an idea, the "lost musicians" discovered that they were not relegated to a pit, but obligated to fulfill an integral element of ritual, on stage, and they did so. From the viewers' standpoint, the dynamism involved in seeing them as a tumultuous part of a modern whole, along with dancers, actors, singers, medicine-men, or whatever, opens a road to the rediscovering of Western man's ancient past and his present brothers.

The original lost musicians were never involved in a formal staging of The Bewitched, but I found willing proxies at the University of Illinois, and this was the locale of its debut, at the Festival of Contemporary Arts of 1957.


Argument We are all bewitched, and mostly by accident: the accident of form, color, and sex; of prejudices conditioned from the cradle on up, of the particular ruts we have found ourselves in or have dug for ourselves because of our individual needs. Those in a long-tenanted rut enjoy larger comforts of mind and body, and as compensation it is given to others who are not so easily domesticated to become mediums for the transmission of perception, more frequently. Among these are the lost musicians. The present-day musician grows up in a half-world between "good" music and "not-so-good" music. Even when he has definitely made his choice between the two, he is still affected by the other, and to that extent he is dichotomous and disoriented. His head is bathed in an ancient light through a Gothic window while his other end swings like a miniature suspension bridge in a cool right-angle gale. The perception of displaced musicians may germinate, evolve, and mature in concert, through a developing at-one-ness, through their beat.

Tracklisting:

1. Prologue: The Lost Musicians Mix Magic {18:08}

2. Scene 1: Three Undergrads Become Transfigured in a Hong Kong Music Hall {5:29}

3. Scene 2: Exercises in Harmony and Counterpoint are Tried in a Court of Ancient Ritual {5:07}

4. Scene 3: The Romancing of a Pathological Liar Comes to an Inspired End {5:31}

5. Scene 4: A Soul Tormented by Contemporary Music Finds a Humanizing Alchemy {5:40}

6. Scene 5: Visions Fill the Eyes of the Defeated Basketball Team in the Shower Room {4:19}

7. Scene 6: Euphoria Descends a Sausalito Stairway {4:16}

8. Scene 7: Two Detectives on the Trail of a Tricky Culprit Turn in Their Badges {5:30}

9. Scene 8: A Court in Its Own Contempt Rises to a Motherly Apotheosis {5:26}

10. Scene 9: A Lost Political Soul Finds Himself Among the Voteless Women of Paradise {5:56}

11. Scene 10: The Cognoscenti are Plunged into a Demonic Descent While at Cocktails/Epilogue {9:17}

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