Harry Partch’s Sonata Dementia Reviewed

Source: seattlepi.com.

Harry Partch is one of the few creators who can fairly be said to be a true original. Indeed he can seem almost sui generis. He invented and scored for his own instruments, and held to almost none of the musical conventions his generation inherited. On the other hand, he wasn’t conceptual or distinctively cerebral in his iconoclasm the way, say, John Cage was. With his 43-tone scale and seemingly infinite appetite for absorbing and recasting 20th-century American cultural touchstones and quirks, Partch created works that remain living things, typically exist in multiple forms, and still surprise us.