New recordings of Harry Partch’s music seem even rarer than live performances, so for a disc of his works to arrive so soon after the astonishing staging of his Delusion of the Furies at this summer’s Edinburgh festival is a happy coincidence. Plectra and Percussion Dances is a trilogy of dance scores – Castor and Pollux, Ring Around the Moon and Even Wild Horses – that was performed a few times under Partch’s direction in 1953 (his recorded introduction to one of those performances is included here as a bonus) and not heard again complete until 2008, when it was revived by Partch, the ensemble founded by John Schneider expressly to perform Harry Partch’s music on a specially made set of the necessary microtonal instruments. The scenarios of the three pieces are a typically odd Partch jumble of Greek myth, surreal humour – Happy Birthday to You crops up in the middle of one of them – and snatches of texts by Rimbaud. The struck and plucked music sometimes recalls a Javanese gamelan, sometimes modern primitivism; as always, there’s the mismatch between the extreme refinement of Partch’s harmonic thinking, with its 43-step division of the octave, and his relatively unsophisticated rhythmic invention. But without question it’s important to be able to hear this music.
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