Music From Other Minds

Program 614: Harry Partch's "The Bewitched"

KALW Broadcast Date: August 21, 2020 | Host: Randall Wong

On this Music from Other Minds, Randall Wong plays The Bewitched and other dramatic and lyric works by Harry Partch including the Gate 5 Ensemble’s performance of The Wayward: I. U.S. Highball-A Musical Account Of A Transcontinental Hobo Trip.

“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, 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.” – Harry Partch

Program Audio

30-Second Spot