** condition: M/VG+ (ring wear) ** CRI's 1973 double LP re-issue with gatefold sleeve of Harry Partch alien sounding avant-garde major opus recorded in 1953 with a big ensemble also playing his self-invented istruments and previously released on Partch's own Gate 5.
"The Bewitched" features musical accompaniments for a prologue and ten scenes. Partch's music is stunningly resourceful and iconoclastic: Many of the instruments used here were created by Partch himself, and Partch embraced non-Western and ancient music as principal sources of inspiration long before it became popular for composers to do so. Also, by the 1950s, when this work was composed, Partch had worked for decades on systems of microtonality (in which the composer divides the octave into a different number of pitches than the usual 12) that the rest of the new music world was just beginning to catch up with. "The Bewitched" is intensely percussive, and despite its cosmopolitan themes (exoticism, basketball, xenophobia, women's suffrage), it often sounds like field recordings of folk songs from unfamiliar lands."