Harry PARTCH: Delusion of the Fury

Short Films | 17 min | 1969 | Directed by Madeline Tourtelot

Delusion of the Fury: A Ritual of Dream and Delusion, \\ Recorded at UCLA Playhouse 1969. Conducted by Danlee Mitchell, musician assembly Emil Richards.

American composer Harry Partch (1901-1974) had a musical vision for which 12-toned instruments were not enough. His objection to the standard western classical scale wasn’t so much along the philosophical lines of Schoenberg and other early 20th-century atonalists; he was mainly frustrated by the musical limitations of the equal-tempered octave, so devised a system that split the octave into 43 notes instead.

Partch’s masterpiece is the bizarre 1960s music drama Delusion of the Fury. It is outlandish and magnificent and it spits you out wanting to dive back in and experience the whole strange thing again. And if it is hardly ever staged that’s because it can’t be: it requires its very own orchestra of hand-built instruments, each one specially invented by Partch to play his unique microtonal music.

Even the names of the instruments are little poems in themselves: Eucal Blossom, Zymo-Xyl, Quadrangularis Reversum, Castor & Polux, Spoils of War. There are closely-tuned glass gongs and thin sheets of metal which, when tugged by strings, make loud wobbly noises. The Chromelodeon is a sort of harmonium that produces a mellow thrum. The heavy bass of the Marimba Eroica hits you first in the stomach then in the head, like a big wooden subwoofer. A zither-ish instrument plays a recurring spaghetti-western figure – glimmers of Partch’s childhood in remote Arizona, like heat-haze on a long horizon.

There is more to these instruments than wild names and weird sounds. What’s surprising is how, well, tonal his music often ends up sounding. 

Read more: Harry Partch – how Heiner Goebbels bought Delusion of the Fury to Edinburgh