Choose artist...
Home   >   Projects   >   Sonata Dementia
PARTCH

Sonata Dementia

Bridge Records

Press Release

Read press

Artist Details

Read bio
Daphne of the Dunes - PARTCH Ensemble with casebolt and smith
The @Percussion Podcast ep 188 with Partch LA members T J Troy, Erin Barnes, and Nick Terry
1 Ulysses at the Edge of the World - A Minor Adventure in Rhythm  
2 Twelve Intrusions - Study #1 on Olympus' Pentatonic  
3 Study #2 on Archytas' Enharmonic  
4 The Rose  
5 The Crane  
6 The Waterfall  
7 The Wind  
8 The Street  
9 The Letter  
10 Lover  
11 Soldiers War Another War  
12 Vanity  
13 Cloud Chamber Music  
14 Windsong  
15 Sonata Dementia  
16 Cancion de Los Muchachos  
17 Barstow: Eight Hitchhikers'  
Show all tracks
Hide

The Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble, hailed as "funny, moving, inventive and insanely theatrical" by the San Francisco Chronicle, announced the release of Sonata Dementia, their third volume of music by American maverick composer Harry Partch (Bridge Records 9525).   Sonata Dementia follows on the success of the ensemble's Vol. 1: Bitter Music: Harry Partch's Depression Journal (Bridge 9349A/C); which earned a GRAMMY Award nomination in 2012 for Best Classical Compendium, and Vol. 2: Plectra & Percussion Dances (Bridge 9432), the 2014 GRAMMY Award winner for Best Classical Compendium, which was also nominated for Best Chamber Music Performance. Early reviews recognize Partch as "truly one of a kind, and the group PARTCH does a wonderful job of capturing both the letter and the spirit of his music." 

  • Harry Partch - Cloud-Chamber Bowls makes yahoo: '10 Homemade Musical Instruments That Rocked The World' list
    Posted At: September 7, 2022 12:00 AM
    Californian-born composer Harry Partch, who died in 1974, aged 73, is one of music’s true mavericks. He invented a new musical language on a 43-note scale and created an orchestra of new instruments to play it on. Partch’s homemade musical instruments were often built out of found objects, such as the discarded ketchup and wine bottles and hubcaps used in the Zymo-Xyl, his take on the xylophone. Partch...
    Bookmark and Share

  • A Pittsburgh music festival celebrates 'the notes between the notes' / 90.5WESA
    Posted At: February 27, 2020 12:00 AM

    Microtonal music uses alternatives to the scale reflected in that familiar do-re-me-fa-so-la-ti-do sequence. The scales can have more, fewer, or just different notes – the notes between the notes, they're sometimes called. "Most world musics use notes that are tuned in other ways than what we're used to," said Mathew Rosenblum, who chairs the University of Pittsburgh's music department. ...
    Bookmark and Share

  • PARTCH - Sonata Dementia makes 105.9:WQXR 'Best Classical Recordings of 2019'
    Posted At: December 17, 2019 12:00 AM

    As a decade that has brought its fair share of ups and downs comes to a close, it's hard to be anything but amazed by one enormous plus: the sheer volume of exceptional new classical recordings that hit the shelves in the 2010s. The last year has been a fitting culmination, chock-full of brilliant reinterpretations of old favorites and bold ventures into new musical frontiers. Here are our favorites of 2...
    Bookmark and Share

  • PARTCH - Sonata Dementia makes All About Jazz: Best Releases Of 2019
    Posted At: December 13, 2019 12:00 AM

    In the sole and separate outside, where cages are execrated and institutes destined to oblivion, the ensemble Partch... plainly would not exist. The same outside, however, houses the individual, Dionysian music of Harry Partch, upholding it metaphysically and moreover ethically. Such is the paradoxical state of performing Partch's music today. A necessity, performance of such illusive but concrete an...
    Bookmark and Share

  • Sonata Dementia is an unpretentious, enjoyable introduction to the music and philosophy of Harry Partch / LIMELIGHT
    Posted At: October 23, 2019 12:00 AM

    Harry Partch was a 20th-century musical vagabond. Struggling to find secure work during the Great Depression, he took to wandering the countryside where, in a notepad, he notated speech inflections of people met along the way. His renegade ideas are carried on by the ensemble known also as PARTCH, which specialises in his music and instruments. Here they present their third volume of Partch's quirky expl...
    Bookmark and Share

  • PARTCH captures the letter and spirit of Harry on 'Sonata Dementia' / PublicRadio90
    Posted At: August 12, 2019 12:00 AM

    The Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble, hailed as "funny, moving, inventive and insanely theatrical" by the San Francisco Chronicle, announced the release of Sonata Dementia, their third volume of music by American maverick composer Harry Partch (Bridge Records 9525). Sonata Dementia follows on the success of the ensemble's Vol. 1: Bitter Music: Harry Partch's Depression Journal; (Bridge 9349 A...
    Bookmark and Share

  • Definitive scholarship, intelligence of production & quality of performance and recording make Sonata Dementia an essential part of Partch, microtonal music / New Music Buff
    Posted At: July 9, 2019 12:00 AM

    Bridge Records is one of those labels whose every release is worth one's attention. Their series of music of Elliott Carter, George Crumb, et al are definitive. And while this listener has yet to hear the first two volumes of the Harry Partch series this third volume suggests that Bridge continues to maintain a high standard as they do in all the releases that I've heard. Like Philip Glass and Steve ...
    Bookmark and Share

  • Getz, McGill, Pavarotti & PARTCH make KCRW - Rhythm Planet 'Summer Mix'
    Posted At: July 8, 2019 12:00 AM

    Tom Schnabel's 'Rhythm Planet: Summer Mix' features lots of new releases in jazz, classical, and world music, plus a few reissues and evergreens. Highlights include an interesting and previously unreleased live album called Getz at the Gate, with Stan Getz at the Village Gate in New York. This album was recorded just three weeks after John Coltrane's iconic Village Vanguard sessions of Novemb...
    Bookmark and Share

  • 'Sonata Dementia' is an impressively played album covering Harry Partch / The Guardian
    Posted At: July 4, 2019 12:00 AM

    Performing the music of Harry Partch on the instruments he invented is always challenging, and Bridge's series dedicated to that has been appearing slowly since it launched seven years ago. The latest volume, Sonata Dementia, performed by the eponymous ensemble Partch, is just the third. The work that gives the album its title, recorded for the first time, was Partch's earliest abstract instrumental comp...
    Bookmark and Share

  • Harry Partch may not be a household name, but his visionary musical approach is still being celebrated long after his passing by the L.A. ensemble / 89.3KPCC - The Frame
    Posted At: July 3, 2019 12:00 AM

    The Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble, hailed as "funny, moving, inventive and insanely theatrical" by the San Francisco Chronicle, announced the release of Sonata Dementia, their third volume of music by American maverick composer Harry Partch (Bridge Records 9525).  Sonata Dementia follows on the success of the ensemble's Vol. 1: Bitter Music: Harry Partch's Depression Journal (Bridge 9...
    Bookmark and Share

  • PARTCH - Sonata Dementia is like falling down a rabbit hole into a surreal estate / ICON
    Posted At: July 1, 2019 12:00 AM

    The Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble, hailed as "funny, moving, inventive and insanely theatrical" by the San Francisco Chronicle, announced the release of Sonata Dementia, their third volume of music by American maverick composer Harry Partch (Bridge Records 9525).   Sonata Dementia follows on the success of the ensemble's Vol. 1: Bitter Music: Harry Partch's Depression Journal (Br...
    Bookmark and Share

  • THE REHEARSAL STUDIO is impressed by the freshness and immediacy of PARTCH - Sonata Dementia
    Posted At: June 17, 2019 12:00 AM

    There are times that I feel as if the phrase "American original" has been invoked so often across such a diversity of sources that it has become trivialized. Composers representative of that epithet on this site easily include Charles Ives, John Cage, Lou Harrison, Henry Cowell, and, for that matter, Edgard Varèse, who moved from France to the United States in December of 1915 and turned away from...
    Bookmark and Share

  • PARTCH does a wonderful job of capturing the letter and spirit of Harry Partch's music / The Art Music Lounge
    Posted At: May 15, 2019 12:00 AM

    This is Vol. 3 in Bridge's series devoted to the microtonal music of Harry Partch. I reviewed Vol. 2, Plectra and Percussion Dances (Bridge 9432) for another venue when it was released in 2014. Like its predecessor, it is performed by the group of musicians collectively known as PARTCH. As one can see from the list of instruments, Partch was forever coming up with minute cracks in the tonal system, tryin...
    Bookmark and Share
Go to artist details