Through the kind offices of Jon Szanto, webmaster of Corporeal Meadows, I am now [1999] able to offer two excerpts from my musical score for The Ghost Dancers in RealAudio format.
The first is the opening music for the play, what would be called curtain music if I envisioned a curtain (I don't). This is the one part of the score that has been performed more or less as written; it was recorded in 1983 using a pipe organ and live percussion; the present recording, however, was done from my synthesizer.
The second excerpt is the complete second dance sequence, which begins here in the text. The vocal parts are omitted; I haven't yet been able to rehearse a chorus or an actor for the important preacher's part, so the fitting of words to music will have to be imagined. There is a fairly long coda, though, which is purely instrumental, allowing the dancers to focus on the dance, which reaches its high point here. This part is closer to what I intended, though the instruments are, as before, simulated by a synthesizer.
Play second dance sequence now
The music is scored for marimba, xylophone, drum, organ, piccolo, and chorus; all but the last two are heard (in their synthesized versions) in these excerpts. See the end of the performance notes for a list of the musical portions of the play.
The Ghost Dancers music was favorably mentioned in a review mostly devoted to Harry Partch in the March/April 1998 issue of Fanfare magazine. Considering that no recording of the music has yet been released, its inclusion there was somewhat unusual, and I am grateful to the reviewer, Adrian Corleonis, for his interest and kind words.
Ghost Dancers main page | Preface | (1)
| (2) | (3) | (4) |
(5) | (6) | Notes for performers