Just West Coast
Fifteen years later, this album still fascinates me. I love John Schneider’s (ahem, not the man who played Bo Duke and country music) playing on the movable-fret guitar. His performance of Harry Partch’s “Barstow” feels just a little bit more ridiculous to me now, but of course Partch’s own performance is a towering masterpiece of hiliarity.
These are works tuned in Just Intonation, ie the tuning of notes to pure intervals rather than to intervals compromised to allow key changes. When used to play music with implied key changes, Just Intonation really just sounds like bad tuning, but it’s kind of delightful nonetheless. It’s like trying to write your name while your arm is dead asleep.
“Barstow” is one of my favorite pieces of music. In general, I like the idea of making regular things special by changing the context. Here, Harry Partch takes little pieces of highway loneliness, hobo screeds and lost travelers’ time-passers, and arranges them in his deliriously odd harmonic mess.
11 months ago
