Just West Coast is a lovely compilation featuring some composers I'm loving more and more, arranged for guitar and harp. La Monte Young's incredibly short gem of a sarabande is on it. Lou Harrison is obviously a lovely guy who wrote delicate, jeweled strings of harmony. Harry Partch is the Walt Whitman of American music, making boxcar travelers sing.
There's something marvelously object-oriented about it, something that I also love about “naive” painting such as Henri Rousseau's Carnival Evening. Instead of composing in the traditional box, or destroying the box, or thinking outside the box, these composers invent whole new boxes. Fed up with Western music? Invent some new instruments. Invent some new media. Some new objects.
Retune your piano or your guitar to whole number ratios, the lower the number the better. Stop stifling the harmonic range of the strings. Stop fudging the ratios to make them agree with one another in a false totalitarian democracy of sound. Stop telling stories and start exploring tones.
1 comment:
I'm not familiar with this compilation, but it is always good to see references to tuning in connection to your work! I like to think of just intonation as an attempt to catch a glimpse of the harmonic series hyperobject, which is integral to our material reality, yet mostly withdrawn. And the entrenchment of equal temperament seems to be another way in which we are still very much "in" Romanticism.
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