Harry Partch; Barstow, “Eight Hitchhikers’ Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California”; performed by the Kronos Quartet & Ben Johnston.
“Barstow†is composed for string quartet, a male narrator/singer, and a percussionist. The singer/narrator speaks and then sings each of the eight inscriptions in turn. The piece is in just intonation, with many notes that are between the 12 conventional notes used in equal-tempered tuning.
I somehow got interested in just intonation (I like the abstract purity of it), and so I was particularly interested in hearing pieces by Harry Partch (the only time I’ve heard him before was as part of the San Francisco Symphony’s American Mavericks project). The tuning in this piece takes some getting used to—at first, it just sounds like there a lot of out-of-tune notes being played—but after you get used to it, it’s very interesting (in a good way). I’ve been to Barstow (my sister and I stopped there for gas and to get something to eat once, while driving through), and somehow this piece does evoke that American West, desert, weird, edge-of-the-civilized-world, hopeless atmosphere. It’s lonely and sad, like an Edward Hopper painting.