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I just got back from a fascinating experience in Guadalajara, playing at the  Guadalajara Book Fair with Jessica Fichot. It turns out that it's the second biggest book fair in the world (to Berlin) and every year they have a city or country as the guest of honor. This year it was Los Angeles, so all of the concerts, writers' seminars, panel discussions, film screenings, and other events were centered on people from Los Angeles--bringing the culture of LA to Guadalajara and dialoguing about how Mexican culture influences life and art in LA.
As this was my first time in Mexico, I was able to have many new and amazing experiences--incredible food, locally made tequila, luchador culture (Nacho Libre isn't too far off!), banda music, and an overall relaxed yet really energetic culture. In addition to that, though, the book fair brought so many great events that enriched my experience even more. I got to hear Jonathan Gold (food critic for LA Weekly) speak about LA cuisine, Phil Ranelin and his happenin group of jazz players from the LA scene, and a beautiful evening of dance from three LA dance companies--one Indian, one Hawaiian, and one Brazilian. Since we were all part of this experience together, we all stayed in the same hotel and got to know each other a bit, which made the experience even more dynamic.
 One of the most interesting events was the Partch Ensemble out of LA, performing the micro-tonal music of Harry Partch, a composer who decided that 12 tones were not enough, so he divided the octave into 43. Naturally, he had to invent his own instruments to do so, and this group performed on some of those instruments in an exciting and intriguing concert. I was having traumatic flashbacks to music theory and history classes at Indiana when I heard his piece Barstow, but I will say thank you to Dr. Wennerstrom and Dr. Burkholder for giving me appreciation for music that might be a little bit inaccessible!
That being said, I had higher hopes for the concert of micro-tonal music. The pieces they chose were more percussive than pitch-focused, more random than melodic. Granted, Partch died in the 70s and his music was the first to push this boundary (thus being a bit extreme), but I still found myself wanting something that I could connect to a little bit better. I knew a guitarist, Russ Daughtery, that designed a guitar that divided the octave into 19 tones (or was it 31?) and performed songs, singing about art not being done the way we've always done it and about life being lived in a way that wasn't constrained to traditions. To me, that's where the power of experimental music and art lies--not in the process of doing something new for the sake of it, but doing something new and communicating meaning and truth through the experimental process itself. |
