6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Genius or Fraud?, March 15, 2010
This review is from: The Harry Partch Collection, Volume 2 (Audio CD)
I guarantee you'll have an opinion, an answer to that question, once you hear the music of Harry Partch. And you should at least listen. This is my favorite volume of the "Harry Partch Collection", the volume that presents his musical thought at its most 'developed'. No, the samples will NOT be adequate to evaluate him.
Partch is a musical experimenter, an inventor of new and Rube-Goldbergish instruments that only his disciples can play, an advocate of microtones and mathematically outlandish scales. At times, his music sounds very much like "hippy gamelan", or like a pop group getting 'zoned out' -- Phoenix, for instance, or Massive Attack -- and at other times it sounds like John Adams or Philip Glass or some other earnest minimalist. But is Partch ever earnest? Don't trust him! He's a leprechaun or a troll at heart. Nobody has more fun with music, and nobody's music is more fun to play, when you're 'in the zone'.
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