FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Tamar Fortgang at 661 253-7724 or
John Schneider at 310 396-5915 (DO NOT PUBLISH)

John Schneider and Just Strings Perform Harry Partch's Bitter Music at REDCAT

June 11, 8:30 p.m.
Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater (REDCAT)
General Admission: $24. Student Admission: $12

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Los Angeles, May 19 -- Acclaimed guitarist John Schneider and his chamber group Just Strings come to the Roy and Edna Disney/CalArts Theater on June 11 to give a special multimedia presentation of Harry Partch's Bitter Music -- the long-lost 1935-36 hobo journal kept by the famously iconoclastic American composer, musical theorist, instrument builder and raconteur. In addition to diary accounts and sketches of Partch's travels and experiences, the journal contains musical notations as well as references to other Partch compositions.

The performance at REDCAT marks the first time that Partch's music, words, original pen and ink illustrations, and photographs are brought together in a single presentation.

"Bitter Music," writes Partch in the introduction to the journal, "is a diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road. I wrote each of the diary entries on the day indicated or the day following, and notated the music of the spoken words in a rough way without instruments, in most cases very soon after the words were actually spoken. I sketched the original pencil drawings -- used as suggestions for the present illustrations -- on the scenes described.

"I heard music in the voices all about me, and tried to notate it, and I tried to enhance the mood and drama of such little things as a quarrel in a potato patch. The nuance of inflection and thought of the lowest of our social order was a new experience in tone, and I found myself at its fountainhead -- a fountainhead of pure musical Americana."

John Schneider is a well-known interpreter of Partch's work. "[Schneider] delivered a pretty good facsimile of the old boy's stentorian growl," Alan Rich has noted previously in the L.A. Weekly. "As long as there are John Schneiders to re-create passably the sounds of Partch, we'll have a tenuous grip on this unique byway in the annals of American innovation." Mark Swed, writing in the Los Angeles Times, has observed: "Schneider, whose gracious stage personality is the opposite of Partch's, nevertheless manages to convey the composer through his own voice, which is exactly what all lasting music must be capable of sustaining, even in such unique works as Barstow and excerpts of Partch's journal Bitter Music."

Partch's journey from June 1935 to February 1936 took him from Los Angeles to London. Along the way he met colorful characters ranging from a hobo called Pablo, a dipsomaniac and marijuana addict named "Kaintuck" and a Filipino evangelist to the famed Irish poet W.B. Yeats and early music maven Arnold Dolmetsch. All the while, Partch's delivered his hilarious, often heartbreaking observations of Depression-era America with such wit and grace as to place him shoulder to shoulder with John Steinbeck and Woody Guthrie -- two of the best-loved storytellers of the period.

CalArts, the first U.S. higher educational institution to integrate the visual and performing arts under one roof, is recognized as the nation's leading laboratory for the arts. Housing six schools -- Art, Critical Studies, Dance, Film/Video, Music and Theater -- CalArts embraces creative cross-pollination among diverse art forms and traditions, and strongly encourages each artist to pursue his or her vision within a broad context of social and cultural understanding.

REDCAT, an interdisciplinary arts center that allows Los Angeles audience to follow the latest developments in the performing, visual and media arts from around the world, is a natural extension of CalArts' educational mission. Its programming features a wide-ranging array of interdisciplinary performances, music and dance concerts, multimedia performances, theater works, film and video screenings, readings, and art exhibitions.

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