World Premiere of COLOR THEORY: PRISM Quartet and Partch

In search of new musical colors, PRISM and the Grammy-winning ensemble Partch (in its East Coast debut) premiere new works by Ken Ueno and Stratis Minankakis for saxophones and Harry Partch instruments. “Of all the triumphantly weird characters who have roamed the frontiers of American art, none ever went quite as far out as the composer Harry Partch,” notes New Yorker critic Alex Ross. Finding no instruments capable of producing the sounds he imagined, Partch invented his own. The instruments use microtones, dividing the octave into 43 tones. Harry Partch famously held J. S. Bach responsible for a downhill trend in music: “the movement toward equal-tempered tuning, which meant that composers could not absorb the scales of other world traditions.” Commissioned works draw upon and extend this rich compositional tradition. Ueno’s work, “Future Lilacs,” features Derek Johnson on the adapted electric guitar. Also on the program: “Castor & Pollux” by Harry Partch, “Xas” by Iannis Xenakis, and Radical Alignment from “15 Places At The Same Time” by Steve Lehman.