Like other musicians of my generation, I first encountered Harry Partch (1901–74) in the late 1960s through the Columbia recordings of Barstow, Castor and Pollux, and Delusion of the Fury. By then Partch appeared to be – or was being marketed as – a proto-hippie, a flower-child ahead of his time, an old man whom the young and disenfranchised could nevertheless identify with as a flouter of convention and rebel against authority. After decades of neglect and vicissitudes of fortune, he had come into his own, and he visibly relished the attention. In the 1972 film about him, The Dreamer that Remains, the septuagenarian Partch is shown running down a beach in a neck-to-ankle bathing suit, while his voice-over recounts his beginnings as a composer at age fourteen: ‘I said right then and there, I will not be straitjacketed by anyone, I am going to be completely free!’ He mugs for the camera with a youthful audience clearly in mind. Bewailing the sea of blue-haired old ladies at orchestra concerts, he exclaims: ‘If we aren't concerned about our youth, we're headed straight to a dead end!’

And so it is an experience resembling time-travel, or an extended flashback in a movie, that in his new book S. Andrew Granade takes us back to the middle of Partch's life, and back to the middle of the American century, to show us how differently Partch understood himself and presented himself in the early years of his musical career, before his late-life celebrity. The title Harry Partch, Hobo Composer seems generic enough, but actually bristles with layers of contradictory meaning. Whether Partch called himself a hobo depended on what period of life he was in, whom he was trying to impress, what the context was. As the social connotations of being a hobo changed with time, Partch kept up a complex dance with his self-definition as a hobo, a dance on which his very existence as a composer direly depended. Whether he was, in fact, ever a hobo at all depends on nuances of definition. Granade concentrates with a laser-like focus on Partch's activities and writings of the years 1928 to 1944, and shows us how Partch kept experimenting with varying strategies of self-definition in order to find some social acceptance for a music that was radically original in its instruments, in its tuning, in its relation to American life, in its combination of historical influences, and in its attitude towards performance.

At issue are some distinctions in terminology that have faded over the decades, between hobo, transient, and migrant – also tramp, bum, newspaper boy, and a few others. Hoboes were people (mostly men) who would take odd jobs now and then, but who refused to settle into a predictable life pattern, and changed location sporadically. The very existence of hoboes arose with the proliferation of railroad lines after the Civil War, and all but vanished with the diminishing emphasis on rail travel after the Second World War. The onset of the Depression swelled a new population called transients, unemployed workers travelling wherever jobs might be found, basically what we today call the homeless. Migrants were workers who came from out of state, often driven by natural disasters such as the Oklahoma dust storms, and travelled in order to keep working, following the crops with the change of the season. The sudden rise in visibility of these last two categories created major social problems during the 1930s; in the middle years of that decade over 200,000 transients arrived in California (211), and in 1933 48,000 migrant workers were involved in thirty-one strikes (212). Hoboes, at times and in myth and literature, might have had an aura of romance and individualism, but transients and migrants were looked on with suspicion. Telling the difference was not always possible.

Granade devotes considerable research to the history of the Federal Emergency Relief Administration and the various State Emergency Relief Agencies established in 1933 to show how much rode on the distinctions among different types of workers. Partch spent 1934–35 in Europe on a Carnegie Corporation grant to study the history of tuning. Upon his return he found himself classified as a transient, and treated differently according to whether the agencies considered him a California native (he had been born in Oakland) or out of state (since he had been living in Europe). As a transient, Partch kept a journal of his experiences and acquaintances, filled with musical notations of speech patterns (published posthumously as Bitter Music in 1991). Granade draws a great distinction between Bitter Music, in which Partch identified as a transient, and the early compositions Barstow (which Partch labelled a ‘hobo concerto’) and U.S. Highball, the latter written to document his 1941 train and hitch-hiking trip from California to Chicago. The latter pieces were his hobo works, and the change in perspective was deliberate. In fact, Partch later so distanced himself from the victimized image of a transient that in 1950 he burned the manuscript of Bitter Music. Luckily, it had already been microfilmed by a friend.

One of Granade's more evocative ideas is to connect Bitter Music, Barstow, and U.S. Highball with the 1930s emphasis on documentary. He links Partch with a multidisciplinary group of artists who used their work to document the struggles of migrants and transients in the Depression's harsh economic climate: Dorothea Lange, whose iconic photographs of despairing migrants brought the crisis to America's dinner tables via newsprint; John Steinbeck, whose 1939 novel The Grapes of Wrath offered a humanized image of those driven from their homes to seek employment in a distant state; and Woody Guthrie, a singer and songwriter from Oklahoma who rode the Grapes of Wrath outrage into a New York-based career of protest and social conscience songs. The Partch/Guthrie pairing is the most intriguing. Guthrie arrived in New York from California in 1940, singing songs while playing a guitar; Partch arrived in New York from California via Chicago in 1942, and the early versions of Barstow and U.S. Highball involved only the composer singing and accompanying himself on his adapted guitar of forty-three tones to the octave. Guthrie's 1943 autobiography Bound for Glory was as full of sketches and written-out dialogue as Partch's Bitter Music (79). Granade, however, astutely represents them as opposites in their artistic aims:

In addition, of course, Guthrie was using the folk song medium for political purposes; Partch was creating a paradigm for a new kind of classical, or at least notated, music from vernacular elements. Indeed, it is not difficult to see the influence of the 1930s emphasis on documentary as part of the rationale for Partch's paradigm. Barstow is a setting of eight hitchhiker inscriptions Partch found on a highway railing while waiting for a ride at that ‘hitchhiker's bottleneck’, Barstow, California, the wording only slightly modified and with a few decorative additions. U.S. Highball strings together snippets of hobo slang and narrative that Partch heard on his trip and marked down in a crowded notebook. As Partch's superb first biographer, the late and much-lamented Bob Gilmore, has written, ‘A piece like Barstow was quite clearly thumbing its nose at the myth of the cultivated, refined masterpiece tradition . . . whereas U.S. Highball's peculiar anti-epic grandeur seems distilled from the shards and dregs of society.’Footnote ¹ Like Lange's photos and The Grapes of Wrath, U.S. Highball takes us viscerally into a foreign world and forces us to acknowledge and confront its coexistence with ours.

Partch's journey from San Francisco to Chicago to New York between 1941 and 1943 paralleled, and partly overlapped with, a similar journey by John Cage. Partch arrived in Chicago with a dime in his pocket; Cage arrived in New York with a quarter. Granade documents the differences in emphasis, concert by concert, with which Partch subsequently presented his music. At Bennington, he charmed the audience as ‘an erudite composer, obviously knowledgeable in the inner workings of music, performing as a hobo’ (234). Later, at concerts in New York City, he would emphasize the microtonal and theoretical aspects of his music. Once his life became temporarily stabilized at the University of Wisconsin in 1944, he developed the concept of Corporeality, which emphasized the physicality of theatrical performance as opposed to the sonic abstraction of conventional classical music. Reactions varied widely. Some audiences found a musical hobo delightfully exotic; others were suspicious of a composer so conspicuously lacking in conventional training. Some were ideologically drawn to Partch's attempt to ground a new style in the vernacular of American speech; others appreciated the attempt but thought the music formless and meandering, merely literary in value, as a result. Some were fascinated by the acoustic principles of forty-three tones to an octave; others considered it an attack on the great tradition of European music itself. At a prestigious League of Composers concert at Carnegie Chamber Music Hall in 1943, part of the composter-studded audience rebelled; as Henry Brant recalled it, ‘It was looked upon as a cheap fraud that somehow Partch, in a sneaky but clever way, had gotten past the learned and solid people who ran the League of Composers and had perpetrated this horrible fraud or else somebody had done it as a spoof’ (247).

In other words, Partch's attempts to sculpt his musical image cannot be reduced to the kinds of facile marketing ploys that another composer might employ to position himself for commercial, institutional, or audience success. Every aspect of Partch's music was so radical and outside the mainstream that there was no safe approach from which to engage an audience's sympathies. As Granade describes it, Barstow and U.S. Highball were not merely decoratively exotic, like the folk-song-studded symphonies and ballets or Roy Harris and Aaron Copland – they were ‘conceptually exotic’ made up from bits and premises of different traditions so that they fit into no pre-existing genre (11). Even though his tuning system was grounded in solid acoustic theory, his dramaturgy in ancient theatrical traditions, and his vernacular texts in a segment of society he had lived among for years, from the standpoint of East Coast classical musicians, Partch was unapproachably foreign from every angle, intriguingly articulate but with the ineradicable potential of charlatanism about him.

It is all the more remarkable, then, when we learn which composers gave Partch his few footholds in the classical establishment. Utterly contrary to what one might imagine, it was some of the most conservative, safely European-sounding composers in America who invited Partch to their schools, wrote copious recommendations for him, and tried to interest colleagues in his work: Douglas Moore, composer of conventional operas such as The Ballad of Baby Doe; Howard Hanson, dean of the American neo-romantics; the Boston contrapuntalist and Yale professor Quincy Porter. As a setter of American lyrics, Moore seemed to have sympathy for Partch's aim to wed music closely to American speech. Hanson, when a Partch presentation ran over time, announced to students and faculty that U.S. Highball would be heard even if all afternoon classes had to be cancelled to do it (250). And why the resolutely neo-classic Porter formed such an affinity for Partch is anybody's guess. It speaks well for all three.

Just as surprising, some of the more avant-garde figures – John Cage, Henry Cowell, and even Lou Harrison at first – were dubious of Partch. Harrison and Partch, of course, would later become close friends; Partch seems to have benefitted from a review Cowell wrote about the lack of rhythmic interest in his music, in response to which he added the percussion instruments that raised his work to a new level; Cage and Partch would never find an easy truce. Nicholas Slonimsky, though, became fanatical about Partch's music, and Otto Luening was a staunch supporter from the start, even writing the introduction to the first edition of Partch's theory book Genesis of a Music (1949), though it was replaced in the second edition (1974).

Partch's problems with music professors and departments would continue for decades, exacerbated by his own thorny and sometimes self-pitying personality, and he would rarely find respite from wandering for very long. Granade drops him off in 1944 just as he has achieved a moment of repose at the University of Wisconsin, and follows with only a few vignettes of later life to chart how Partch moved away from, and ultimately returned to, the hobo image. As American prosperity following the Second World War pushed hoboes, transients, and migrants from the focus of national attention, Partch turned away from Americana towards ancient Greece with King Oedipus and Revelation in the Courthouse Park. In 1949, Partch's brilliant treatise on his tuning system, Genesis of a Music, was published, and from that point on reviewers tended to focus on the forty-three-tone scale to an extent that bothered Partch as much as the emphasis on being a hobo had sometimes bothered him before. In 1967, preparing a demonstration for the American Society of University Composers, Partch included in his introduction to the tuning the words, ‘News stories, and even reviews, have almost consistently latched on to the number forty-three as though this were somehow the touchstone of my life. It is not. It is, in fact, about the one-half truth of the one-fourth factor.’

Interestingly, Partch had no use for the members of the younger generation that one might think he would have found validation with: the Beat poets of San Francisco. For all Partch's originality, Granade paints him as an antimodern: ‘casting off older conventions in search of the new was an artistic view antithetical to Partch's’ (267–8). Granade quotes Partch saying ‘Innovation? Not for me’ in an interview with Peter Garland (268), and it is true that in a 1960 essay he wrote, ‘Let not one year pass . . . when I do not step one significant century backward.’Footnote ² Nevertheless, Jack Kerouac's celebration of hitchhiking and defying authority in On the Road created a kind of predecessor-after-the-fact for Partch's image of the 1960s, and Granade details the extent to which critics turned Partch and Kerouac into fellow travellers. Eric Salzman, writing in Stereo Review in the 1970s, said, ‘Partch spent the year of the Depression literally on the road – long before the Beats and the Hippies got there’ (268). This is where I came in, and how the picture I got of Partch came to be: no hobo, even less a transient, merely an artist too free to be straitjacketed.

Even so, in 1965 his last masterpiece Delusion of the Fury introduced a hobo into his music for the first time in twenty years, as a slightly incongruous adjunct to an Ethiopian folk tale. And in the documentary film The Dreamer that Remains, a seventy-one-year-old Partch embraced the hobo identity quite fully, describing the life he lived in the 1930s in rapturous terms that contrast strongly with the despairing tone of Bitter Music. ‘Of course’, he exclaims with his arms gesturing, ‘hoboes are extraordinarily individualistic people, that's why they're hoboes. They cannot conform to a society [. . .] or the strictures of a city.’

Grenade's book is not at all a replacement for Gilmore's magnificent biography, but a revisionist adjunct to it. His focus on Partch's life and work is far narrower, his social concerns far wider, his approach more multidisciplinary. He has to transport us back into the social milieu from which Partch's Americana works arose, and he does, through numerous government statistics and portraits of Partch's like-minded contemporaries. His description of the composing process for U.S. Highball, with careful delineation of its original version and two revisions, seems unlikely to be superseded. Partch claimed at one time to have simply recorded and set to music remarks and conversations he had heard en route, but Granade shows how much artistry actually went into shaping a quasi-narrative without a story, demarcated by western geography and driven by locomotive and automotive transport.

As a result both Partch's tuning theory and his instruments take a back seat to his travels and attempts at self-promotion in this quasi-biography, and the change of emphasis is not unwelcome. It is part of Partch's contradictory legacy that he is the patron saint of many American microtonalists, the first to leap into just intonation with both feet and to set out not just the historical data and mathematical basis, but a complete paradigm for composing in what would come to be called extended just intonation – that is, not just the use of pure intervals (which had been common in earlier centuries), but the extension of tonality up through the seventh and eleventh harmonics. And yet, going through Partch's scores, one gets the impression that he had little interest in exploring the available harmonic profusion. Granade characterizes Barstow as ‘a celebration of the triad’, and the melodic aspects of U.S. Highball were developed through Partch's intonation of the words. We must take seriously indeed Partch's assurances that he was primarily interested in the nuances of speech.

Consequently, Granade's book contains a few passages in which he analyses the music via tuning ratios, but not too many for the uninitiated to conveniently skip over. Those interested in the design of the instruments have other sources, such as Partch's own Genesis of a Music, to look in. Harry Partch, Hobo Composer is a history of how one composer, inconveniently if not quixotically original, positioned himself to get his music made and to get taken seriously by his peers. In Granade's telling, it is also, by extension, a portrait of America between the wars, as refracted through an artist determined to transmit the American experience purely as he found it.