Harry Partch and the Music of the Rails

The Chromelodeon

Early in 1939 Harry Partch, the hobo son of missionaries, arrived in California and signed on to the California Writers’ Project for a second time.
    As a writer he had a distinctive style and an eye for detail, but even more, he had music. Partch the composer would become one of the most distinctive voices in modern music. At the time, the ancient Chinese poet Li Po inspired him to take a viola and adapt it to a new microtonal scale.
    Partch would go on to adapt and invent instruments like the Chromelodeon and the Boo II that still inspire performers today.
    For surviving, though, he turned to writing for the WPA. Two years before, he had worked on the Writers’ Project in California, editing and writing until he grew restless to move again. “Life is too precious to spend it with important people,” he said later in life. He found hoboes and the people he met on the road more open-minded.

The Boo II

    “The bums’ courage in remaining stoically humorous in the face of even the gravest misfortune was a value Partch treasured,” noted his biographer Bob Gilmore. The composer’s second stint with the WPA was more agreeable, it seemed. At least he stayed with it longer -- through the publication of the WPA Guide to California that spring and on through the end of the year. Then it was back on the rails, later immortalized in U.S. Highball.
    Not long ago my old English professor, J. Gill Holland, a polymath who has translated Li Po and other Chinese poets, was delighted to find this video of Partch’s musical adaptation, '17 Lyrics of Li Po.'
    Holland has published a short piece about his own use of Li Po’s quatrains in creative writing classes in the online journal Enter Text, where he notes that “class presentation of lovely poems like these is always full of amazement and delight, and the notion of a dialogue with past poets is true to Chinese literary tradition.”
    Just last month, that Li Po/Partch combination inspired songs in The Third Life of King Lear, performed in Brooklyn. The dialogues continue.

Iconoclast Rode the Rails for the WPA Guides

A number of hoboes made their way from freight cars to the federal payroll of the WPA Writers’ Project. The Soul of a People book features the stories of three: Rudolph Umland in Nebraska (featured in this review and this online exhibit), Eluard Luchell McDaniel in California, and Harry Partch.

Partch was born in California, grew up in Arizona, and as a young man bounced around the West, feeling freer among hoboes than in straight-laced society. Partch would later become famous as an avant-garde composer whose works were so iconoclastic that he had to create new instruments and scales for them. In between his times on the bum, he worked on the WPA guides to Arizona and California. He later memorialized his wanderings in U.S. Highball, which the Kronos Quartet recorded in the 1990s. John Rockwell, the New York Times critic, called Partch’s compositions “the musical counterpart to the Watts Towers,” that monument of folk art that rose over the working class L.A. neighborhood.

Partch will be featured at a September event in the Soul of a People series at the San Jose Public Library. The Harry Partch Foundation is based in San Diego.

More about Harry Partch from that talk here.

You can now watch the Writers’ Project afternoon at the Library of Congress with excerpts from the film. Click here.