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.

Spring in Arizona

With spring comes a blooming of books: this week marks the anniversaries of the WPA guides to Arizona (70 years ago) and Washington, DC (73 years).
As I mentioned in an earlier post, the Arizona guidebook includes the work of the peripatetic Harry Partch, who's recalled now mainly for his music and his invention of new instruments for playing it. (The song “Harry Partch” by Beck uses Partch’s 43-tone scale. Thanks, Wikipedia.) But Partch flirted with becoming a writer before he settled on music, and his wide sense of the world informs his compositions from U.S. Highball to “Daphne of the Dunes.” It’s not clear if Partch is responsible, but the Arizona guide’s essay on the arts notes that the state’s landscapes inspired compositions ranging from Ferde Grofe’s Grand Canyon Suite and Victor Young’s Arizona Sketches to Cadman’s Land of the Sky Blue Water. And the guidebook's section on folklore lovingly describes musical instruments brought by immigrant groups, including the gusle: “something like a mandolin, with goatskin across the sounding box and strands of horsehair for string”; played with a bow, it made the perfect accompaniment to a song like “Underground in America,” Lazar Jurich’s lament of a Serbian miner.

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.

Smithsonian Channel Gears Up for the 1930s

With the Soul of a People film screened in Chicago last week and slated for national broadcast on September 6th, the Smithsonian Channel is getting ready and has posted my talk with web producer Gina Buchanan, about the WPA guides, where you can find them, the WPA Writers' Project as reality show (featuring Louis L'Amour and Harry Partch), and what you can discover in their work now. And what would we find if we retrace their routes today? The sound quality is truly vintage! Show them I have friends and have a listen here.