NRR Project: Harry Partch, “U.S. Highball (A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip)”

 

NRR Project: “U.S. Highball (A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip)”

Composed by Harry Partch

Performed by the Gate 5 Ensemble

Recorded 1946

25:20

Harry Partch changed how I think about music.

When I was 12 or so, I checked out the album The World of Harry Partch from the Denver Public Library. It was in the Classical Music section.

I didn’t understand it. The manic drumming, the unharmonic melodies, the bizarre sounds, the comic lyrics. Finally I heard “Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow” and fell in love.

Partch is sui generis; there is no one following in his steps. In this he is like other bizarre composers I love, such as Ives, Satie, Moondog, Terry Riley, Frank Zappa, Steve Reich, and John Luther Adams. All iconoclasts, creating strange sound-objects that are hair-raising in their audaciousness and intensity, their just plain weirdness.

Harry Partch (1901-1974) made his own music. Literally. An aspiring composer, he kept rejecting the educational experiences music schools offered to him. He was searching for a sound that reflected the dense, complex, a-harmonic music he heard in the world, coming from machines, nature, and the mouths of those around him. In 1930, he burned all his compositions to date in a pot-bellied stove.

He devised a new scale, with 43 notes to it. He based his compositions on just intonation, a form of notation used in ancient Greece and Medieval times. No instruments of the day could accommodate his method of composing.

So he made his own instruments. The Chromelodeon, the Kithara, the Bloboy, Zymo-Xyl, Quadrangularis Reversum and more we tuned to Partch’s special frequencies.

But Partch was strapped for cash. He traveled as a hobo across the West. He could rarely assemble the instruments, the people, and the sheer time it took to teach his music. He lived on short-term grants and university appearances. Very few believed in his utterly new and confusing music. It featured percussion-grounded bursts of sounds and swooping, meandering melodic lines, clashing chords that sound like mistakes.

But when you pull back, you see that Partch is creating complex sound fields against which his musical gestures play themselves out. His narratives, whether self-written or taken from Chinese poetry, are acerbically voiced. His sound is wild, freewheeling, warm, expansive, open to the sky. His compositions have a tough, lean spirit. It’s hypnotic, engaging.

His “U.S. Highball: (A Musical Account of a Transcontinental Hobo Trip)” is exactly that – taken from his notebooks kept during his transcontinental hobo trip. Wisps of narrative, bits of conversations, the recitation of sign verbiage, pieces of advice, warnings from cops, pepper the music, sung, intoned. Marimbas play, harps strum, the percussion clatters on. We are on a train, plunging through Wyoming (“Stay out of Denver”). Partch captures a vernacular experience in a method uniquely suited to it.

The National Recording Registry Project tracks one writer’s expedition through all the recordings in the National Recording Registry in chronological order. Next time: Winston Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech.