Harry Partch: Hobo Composer by S. Andrew Granade (review)

Abstract

Harry Partch: Hobo Composer. By S. Andrew Granade. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 120.) Rochester, NY: Uni - versity of Rochester Press, 2014. [xiii, 351 p. ISBN 9781580464956 (hardcover), $29.95; (e-book), various.] Illus - tra tions, glossary, bibliography, index.Encountering Harry Partch requires a suspension of disbelief; the iconic Ameri - can composer remains shrouded in mystery, even now several decades after his death in 1974. Partch's rich musical output is magnified by two significant texts: his posthumously published journal, Bitter Music (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1991), and a magnificent treatise on microtonality, Genesis of a Music (2d ed., New York: Da Capo Press, 1974). Together, his textual commentaries and compositional breadth make it difficult to separate Partch's chronicles from his musical legacy. And yet, to better understand the nuances of his groundbreaking theoretical and compositional work on microtonal music, this endeavor becomes all the more important. To this end, S. Andrew Granade's book contributes an important, largely overlooked perspective to the modest but growing Partch literature: the lasting effect of Partch's years as a hobo on his musical development and artistic identity. With Harry Partch: Hobo Composer, Granade accomplishes the difficult task of balancing biography with microhistory. In Granade's hands, Partch becomes both the object of scrutiny and the lens through which the rich and largely invisible transient culture is brought back into sight.Granade's book is not an exhaustive account of Partch's life and works: only those compositions emerging from Partch's experience on the road hoboing are given full attention here. Granade's work thus fits nicely into existing Partch scholarship, consisting almost entirely of Bob Gilmore's seminal biography Harry Partch: A Biography (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998), Philip Blackburn's Enclosure 3 (St. Paul, MN: American Composers Forum, 1997), and a handful of significant articles. Indeed, Granade's focus on Partch's identity as a hobo builds from the biographical work of his predecessors-along with apparent heavy lifting in the Harry Partch Archive at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign-to draw attention back to specific compositions and how they may be understood within the framework of hobo identity.Bookended by a prologue and an epilogue, Granade structures the book's eight chapters in a chronological fashion. However, Granade places much emphasis on foregrounding hobo culture, and these discussions are bracketed in two chapterlength interludes, rather than woven throughout the text, which makes for an unconventional read. Beginning in the Prologue: To Sound American, and continuing for the length of the book, Granade argues for the indelibility of those experiences not only for Partch's musical output, but even more intriguingly, for the way in which Partch later constructed his identity around and against that of the hobo, even though those experiences only lasted for fifteen years. That uneasy relationship with his hobo background can be explained by the shifting place hobos occupied within the American imagination. Over the course of Partch's lifetime, the hobo moved from being idealized as frontier explorer or rugged individualist to being feared, loathed, or-perhaps the most damning of all-nostalgized. As much as industrialization's separation of labor from product pushed many men and women into hoboing as a means of self-fulfillment and control, it also eventually led to the unraveling of hobo culture, as more trucks and cars on the road meant fewer trains to hop, and more uniform driving habits decreased the likelihood of successful hitchhiking along increasingly-busy freeways. As hoboing was vanishing in practice, and the American perception of hobos was wavering, Partch tried his hand at musically documenting those souls and their stories of life on the road. Granade carefully places Partch's work from this period into its context. …