Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California (1968 Version) (review)

The composer Harry Partch left, at the time of his death in 1974, a body of work unique in American music. Partch wrote all of his mature compositions for new instruments that he designed and built himself, each tuned to a complex microtonal scale in just intonation completely different from the equal temperament of the piano. These works are the result of a fifty-year odyssey to create a new music that, both in matters of aesthetics and compositional techniques, looks beyond the cultural traditions of post-Renaissance Europe to the enriching impact of other cultures worldwide and to certain practices of the ancient world. The result is a life's work of enormous integrity, a musical world full of what the musicologist (and editor of the volume here under review) Richard Kassel calls "fruitful contradictions" (p. xiv) in which ancient Greek tuning theories nestle alongside the theatrical ideals of W. B. Yeats, the ancient verse of Li Po or the Psalms keeps company with hitchhiker graffiti, and hobos and anonymous travelers take their place beside the dramatis personae of classical dramas such as Oedipus and The Bacchae.

Until recently it has been difficult to get to know Partch's music well. Although most of his instruments are still in good repair, and are now housed at Monclair State University (Upper Montclair, N.J.), in the hands of composer and percussionist Dean Drummond, live performances of the music are as infrequent now as they were in Partch's lifetime; any such undertaking involves a major commitment of musicians' time and energy, and the instruments are expensive to move. Recordings and films are less of a problem: thanks to the dedicated efforts in recent years of Partch scholars Philip Blackburn and Jon Szanto, much has now been exhumed from the archives, and something like 90 percent of Partch's recorded legacy is now commercially available, primarily on the CRI and Innova Recordings labels (for example, the reissued or previously unreleased recordings of performances from 1951 to 1982 available in The Harry Partch Collection, vols. 1-4, CRI CD 751-54 [1997], CD; and performances from 1941 to 1997 in Enclosure 2: Historic Speech-Music Recordings from the Harry Partch Archives, Innova 401 [1995], CD; Enclosure 5: On an Ancient Greek Theme, etc., Innova 405 [1998], CD; and Enclosure 6: Delusion of the Fury, Innova 406 [1999], CD). Two very different biographical works have now appeared as well (Harry Partch, ed. Philip Blackburn, Enclosure, 3 [Saint Paul, Minn.: American Composers Forum, 1997]; and Bob Gilmore, Harry Partch: A Biography [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998]). Twenty-five years after Partch's death, it is now possible, as it was not for previous generations, to acquire a more complete grasp of that work and to have a more informed sense of the richness and depth of the composer's achievement.

It would be plainly untrue to give the impression that all the problems have been solved. The long-term future of the instruments remains in question, and two areas in which progress has been extremely slow and heavily laden are the publication and study of Partch's scores. Only two were published in the composer's lifetime, Barstow (in Soundings 2 [April 1972]: 31-57) and And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma (in Source 2 [July 1967]: 94-113), and these in magazines...