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Harry Partch, Hobo Composer (Eastman Studies in Music) (Volume 120)
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About Harry Partch, Hobo Composer
Product description Harry Partch (1901-74) was one of the most distinctive and influential American composers of the mid-twentieth century. During the Great Depression, Partch rode the railways, following the fruit harvest across the country. Although he is renowned for his immense stage works, such as Delusion of the Fury, and his use of highly sophisticated instruments of his own creation, Partch is still regularly called a "hobo composer." Yet few have questioned this label's impact on his musical output, compositional life, and reception. Focusing on Partch the person alongside the cultural icon he represented, this study examines Partch from historical, cultural, political, and musical perspectives. It outlines the cultural history of the hobo from the mid-1800s through the 1960s, as well as those figures associated with the hobo's image. It explores how Partch's music, which chronicled a disappearing subculture, was received, and how the composer ultimately engaged and frustrated popular conceptions of the hobo. And it follows Partch's later years to question his response to the hobo label and the ways in which others used it to define and contain him for over thirty years S. Andrew Granade is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City. Table of Contents Prologue: To Sound AmericanThe Hobo in Partch's Early Life and AestheticInterlude 1: Transients and MigrantsThe Transient JourneyBitter MusicA Knight of the RoadInterlude 2: HoboesU.S. Highball: Becoming a Musical HoboA Newsboy LetterTrading on a Hobo ImageThe Strangest Kind of HoboEpilogue: To Be AmericanGlossary of Instruments and Hobo SlangNotesBibliographyIndex Review Granade shows that the grim predicament of the transient population during the Depression depicted in films, the novels of Steinbeck and the songs of Woody Guthrie, is also central to Partch. Provides new material, including details of his friendships and his contacts with other composers. Well produced and cheap at the price. GRAMOPHONE (Peter Dickinson) Harry Partch, Hobo Composer is almost epic in its panoramic view of an American subculture as seen through the lens of one artist's life. It should find a ready audience among composers and scholars of American music, not to mention the legions of microtonalists who look to Partch as their primogenitor and patron saint. An important book. --Michael Hicks, author of Henry Cowell, Bohemian About the Author S. Andrew Granade is Associate Professor of Musicology in the Conservatory of Music and Dance, University of Missouri-Kansas City.
