Harry Partch: Barstow: Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions from a Highway Railing at Barstow, California [1968 Version]

Edited by Richard Kassel

Among twentieth-century composers placed under the umbrella of the American experimental tradition, Harry Partch (1901–74) took a path that was at once personally and aesthetically radical while at the same time theoretically and (in many ways) musically conservative. Partch led a peripatetic life which found him willing to “starve for his consonances,” challenging the academic and concert status quo of American music; exploring the possibilities of a long-forgotten tuning system, just intonation, and producing a masterpiece of musical theory and its implications in his Genesis of a Music; and building a remarkable set of instruments to make composition in just intonation more readily possible for him as a “musician seduced into carpentry.”

One remarkable thing about Partch the “rebel composer” is, however, the utterly tonal basis of his music. This tonality does not exist in the neoclassic or neoromantic sense (his music never sounds like a WPA-era symphony), but in the sense of deriving from a single note, or fundamental pitch. Partch’s music is full of what seem to be familiar harmonies, although they are tuned according to ratios, not logarithms, and their progressions are unique to him. In his musical structures, Partch rejects virtually all abstract notions of form, using repetition in a direct, almost exclusively text-inspired manner. Indeed, Partch’s oeuvre is almost entirely text- or program-based in spirit, without being literal or blatant in expression. And what marvelous sounds those instruments make, whether familiar (viola, guitar, harmonium), somewhat familiar (a multitude of marimbas and plucked strings), or unheard before (notably the collection of sounds Partch called, with his usual sense of ironic humor, the Spoils of War).

As the centenary of his birth approaches, Harry Partch’s music has never been more available to the public through new recordings, reissues or first releases of recordings with which he was involved, and video releases of films made about the composer’s music and instruments during his lifetime. There is a full-length biography, a beautifully designed “scrapbook” of documents from his life, a collection of his essays, a works catalogue, and a smattering of journal articles. Unfortunately, Genesis of a Music continues to live an in-print, out-of-print existence.

Those who have always been his greatest supporters and believers, with an ear for and openness to “alternative” music of all kinds, continue to grow in numbers. While no composer can be expected to be free from detractors—and there were many vociferous ones during his lifetime—they have been forced to recognize the difference between personal preference and pseudo-analytical outrage (of the “he’s a weirdo” variety), and cannot control Partch’s legacy as they once did his professional fortunes.

Of Harry Partch’s works, Barstow, which he composed in 1941 as one of a series of “Americana” pieces, is one of his most accessible scores and has always been one of his most popular works. Its origins embody Partch as bri­coleur, with a text based on hitchhikers’ graffiti found on a highway railing by another hitchhiker—Partch himself. Barstow went through several revisions and one major reconception when he added percussion to the string and keyboard scoring in 1954. The final version of Barstow, which Partch completed in 1968, is the basis of this edition.

In addition to the historical and analytical essay on Barstow, this edition includes a somewhat unusual component: a facsimile and transcription of the 1968 version. A glance at the facsimile of Partch’s handwritten score reveals the necessity for this approach. Since his use of “extended” just intonation (i.e., beyond scalar considerations) extended beyond 12 chromatic pitches per octave, Partch spent some years trying to devise a universal method of notating pitch for his music. Because of the complexity involved and the increasing need to teach others how to play his music, Partch decided instead to create tablatures for each instrument, showing performers how to play a note rather than what pitch they would hear as a result. The more instruments Partch developed, the more new tablatures were necessary, so that a Partch score became, with the exception of vocal parts (which eventually relied on a more-or-less standard notation), a collection of instructions with no readily visible pitch content.

In order to study Barstow, then, it is necessary to “retranslate” (transcribe) the music into a kind of adapted conventional notation so that one could “see” the music as one sees other composer’s works—as a study score, a memory device, or a representation of the work, ideally in preparation for enjoying the best representation of all, a successful live performance. I have chosen a system devised by Ben Johnston, a composer who worked with Partch in the 1950s and who has written music (of a very different sort from Partch’s) in just intonation for many years. (There are other methods of transcribing justly tuned music into “standard” notation, but Johnston’s is, perhaps, the most fully accessible for study.) While any transcription of Partch’s music raises the spectre of the most contentious issue in the quarter-century since his death—performance of his music on non-Partch instruments—the intention here is to make his music available in a way it has almost never been before, and certainly never as a part of a series of publications saluting the manifold aspects of great American music.  

Partch's legacy is considerable, fascinating, and extremely difficult to maintain.  Those that are doing so through performance, publication, and shared opinion must struggle heroically at times against long odds and old prejudices, and the success they've had is a tribute to the strength of their beliefs and the legacy itself.  I believe that the time is long overdue to put aside Partch's intensely ambivalent relationship with academia and facilitate full and properly equipped scrutiny of his art, as I hope this edition of the 1968 Barstow in its small way succeeds in doing. ?  

Harry Partch, Barstow, facsimile of the final page of the manuscript.  © 1956 by Harry Partch, renewed and assigned to Schott Musik International.

Richard Kassel has, at one point or another, been a composer, musicologist, theorist, editor, producer, essayist, critic, educator, and performer.  He has been studying Harry Partch and his music for over two decades.