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articles / New Music

The Story of Harry Partch: How Hitchhiking and Microtonal Scales Come Together

New MusicPop CultureArts Alive Blog


The PARTCH Ensemble | Photos courtesy of PARTCH Ensemble

Hit play below to listen to our Arts Alive feature.  
The Story of Harry Partch: How Hitchhiking and Microtonal Scales Come Together
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The Grammy Award-winning PARTCH Ensemble heads to Jacaranda for a performance of Partch’s The Wayward – a chronicling of composer Harry Partch’s life from 1935 – 1941. The PARTCH ensemble plays fourteen custom-built instruments, including a few that were built just for this specific piece.

Harry Partch was an eccentric personality with an incredibly forward-thinking musical mind. In his late twenties, he burned all of his early music as a rejection of the classical music tradition and focused his work on designing and building instruments with custom-tuned, microtonal scales. Partch lived as a self-described hobo for a long period of his life – wandering around the US, hitchhiking and hopping on trains, capturing his life’s adventure in the autobiographical concert piece The Wayward.

The Wayward’s movements are filled with real-life moments from Harry Partch’s travels such as the opening movement which is about getting stuck in Barstow, unable to get a ride while hitchhiking. Another movement, captures a foggy street corner of San Francisco in the early morning where two newsboys are calling out and selling newspapers.


The PARTCH Ensemble

The Wayward is a sort of song cycle, but they are not songs. Instead, the ensemble does a special combination of speaking and singing in order to tell the narrative, almost like a musical speech.

The PARTCH Ensemble performs Harry Partch’s The Wayward on Saturday November 9, 2019 with Jacaranda. For more information on this concert, visit jacarandamusic.org.

New MusicPop CultureArts Alive Blog
Written by:
Thomas Kotcheff
Thomas Kotcheff
Published on 11.04.2019
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