Review--Harry Partch: Hobo Composer, by S. Andrew Granade

Book Reviews pall over Ives’s activities of the 1920s and 1930s by describing them in light of the dire and chronic nature of his health, offering a fresh reinterpretation of many of Ives’s most well-known endeavors. When Budiansky calls the Essays Before a Sonata “almost incoherent in places, grandiosely naive in others” (p. 179), he also appropriately wonders “how much the shortcomings of the essays reflected Ives’s self-imposed pressure to sum up his life’s work and his distraught state of mind about his illness” (p. 180). As Budiansky describes it, were it not for the fact that Charles Ives thought he might die imminently, he may have never published the original run of 114 Songs and the “Concord” Sonata, which ultimately brought his music to the world’s attention, as the prospect of publishing his work made him “scared stiff ” (p. 184). Despite his well-documented and scholarly exposition, Budiansky occasionally maintains a disparaging and dismissive tone when referring to musicologists, an attitude that I found somewhat discomfiting. Perhaps this is all part of his intended appeal: his biography’s niche is that it does not engage in overly didactic theorizing, psychoanalysis, or postmodern deconstruction. However, to reject these approaches is to deny the widest spectrum of inquiry that is the Platonic ideal of musicology, even if that notion is itself romanticized. For example, Budiansky dismisses J. Peter Burkholder’s well-known term “cumulative form” by calling it “didactic and incomplete as a description,” and continues that “it scarcely does justice to the emotional profundity and originality of Ives’s insight” (pg. 144), even though he generally agrees with Burkholder’s interpretation. Elsewhere he distances himself from scholars who have “suggested that Ives created a mythical image of his father” (p. 46), declaring that such academics made a “willful misreading” of Ives’s writings to come to said conclusion (p. 47). This seems an odd choice given Budiansky’s own emphasis on Ives’s nostalgic memories of nineteenthcentury life, which are intimately embroiled with images of his father’s activities as a Civil War bandleader and small town New England church musician. Ultimately, Budiansky stays true to his title, telling a story about the nostalgic, rebellious, cranky, and eccentric Charles Ives—indeed, a well-researched, tightly-

353 structured story. Yet there are, of course, many other threads to Ives’s music and personality that do not appear within these pages. Still, Mad Music is an excellent introduction for the nonacademic reader. Teachers of undergraduates, and especially non-majors, will find it incredibly useful, especially when combined with more detailed passages about specific works elsewhere in the literature. It is no damning with faint praise that I will wholeheartedly recommend this book to nonmusician friends and relatives who want to know more about the subject of my own work. Indeed, that Budiansky is able to meet the intellectual rigor of musicology while writing for the layman is the book’s greatest asset, and certainly a difficult task to accomplish successfully. Jacob A. Cohen City University of New York

Harry Partch: Hobo Composer. By S. Andrew Granade. (Eastman Studies in Music, vol. 120.) Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2014. [xiii, 351 p. ISBN 9781580464956 (hardcover), $29.95; (e-book), various.] Illustrations, glossary, bibliography, index. Encountering Harry Partch requires a suspension of disbelief; the iconic American 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

354 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

Notes, December 2015 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. Moreover, Granade situates Partch’s reception from indiscernible outlier to celebrated “hobo composer” within the context of this fascination and idealization of the hobo, helping to explain, in the clearest manner I have encountered, the peculiar nature of Partch’s place within American musical thought. In the prologue, Granade erects a dual theoretical structure for examining Partch’s work during these hobo years. First, he draws from John Corbett’s phrase “conceptual exoticism” (“Experimental Oriental: New Music and Other Others,” in Western Music and Its Others: Difference, Representation, and Appropriation in Music, ed. Georgina Born and David Hesmondhalgh [Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000], 163–83) to refer to how Partch “use[d] a given culture’s organizational principles and philosophical basis as the foundation to attempt a true hybrid, a music that rests comfortably in neither the composer’s nor the borrowed culture” (p. 11). Conceptual exoticism resists the temptation to exclude the nonmusical from discussions about the music itself, thus helping “train our attention on how music engages materials from another culture on a structural and aesthetic level” (p. 11). The second half of his theoretical lens includes what Granade calls the “documentary imagination,” or the use of “images, words, and sounds [to] appear truthful and credible” to an increasinglyskeptical American psyche, distrustful of empty promises from an inept Depressionera government (p. 16). Granade thus positions Partch and his music within a larger discussion of hobo representation in American popular culture, a discourse that includes the documentary and artistic work of John Steinbeck, Walker Evans, James Agee, Woody Guthrie, and Dorothea

Book Reviews Lange. These two lenses provide Granade with sufficient leverage to move with ease between Partch’s speech-intoned compositions and the images and characters much more readily associated with the Depression, in turn insisting that this largely-overlooked composer be instated in his rightful place among other prominent American icons. From the perspective of these two lenses, chapter 1 introduces Partch and describes the role of the hobo during his childhood and adolescence. Readers learn, for example, that hobos were a part of the composer’s early life, as Partch’s father frequently offered hoboing men room and board in exchange for some work around the home. Interlude 1 follows and offers some historical context for the rise of the transient population at the moment Partch undertook his first hoboing excursions. Chapters 2, 3, and 4 then continue with Partch’s biography and his various intersections with and musical settings of hobo culture. Following the second interlude, which focuses on various media constructions of the hobo in the twentieth century, chapter 5, “U.S. Highball : Becoming a Musical Hobo,” forms the cornerstone of the book. In this chapter, Granade examines one of Partch’s most enigmatic hobo compositions, which is perhaps the most demonstrative of the place Partch’s hobo music occupied within the American consciousness; it stands as a particularly exemplary model for future Partch scholarship. Here Granade seems most comfortable, as he delves into a source study of five different versions of U.S. Highball, demonstrating the compositional trajectory and changes that Partch made over a lengthy revision period. Through this close reading and examination of archival material, Granade dates U.S. Highball ’s beginnings to a year-and-ahalf earlier than commonly thought. He also offers a detailed examination of how the piece informed Partch’s process of orchestrating later compositions. Readers should be cautioned that without a technical understanding of the overtone series and intervallic ratios, lengthy passages such as this can be—perhaps unavoidably— alienating. Partch’s monophonic system necessitated a forty-three-tone scale and, consequently, Partch had to design and build

355 most of the instruments needed to perform his music. Granade’s discussion of these instruments provides a fascinating glimpse into Partch’s development as instrument builder; although he provides a glossary that describes twelve of Partch’s instruments at the end of the book, it requires at times a vivid imagination to envision what is described. Regrettably, there are no photographs of the instruments included in this volume. Nonetheless, for those familiar with Partch’s theories and technical language, this chapter does tremendous work and, in my opinion, is in itself worth the price of the book. The remaining three chapters and the epilogue bring into relief Partch’s vacillating embrace of his hobo past. Granade concludes by suggesting that Partch cleverly negotiated his hobo identity to compensate for his lack of credentials, thereby maneuvering his way into broader cultural acceptance while still maintaining his distinct position as an iconoclast. While I think most any study on Harry Partch would be both welcome and important, Granade’s book has set a high standard for future Partch scholarship. There are a few curious distractions within the book, nonetheless. Granade’s handling of the prose can be a bit heavy-handed at times or, as in his discussion of Partch’s tonality diamond (pp. 214–15), perhaps assumes too much knowledge from a general readership. As the nature of this book necessarily shifts between foregrounding and backgrounding Partch the composer, the price paid for those shifts is a degree of repetition from chapter to chapter. Finally, dividing the book into chronological and biographical chapters and then separate contextual interludes is at once a bold but also atypical publishing decision. I have addressed some of the disadvantages to this approach, but one possible advantage is that the reader may skip around the interludes—or, conceivably, read only the interludes—depending on interests and the purpose behind choosing the book, thereby broadening potential readership. Regardless, these criticisms do not detract from the significance of Granade’s book in offering a slightly more nuanced understanding of a man whose life and music defy easy classification. Jake Johnson University of California, Los Angeles

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Notes, December 2015 BAROQUE

Music in the Baroque. By Wendy Heller. (Western Music in Context.) New York: W. W. Norton, 2014. [xx, 271 p. ISBN 9780393929171 (paperback), $44.10; ISBN 9780393904574 (e-book), $29.40; ISBN 9780393920208 (anthology), $44.10.] Illustrations, glossary, bibliographic references, index. To write an accessible yet detailed narrative of a certain period of music history is not an easy task. The difficulty is in achieving an intricate balance between breadth and detail to craft a meaningful description of the music and culture of a time and place for both musicians and nonmusicians alike. Harmony between cultural history and the study of iconic repertoire and composers is likewise of the essence to engender significant connections between the cultural, political, and social environment of the time and relevant musical styles. In Music in the Baroque, an installment in Norton’s Western Music in Context: A Norton History series, Wendy Heller carefully treads these fine lines between cultural context and repertoire, breadth and detail. The book provides a well-proportioned study that blends the cultural context of seventeenth-century Europe with an examination of the iconic composers and works of the period. Heller’s prose is straightforward and her tone makes this volume suitable for a highly varied audience of undergraduate music majors, graduate music students, or nonmusicians. While Heller does not shy away from explicit musical terminology, she succinctly explains terms that are likely foreign to a nonspecialist, growing the reader’s musical vocabulary. Heller deftly avoids any demanding language that would likely discourage an undergraduate or less enthusiastic readership. The scope of Heller’s book is introductory, but not simple. She focuses on contexts of the seventeenth century rather than on particular genres or composers. Evidence of Heller’s years of experience teaching seventeenth-century topics to diverse audiences is shown in her ability to bring context to the foreground while simultaneously providing detailed examination and analysis of iconic repertoire. A precise vocabulary enhances these explana-

tions, as Heller’s manner of musical discussion does not sacrifice detail in favor of accessibility. Rather than dividing the baroque period into particular decades or focusing on when the period itself begins and ends, Heller organizes her study around particular cultural contexts. The introductory chapter opens by defining the term “baroque” and tracing the history of the term and its relationship to music. Heller uses two sculptures, one from the sixteenth and one from the seventeenth century, each betraying a different approach to the human body, to illustrate the shift in artistic approaches between the Renaissance and baroque periods. Humanism further illuminates the modes of thought that were prominent in baroque Europe. Without neglecting the political and religious conflicts characteristic of the seventeenth century, Heller focuses rather on the developing Enlightenment, which was embraced more fully in the second half of the century. The introduction concludes with a brief discussion of baroque musical developments, which addresses issues of tuning, modal and tonal harmony, and important styles of the period, such as the stile concertato. The following three large-scale sections of the book are organized by methodology and approach while maintaining a chronological order. In Part I, Heller addresses various contexts for musical performance in the seventeenth century, opening with a chapter that describes the shift away from the strict observation of the rules of counterpoint and toward a more flexible compositional approach that favored writing music in the most expressive way to move the passions, to engender desire and pleasure, and to serve as an expression of lament. The following chapters include discussions of theatrical music, instrumental music, and music in civic and religious rituals.