Since the 1990s, music scholars have begun only gradually to grapple with the American maverick Harry Partch and his seminal theoretical, music philosophical, and compositional ideas. Besides Partch's own comprehensive treatise, Genesis of a Music, and his collected journals, essays, introductions, and librettos, we have the work of the late Bob Gilmore, who authored a biography and a study of Partch's early vocal pieces, and Thomas McGeary's catalog of Partch's works, scores, bibliography, and discography.Footnote ¹ Most other Anglophone publications are limited to individual aspects of Partch's works.Footnote ² In the German literature, articles by Manfred Stahnke, a composer and musicologist, explain Partch's intonational and aesthetic ideas and how they have influenced his own microtonal concepts.Footnote ³ Intervening in this fragmentary literature, S. Andrew Granade's Harry Partch, Hobo Composer presents an exhaustive account of U.S. hobo culture and the ways in which it shaped not only Partch's existential and artistic philosophy, but also his music theoretical and compositional procedures. The book is organized as a chronological study of the music that Partch created while living as a hobo among the multitude of unemployed, homeless men during the Great Depression and after, from 1928 to 1943.

By recounting the shifting hobo, transient, and migrant cultures of the Great Depression era, Granade contextualizes Partch's affinity for and conscious submission to the transient lifestyle as the composer meticulously adopted the hobo persona and gave his music an essential hobo ethos. While living as a transient, Partch collected U.S. folk songs, speeches, and texts; conceptualized a pioneering forty-three-tone-to-octave intonational system; and designed a plethora of original instruments. His just-intoned, eleven-limit scale enabled him to capture all the inflections of a voice reciting these folk texts, songs, and speeches. Partch constructed several visually and acoustically impressive instruments based on his microtonal system and composed works that relied upon his notions of “monophony” and “corporeality” in order to present an inherently U.S. music growing out of the hobo culture.

Granade builds his compelling study upon two pillars: the notions of conceptual exoticism and documentary imagination. In the prologue, he argues that Partch's use of iconic American figures, such as the hobo and the transient, in his pieces Barstow, U.S. Highball, San Francisco, The Letter, and Ulysses at the Edge of the World are conceptually exotic.Footnote ⁴ The fact that Partch collected and set the inflections of hobo texts to music while he was hoboing grants his works an exoticism that emerges from the existential underpinnings of American folk culture. In Granade's words: “Partch presents life as hoboes lived it and allows the audience to infer what it will” (12). Granade demonstrates that decorative exoticism, that is, the superficial integration of folk elements within the apparatus of Euro-American art music, deviates from Partch's complete immersion in the U.S. folk tradition.

On the other hand, even as he lived it, Partch was also documenting hobo culture. His direct engagement with hobo songs took on the aspects of documentary, as we observe in his Bitter Music—a musical, visual, and literary journal of his hobo years. Throughout the book, Granade expounds upon the cultural value of Partch's musical documentary imagination, setting Partch alongside such figures as Dorothea Lange in photography and John Steinbeck in literature, all of whom contributed immensely to the documentation of the hobo, transient, and migrant traditions.

Besides a prologue and an epilogue, Harry Partch, Hobo Composer consists of eight chapters, which focus on Partch's life and works, and two interludes, which explore the culture of hoboes, transients, and migrants during the Great Depression. The book's first chapter portrays Partch's pivotal departure from equal temperament and traditional way of life and arrival at just intonation and hoboing in the late 1920s and early 1930s. The first interlude that follows offers a fascinating excursion to the hobo world beyond the scope of Partch's music. Granade explores the emergence and evolution of these underrepresented groups of people throughout the country, particularly in California. He elaborates on the political and economic conditions that contributed to transience and the ways in which the government dealt with it. In the second chapter, Granade investigates the shift of Partch's documentary imagination toward a transient lifestyle during the same period in which he composed Bitter Music, a groundbreaking format that integrates novel, documentary journalism, a musical score, and drawings. The third chapter analyzes Bitter Music, and the fourth illustrates Partch's nomadic lifestyle and how it affected the composition of Barstow, his hobo concerto, as well as his other works of the period.

In order to fully explain why Partch adopted a hobo persona, the author elaborates in the second interlude on how the hobo was understood and constructed by artists, writers, filmmakers, and the press at the time. Chapters 5 and 6 discuss Partch's U.S. Highball and the other pieces of The Wayward, respectively. Granade reveals the evolution of U.S. Highball—the musical account of Partch's hobo journey from California to Illinois in 1941—as represented in the manuscripts preserving its three versions. The seventh chapter deals with a crucial period in Partch's life, from 1941 to 1944, when he established his persona of a hobo composer in Illinois, New York, and Massachusetts while giving concerts, lectures, and presentations that featured his startling compositions, instruments, and theories. The eighth and final chapter approaches Partch's residency in Madison (1944–1947) to work under a grant from the University of Wisconsin, where he eventually published Genesis of a Music. In this chapter and in the epilogue, Granade clarifies how Partch exploited and finally abandoned the hobo image in the last three decades of his life. During these years, while residing mostly in California, Partch composed corporeal music dramas such as Oedipus, The Bewitched, and Delusion of the Fury. As Granade demonstrates, even in these works, Partch returns to his affection for the hobo culture and integrates hobo elements in his music whenever he felt the need.

Articulating the conceptual exoticism of Partch's Americana music, Granade concludes that “not only did Partch forge an art that sounded American, it was American” (283). As he asserts throughout the book, Partch's worldview, lifestyle, aesthetics, and music were truly interrelated. With its focus on Partch's own integration of these elements of his life, perhaps the only shortcoming of the book is the fact that it does not expand much on Partch's microtonal theory as the basis of his intonational system, instruments, and compositions, although it perfectly illustrates the historical and contextual background of his hobo music. In fact, grasping Partch's hobo music hinges upon comprehending his theory of just intonation and his peculiar notational system, as well as his notions of monophony and corporeality. Harry Partch, Hobo Composer, however, goes beyond being a mere musicological study of a fundamentally American composer; it is also a probing anthropological study of hobo, transient, and migrant cultures in the United States. Granade's book stands out as a valuable addition to the scholarship of American culture, which, for the first time in the musicological literature, affirms the cultural and musical significance of Partch's U.S. hobo music.