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Chris Rainier sings the music of Harry Partch

This recording presents works that bookend the earliest phases of Harry Partch’s creative output: pieces for voice and Adapted Viola (his first ‘invented’ instrument) produced in the early 1930’s; ‘Americana’ works inspired by his hobo wanderings during the Great Depression; and compositions for small chamber ensembles written in the 1940’s that would both conceptually and timbrally inform all of his later, large-scale artistic explorations.

This album commences with the earliest version of "Barstow", arguably Partch’s most ‘famous’ piece, but here presented in its lesser-known, original guise. The starkness of its instrumentation reinforces both the hopelessness and dark humour of its multiple protagonists, as they contemplate yet another cold night alone in the desert. Following the vagaries of this Californian odyssey, the disc’s first side concludes with a transcription onto Adapted Guitar 1 of the earliest version of Partch’s setting of "By the Rivers of Babylon". Apart from a necessary retuning of the guitar’s lowest pair of strings, the original piece transfers entirely idiomatically onto an instrument which Partch could imaginably have used to perform it, as he did on his Adapted Viola at the home of Irish poet W.B. Yeats in the winter of 1934.

The disc’s second side returns to the compositional genesis of Partch’s mature artistic practice. Interpreting the isolated melodic lines of his very first acknowledged work ("The Long Departed Lover") as a timbral tabula rasa, the original score’s Adapted Viola part is transferred unaltered onto Adapted Guitar 1. This is also the case with "The Intruder", the fourth in a collection of pieces that would eventually be known as the "Seventeen Lyrics by Li Po" (1933). The lute-like qualities of the guitar alluded to earlier in "By the Rivers of Babylon" are echoed by the Shakespearean context of "Come Away, Death", the first of three songs in the largely pragmatically titled collection "December, 1942". Following the emotional densities of the concise "The Heron", this triptych concludes with the first version of "The Rose", an innovative five-fingered percussive technique on the body of the guitar propelling the appearance of subtly shifting microtonal chords.

The arrangements of the final two works on this album were both inspired by recently digitised ‘demo’ recordings that Partch produced in 1949 and 1950 during his stay on the remote Northern California coast. These independently engineered sessions often employed ‘sound-on-sound’ techniques on multiple tape recorders. In the case of "Letter from Hobo Pablo" (the first incarnation of Partch’s ever-evolving composition "The Letter"), its original instrumentation of voice, Adapted Guitar 1 and Kithara 1 is here arranged for performance by a soloist, referencing the composer’s own solo alternate version for voice and Kithara 1. This is also the case with the second version of "The Rose". Originally scored for voice, Adapted Guitar 2 and Diamond Marimba, it is presented here as a sparse rendition for voice and Adapted Guitar 2 only, mirroring Partch’s aural documentation of this iteration of the piece more than seventy years earlier.

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https://bwaarecords.bandcamp.com/album/chris-rainier-sings-the-music-of-harry-partch