Harry Partch

Bitter Music

Bridge

‘A diary of eight months spent in transient shelters and camps, hobo jungles, basement rooms, and on the open road’. A collage of readings and musical fragments, this long-lost journal of HP’s wanderings during the Great Depression (from cleaning sewers to tea with W. B. Yeats) is ‘an extraordinary musical portrait of an American pioneer, chronicling his occasionally hilarious and often heartbreaking struggles to forge a new music system outside the classical tradition.’

• Preface
• June 11, 1935 - Santa Rosa, California
• June 15 - Harrington Ranch, San Joaquin Delta
• June 24 - Today is my birthday...
• London, October 1934
• By The Rivers of Babylon
• I draw my last bow, and there is silence...
• Wimbledon, London, March 1935
• Harrington Ranch, June 24, 1935
• July 20 - Heading north, between Sacramento and Redding
• July 25 - Blue Ox Lodge, Seattle, Washington
• August 5 - Toledo
• August 11 - SERA Camp, Ingot
• September 1 - Cisco
• October 22 - Nearing Monterey
• Letter from Hobo Pablo
• Near Lodi I cut the huge Tokays...
• October 24 - Leaving Big Sur
• October 30 - Big Creek
• November 15 - Leaving Santa Barbara
• December 7, 1935 - Night. Four black walls
• February 1, 1936 - San Bernadino
• Postlude - Harry Partch on Bitter Music - Encinitas, 1969