Getting a little Harry

By Kristen Peterson

Wednesday, Jan. 27, 2010 | 5:15 p.m.

An odd little online feud, based entirely on a misunderstanding, took place in the music world last year. Involved: Beck, The Fiery Furnaces, Radiohead and 20th century avant-garde composer Harry Partch, who died in 1974.

It's likely that few had even heard of Partch, who shunned the conformity of Western classical music in the 1920s to explore a new form of composition based on intonations of the speaking voice. But that kind of obscurity, that musical insiderness, triggered the feud: Radiohead wrote and recorded a song to honor a guy named Harry Patch, the longest-surviving British World War I veteran. Matt Friedberger of The Fiery Furnaces, who reportedly believed the song to be about the esoteric composer, verbally attacked the band for its brazen attempts at cool. Later, the Furnaces commented that Friedberger would have "much preferred to insult Beck but he is too afraid of Scientologists."

Beck's response? A song that pays homage to composer Partch and his 43-tone scale, which Beck quickly posted on his website. It's a great piece that can still be found online, as can videos of Partch performing his own work and a BBC documentary on the artist who developed his own microtonal scale and a new notation system, as well as made elaborately complicated instruments.

On Saturday, local classical quartet From Vegas With Love offers a Partch piece — "Eight Hitchhiker Inscriptions From a Highway Railing at Barstow, California" — along with a Debussy quartet and Prokofiev's Quartet No. 2, at the Winchester Cultural Center.

Before anyone pulls a Friedberger, know that From Vegas With Love is performing Partch — Ben Johnston's arrangement for string quartet and narrator — out of love for this stylized song depicting a historical moment in 20th-century America. When he wrote it, Partch was in the company of hobos, riding the rails and hitchhiking across the United States during the Great Depression—an experience he documented in journals. Narrated in a singsong voice, "Inscriptions" includes phrases such as, "It's January 26. I'm freezing. Ed Fitzgerald, age 19. Five-feet, 10 inches, black hair, brown eyes. Going home to Boston, Massachusetts. It's 4 p.m., and I'm hungry and broke. I wish I was dead. But today I am a man."

— Originally published in Las Vegas Weekly