If the Kronos Quartet, who are celebrating their 30th anniversary season with three half-hour CD ‘singles’, wanted a composer to match their musical restlessness, they could hardly do better than Harry Partch. The fact that Partch never actually wrote a piece for anything so traditional as a string quartet was hardly a barrier, given that composer Ben Johnston had previously arranged Partch’s Barstow for the earlier Kronos CD ‘Howl, USA’. Although Johnston – Partch’s protégé, who continues to compose his own micro-tonal works – expressed his qualms about working with US Highball, the pinnacle of Partch’s originality, he was empowered by the fact that Partch had already reworked his semi-autobiographical account of hobo train travel in three different instrumentations.

The Johnston arrangement has neither the clangy narrative feel of Partch’s original 1943 version for solo voice and re-strung guitar, nor the percussive propulsion of the full chamber version from 1958 (featuring typically Partch instruments like cloud chamber bowls and the blo-boy), released on Volume 2 of CRI’s Harry Partch Collection (not distributed in the UK). Instead, it splits the difference, falling more into line with Partch’s 1944 quartet version for voice and three instruments (the adapted guitar, the kithara and the chromelodeon), released as part of Innova Recordings’ selections from the Partch archives.

Their combined efforts pay off in ways that perhaps neither Partch nor the Kronos had foreseen. Whereas Partch’s music generally sounds radical on the basis of the sonorities alone, the string quartet version is relatively normal by comparison. That throws more attention on the piece’s innovative structure, which unfolds in a fairly stream-of-consciousness manner, with melodic material determined by and closely following the spoken text.

Both the compositional technique and the train ride as subject matter make Partch seem like a rather eccentric predecessor of Steve Reich. These are ‘different trains’ indeed, as the Kronos has taken to performing the works together in concert, but the move has served to reveal Partch as more clearly of the American musical tradition, rather than always the odd man out.