Program Note

Though San Francisco-The Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Street Corner was composed in 1943 in Ithaca, New York, the composer was remembering a moment from the late 1920’s. The piece was premiered at Carnegie Hall in 1944 in a concert of his Americana Pieces along with US Highball and Barstow, but when Partch re-orchestrated it for The Wayward (1955), the words “Street Corner” in the title were replaced with “Foggy Night”, an effect produced in both versions by the strummed hexads of the kithara and the murmuring ‘microtonal’ trills of both Viola and Chromelodeon.