Celebrating the release of the first recording of the complete Bitter Music, Partch’s often hilarious, sometimes heartbreaking, long-lost hobo journal from 1935 is performed as a special multimedia presentation including the work’s original pen and ink illustrations, photographs from the composer’s scrapbooks and his legendary instruments. From the transient shelters of mid-Depression California to the reading room of the British Museum, from cleaning sewers to taking tea with Irish poet W.B. Yeats, Partch’s story reveals seven months in a lifetime of extraordinary struggle to forge a new musical language outside the traditions of western classical music. The evening also includes a newly discovered 1969 interview with Partch about Bitter Music, and the first performance of the long-lost 1942 version of Barstow for 2 voices, Adapted Guitar and Chromelodeon.