Dark Brother is a substantial vocal piece (nearly eight minutes), written by Harry Partch (1901 - 1974) at the end of a sustained period of wandering and uncertainty, during the last few years of the Great Depression. Finally, with hopes raised by a letter from a divinity school friend in Chicago, he had ridden freight trains from Oakland, CA, to Chicago in 1941, a trip memorialized in his extended work U.S. Highball. He stayed several months in Chicago, moving in for short times with one friend after another. Meanwhile, he applied for a Guggenheim grant.

One of the projects he itemized in the grant proposal was a seven-part composition called Monophonic Cycle. He used the term "monophonic" in a non-standard way, to refer to his forty-three-tone to the octave just intonation system, because all notes in the source scale were pure interval ratios with "one tone." One of the pieces in the Monophonic Cycle was to be Dark Brother, a setting of the last two paragraphs of a short story by Thomas Wolfe, God's Lonely Man.

It is easy to see why the literary material appealed to Partch. The story begins "My life, more than that of anyone I know, has been spent in solitude and wandering." In his forty-plus years, Partch had not lived in any town or city for as long as three years at a time.

After taking the grant proposal personally to New York, he moved in September 1942, into the attic of his friend Donald Flanders in Chappaqua, New York. They let him bring in his instruments from storage in Chicago and Carmel, California: the kithara, the chromatic organ console, and the chromelodian (as Partch then spelled it). He began work on Dark Brother the same month. By the time he finished it, he had been excused from military service, for "emotional instability" among other reasons, and learned that he received the grant.

He wrote Dark Brother simultaneously with U.S. Highball. The song is scored for chromelodeon, adapted guitar, and Indian drum. The two paragraphs chosen by Partch are a kind of triumph: out of despair, one can have a kind of triumph by accepting loneliness itself as a kind of friend, as one's "dark brother." And, Wolfe argues, loneliness is more prevalent than Christian love.

The music is intensely anguished. This presents Partch's microtonal system in one of it most radical forms. The layout of the chromelodeon (where the fullest hand-stretch spans barely the interval of a Third) encouraged what Partch called "tonality flux," a sequence of chords that resolve into each other by the narrowest intervals without establishing a sense of tonal direction. The constrained, goal-less motion is ideal for the text, evoking a sense of self-centeredness, isolation from other persons. The song is a powerful, painful experience.

Dark Brother was first recorded by Dr. Warren Gilson in Madison, Wisconsin, in 1945, and recorded again in Gualala, California, in 1951, in a revision with a part for bass marimba added.

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