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The definition of "folk music" is a shifty one; it has calcified in layers of association and preconception to encompass almost any musical form which is unamplified and "populist" — that is, of the people, whoever they are — without partaking of popular, mass culture. (It may be a tautology, but the word "folk" itself is folksy, resonant with the lingering vibrations of Appalachian hollers and dust-buffed plains.) From an educated, Western perspective, folk music may be any music in which local traditions drown out the encroaching din of global communications.

But perhaps the purest folk music of all is to be found in the cries and chants of vendors the world over, in which the language of commerce has evolved into a stylized, ritualized collection of sounds. I can still recall, 20 years after a visit to Ecuador, the purr of Quechua women selling goods in markets and bus stations — a sound like "Shoo-shoon-ha, shoo-shoon-ha" — cries that, for all I know, have not changed in centuries. But cultural purity has nothing to do with the essential form: on the beaches of Barcelona, Pakistani vendors have developed an elaborate system of quasi-musical phrases tuned specifically for a global audience, calling out variations like "Cerveza fria, Fanta, Coca, Coca Lite," and "Papas, chips, aguawaterbeer" that slide nasally up and down a scale amalgamated from multiple languages and accents.

If the sonic possibilities of the sellers' cries seem the perfect material to be sampled and looped, you wouldn't be the first to think so. Long before digital sampling, and even before musique concrète, its analogue precursor, the composer Harry Partch used the calls of newspaper sellers in his "San Francisco Newsboy Cries" (credited elsewhere as "San Francisco (A Setting of the Cries of Two Newsboys on a Street Corner on a Foggy Night in the Twenties)"). In the 1943 piece, Partch sings the competing cries of two newsboys, alternating between the dirgey mantra, "Chrooooooonicle," and the uptempo "Examinerexaminer" (which sounds a little bit like a riff on the old baseball heckle, "Hey battabattabattabatta"), while string glissandos slide eerily up and down an unfamiliar scale that wraps around the voice's natural pitch, creating a rich sound-image of the soupy night.

I don't know if Partch was the first composer to utilize such sources in his music, but it wouldn't surprise me; the iconoclastic composer approached all his work by translating the sounds of the world into an unusual musical language distinguished by unfamiliar tunings of the sort that color the mewling strings of "San Francisco Newsboy Cries." In the tradition of Bela Bartok, who enriched the spectrum of what today we call classical music by introducing quotations from Central European folk idioms, and Charles Ives, who injected classical forms with American song traditions, Partch opened up classical music to vernacular musical forms while, like modernists Ezra Pound or fellow drifters of his generation and the Beat poet Gary Snider, he turned his ear to the sounds of Asian cultures.

Thirty-one years after his death, Partch is not well known, but his stature within the American avant-garde grows steadily; much of his music was released for the first time only in the past decade. An autodidact, inventor of unusual instruments and erstwhile hobo — he spent much of the Great Depression riding the rails — Partch is best known as a kind of "outsider artist," but his credentials transcend mere eccentricity. One of Partch's most significant contributions was his challenge to the Western 12-tone scale. Decrying the gaps and absences in Western tuning, or equal temperament, Partch turned instead to the system of "just intonation," which allows for a truer approximation of the range of sounds audible to the human ear. Most written descriptions of just intonation will send you scurrying for a math textbook — not to mention a bottle of aspirin — but Partch helpfully lays out his theories in "A Quarter-Saw Section of Motivations and Intonations," a kind of audio essay with musical samples.

In one sense, "A Quarter-Saw Section of Motivations and Intonations" is an academic, musicological treatise, laying bare the calculations underpinning Partch's music and comparing Western tuning with other musical systems from around the world. But Partch's essay is also a philosophical document designed to restore true dissonance to its rightful throne, after centuries of exile. "I have said many times," says Partch, "that 12-tone equal temperament not only slams doors against any investigation of consonance, but it also slams doors in the entire balance of the temple against any further investigation of dissonance. Dissonance on the piano and dissonance in a monophonic system of just intonation are entirely different servings of tapioca."

There isn't space here to elucidate all the points of Partch's theory, or even to fully investigate the range of his work — a range that, even without its polemical underpinnings, could be profoundly daunting for the first-time listener. Partch's works, presented here in the multi-part albums Enclosure 2 and Enclosure 5 and the '60s composition for the stage Delusion of the Fury, run from strange, Asiatic drones to interpretations of his hobo journals for voice and piano. (Much of Enclosure 2 is given over to segments of Partch's recorded lectures and incidental comments; delivered in a voice reminiscent of William Burroughs, these can be as fascinating as his music itself.)

Fortunately, as both teacher and serenader, Partch makes for an excellent, engaging and above all amicable fireside companion (witness his tapioca analogy above). Where so much Western art-music may seem to make unreasonable demands upon the listener, Partch's only requirement is that the listener be willing to re-tune his or her ears. As he says at the close of "Texts and Music: A Wagnerian Wrestling Match," "I can only hope that my listeners will relax into a tolerant and receptive state, like a patient under hypnosis. It might be interesting to relax and see what happens. If you begin to get angry over what happens, you are undoubtedly a gentleman and a scholar, and a purist. If you succumb to the hypnosis, you are probably a lot more primitive than you realize. And perhaps you were not born in the right age either. If nothing happens..." — and here the recording ends.