Newark Star Ledger 8/30/99: Cloud chamber music

Cloud chamber music

An eccentric composer's unique instruments find a home in
Montclair

08/30/99

By Carrie Stetler
STAFF WRITER

Not many musicians can play "The Romancing of a Pathological Liar
Comes to an Inspired End" on the cloud chamber bowls.

Dean Drummond is one of them.

In fact, he may be the only one.

The song was written by Drummond's mentor, avant garde composer
Harry Partch, whose work was so strange and original he had to
invent his own 43-tone musical scale -- and build his own instruments
-- to play it.

He fashioned them from artillery shells, car horns, airplane fuel tanks
and Chinese temple bells. He gave them names like the "boo," the
"bloboy" and the "spoils of war." (The "cloud chamber bowls" are
bell-like gongs made of 12-gallon Pyrex containers once used for
sub-atomic particle experiments.) The heaviest Partch piece, a
marimba the size of a piano, weighs 600 pounds.

They're not the sort of instruments you can keep in the living room, or
even the garage. So storage has been something of a problem for
Drummond, a one-time prot�g� of the late composer.

But for now, at least, Partch's instruments, have found a home at
Montclair State University, where they occupy 2,000 square feet of
the music department building.

"We feel Harry Partch was one of the most important figures of
20th-century American music," says David Witten, a music professor
at the school. "And it's pretty apparent that the instruments are as
interesting to look at as they are to hear."

That wasn't a popular opinion when Partch was alive. Until recently he
was regarded mainly as an outsider in the world of music theory.
And, although his reputation has grown since his death in 1974, his
songs -- which sound like Martian chamber music -- still upset
people, according to Drummond, whose group, Newband, will give a
Sept. 12 concert of Partch's music at Montclair State.

"It's like being the first person to say the Earth is round," says
Drummond, who lives in Nyack, N.Y. " 'Your world is limited' -- that's
what his message was. He just wanted to open up the world of
possibilities. And he did."

Partch, a classically trained musician who started composing in the
early 1930s, thought the 12-note Western scale wasn't enough to
convey the full range of expression found in the human voice,
according to Drummond. So he devised something called a
"microtonal" scale, the keys of which are labeled with fractions, like
8/5 and 4/3, instead of letters, like C, G and E.

You can't play "Mary Had a Little Lamb" on a Partch instrument. Or,
more accurately, you can play part of it, but as Drummond points out,
"It will sound out of tune."

Partch's own melodies can sound out of tune, too, while his song
titles read like lines of surrealist poetry. "And on the Seventh Day,
Petals Fell in Petaluma," is one, while a piece Drummond is currently
rehearsing is called "San Francisco: A Setting of the Cries of Two
Newsboys on a Foggy Night in the Twenties."

"That's from his hobo opera, 'The Wayward,'" says Drummond.

Another song, titled "I'm very happy to be telling you about this . .
.," is
the transcription of a glider pilot's broadcast set to music. Other
Partch pieces feature literary passages by Shakespeare, Lewis
Carroll, James Joyce and the Chinese poet Li Po.

Drummond, 50, was a California high school student learning to play
the trumpet when he met Partch. He was enthralled with the
iconoclastic composer, who, with his flowery clothes and sandals,
dressed like "the hippest of hippies." Partch rehearsed his music in
an old Laundromat and taught Drummond to play a harpsichord-like
instrument called the "harmonic canon."

Drummond has been playing his music ever since.

"It turned out to be an all-consuming thing for me," he says.

Today, Drummond is one of about 20 people in the world who can
play Partch's instruments. Except for Newband, his nine-member
group -- which is now the ensemble-in-residence at Montclair State --
barely anyone else can perform Partch's music live.

"We're the only ones who have the instruments," says Drummond's
wife, Stefani Starin, co-director of Newband and a flutist with the
group. "They can't be played on anything else except a synthesizer."

They can, however, be played on a "zoomoozophone," a massive
aluminum xylophone invented by Drummond, whose own music has
the same absurdist bent as Partch's.

At the Montclair show, Drummond will be playing his song
"Congressional Record," which features sung snippets of the
Kenneth Starr Report. It ends with the "Plumbing Standards
Improvement Act of 1999," a verbatim congressional transcript, in
which an irate senator thunders, "The message is clear, and often
written on toilet paper: 'Get the government out of my bathroom!' "

As Starin readily admits, "We have no commercial appeal."

But she and Drummond are dedicated to bringing Partch's music to
the world -- which isn't cheap. Trucking the instruments to an
upcoming gig in California will cost more than $13,000, and when
Newband toured Europe, shipping expenses helped drive the band's
price to $80,000.

Anyone who invites Newband to play must often raise funds to pay for
it, says Drummond. Needless to say, the group doesn't make much
money from the shows. Yet, somehow, Drummond has always
managed to find space for the instruments, which have had five
different storage places since he inherited them in 1990.

Their last home was at the State University of New York in Purchase,
where Drummond was the artist in residence. But when a new music
school dean arrived, he was sent packing again.

Drummond and Starin dream of someday founding a Partch
museum, maybe in Montclair, where the original instruments can be
exhibited and Newband can be free to tour with duplicates.

"I don't want to ever move them again," says Drummond. "Harry's
whole life was like that. He knew very well what the burden was. Now,
I know, too."

Newband will perform the works of Harry Partch on Sept. 12 at
Montclair State University in the Recital Hall of McEachern Music
Building. The concert, which begins at 8 p.m., is free and open to the
public, but donations are welcome. The proceeds will benefit the
music department.