Event Details
Saturday May 3 • The Music Gallery presents
THE MSU HARRY PARTCH ENSEMBLE
Dean Drummond, Director
Doors 7pm, concert 8pm
Tickets: $20 regular/$15 member + senior/$10 student
Advance tickets available at www.ticketweb.ca
The MSU Harry Partch Ensemble is a student/alumni ensemble, directed by Dean Drummond, at Montclair State University, New Jersey. The ensemble was founded in 2000 with four students and has since blossomed into about 20 students with several alumni participating in a variety of projects. The Ensemble performs music by Harry Partch and Dean Drummond, new compositions by ensemble members, and more. The Ensemble is part of a larger Harry Partch Institute, in which students take courses in Harry Partch’s music and microtonal music theory, and tune, repair and compose for Harry Partch’s instruments.
For the MSU Harry Partch Ensemble’s May 3, 2008 performance at the Music Gallery, the repertoire includes several works by Harry Partch: O Frabjous Day! and eight of his Eleven Intrusions — Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales, The Rose, The Crane, The Waterfall, The Wind, The Street, and Vanity. The program will also feature three microtonal arrangements by Dean Drummond — J.S Bach’s Est ist genug, Thelonius Monk’s ‘Round Midnight, and Partch’s Two Studies on Ancient Greek Scales; Drummond’s Two Miniatures and Zonix (a collaboration with Gary Schall); new compositions by Christi D’Amico and Gregg Rossetti, recent graduates of the Harry Partch Institute and music composition programs at Montclair State University; and Francis Schwartz’s theatrical piece, Cannibal-Caliban.
The program will include the following Harry Partch instruments: Chromelodeon I, three Adapted Guitars, three Harmonic Canons, Diamond Marimba, Bass Marimba, Bamboo Marimba. This will be the first time any of these instruments have been in Canada! Also featured will be Dean Drummond’s own zoomoozophone and justsrokerods.
Biographies
Dean Drummond (b. 1949) is a composer, conductor, multi-instrumentalist, music instrument inventor, co-director of Newband, director of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium, and associate professor and deputy director of the John J Cali School of Music at Montclair State University. Drummond’s compositions feature new acoustic instruments, synthesizers, new techniques for winds and strings and exotic percussion. His music has been performed internationally in venues ranging from the Knitting Factory and the Kitchen to Carnegie Hall and Barbican Centre; has been recorded on five CD’s, and has received numerous awards and commissions including a Guggenheim Fellowship, National Endowment for the Arts and the Library of Congress. As co-director of Newband, Drummond has been Music Director of Harry Partch’s Delusion of the Fury at Japan Society, Oedipus at The Metropolitan Museum of Art and Montclair State University, and The Wayward at the Bang on a Can Festival. Drummond received degrees in music composition from the University of Southern California and California Institute of the Arts. While a student, he worked as musician for and assistant to Harry Partch, performing in the premieres of some of Partch’s greatest works as well as on both Columbia Masterworks recordings of Partch’s music made during the late 1960's.
Harry Partch (1901-1974), one of the greatest and most individualistic composers of all time, was not only a great composer, but an innovative theorist who broke through the shackles of many centuries of one tuning system for all of Western music, a music instrument inventor who created dozens of incredible instruments for the performance of his music, and a musical dramatist who created his own texts and dance/theatre extravaganzas based on everything from Greek mythology to his own experiences as a hobo. Between 1930 and 1972, he created one of the most amazing bodies of sensually alluring and emotionally powerful music of the 20th century: music dramas, dance theater, multi-media extravaganzas, vocal music and chamber music — mostly all performed on the instruments he built himself.
With parents who were former missionaries to China, living in isolated areas of the American southwest, Partch, as a child, was exposed to a variety of influences from Asian to Native American. After dropping out of the University of Southern California, he began to study on his own and to question the tuning and philosophical foundations of Western music. During and after the Great Depression, he was a hobo and itinerant worker and rode the trains, keeping a musical notebook of his experiences, which he later set to music.
In 1930, Partch broke with Western European tradition and forged a new music based on a more primal, corporeal integration of the elements of speech with music, using principles of natural acoustic resonance (just intonation) and expanded melodic and harmonic possibilities. He began to first adapt guitars and violas to play his music, and then began to build new instruments in a new microtonal tuning system. He built over 25 instruments, plus numerous small hand instruments, and became a brilliant spokesman for his ideas. Largely ignored by the standard musical institutions during his lifetime, he criticized concert traditions, the roles of the performer and composer, the role of music in society, the 12-tone equal-temperament scale and the concept of "pure" or abstract music. To explain his philosophical and intonational ideas, he wrote a treatise, Genesis of a Music, which has served as a primary source of information and inspiration to many musicians for the last half century.
