"It's not just the collection that's evolving. Through being here at Montclair State, musicians who play the instruments also are evolving."

-Dean Drummond

When Dean Drummond was 16, his trumpet and composition teacher suggested he attend a rehearsal of a strange new composer named Harry Partch. Interested in new music and being innovative with sounds and musical possibilities, Drummond was blown away when he walked into the room filled with Partch's instruments.

"I had never seen or heard anything like it and I fell in love with the sound at first sight," he said. "But it was not a rehearsal. Harry was trying to get new players involved so I volunteered, and six months later he called me."

Today Drummond is not only following in his mentor's footsteps, he has become the mentor. As director/curator of the Harry Partch Instrument Collection at Montclair State, he performs on Partch's instruments, and is a musical instrument inventor and a composer whose music has been largely concerned with the exploration of microtonal possibilities. According to The Washington Post, "Drummond's music finds considerable power in what would be cracks on a piano keyboard."

A recipient of numerous awards and commissions including a Guggenheim Fellowship, Drummond performs and records Partch's and his own music with Newband, a professional ensemble he and his wife Stefani Starin co-founded in 1977. Newband will be featured in a concert on Jan. 19 at 7 p.m. in Memorial Auditorium. The ensemble will perform works by Partch and by Drummond, including Drummond's "The Day the Sun Stood Still," which he describes as his favorite instrumental composition. Tickets are $20 and $15. For more information call the Box Office at 973-655-5112.

Drummond recently talked about his role as guardian of the Harry Partch Instrument Collection, which will have a permanent home in the lower level of the Alexander Kasser Theater on campus when it opens in May 2004.

Q. Describe Harry Partch's theories about intervals and intonation.
A. Every musical culture in the world has its own set of pitches. Metaphorically you can look at it as an infinite box of crayons. Western culture took 12 from the box to build its entire musical system and has stuck with them for 400 years. Harry's idea was that countless gradations between those 12 pitches are there to be exploited, so he developed a system that vastly expanded the musical possibilities. Then he built an orchestra of instruments to play them.

Q. You invented two instruments and incorporated them into Partch's orchestra. Is this a collection that continues to evolve?
A. I invented the zoomoozophone, a huge metal percussion instrument, and the juststrokerods, a smaller instrument with vertical metal rods, long before I knew that I would one day have the entire Partch collection in my possession. A few years after Harry died I investigated how to build instruments that could explore this larger set of pitches, totally independent of the original collection. I had little hope that what he and I did would ever come together. But on the off chance it could, I tuned my instruments into the same box of crayons he'd been using.
It's not just the collection that's evolving. Through being here at Montclair State, musicians who play the instruments also are evolving. Now there are two ensembles--a professional group, Newband, and the MSU Harry Partch Student Ensemble--the only one of its kind in the world.

Q. Why is the Harry Partch collection considered a landmark in music history rather than music novelty?
A. Not only did Harry invent a system, he shared it with the world through his book, Genesis of Music, and then went on to write some of the greatest music in the 20th century based on the system. That is what makes it masterpiece-level art as opposed to novelty.

Q. How did Newband originate?
A. Newband is an offshoot of a group Stefani and I were in called the California New Music Ensemble, a young, renegade group of forward-looking musicians. When we moved to New York we started our own ensemble. Our first concert was at New York University, and when the publicist asked me the group's name, I stuttered and said, Newband. That was in November 1977. Stefani and I got married a month later, so I've been together with my wife and with Newband for 25 years.

Q. Tell us about the academic program in Harry Partch studies you established.
A. The program started out in 1999 with four students and now there are 20, so it's growing exponentially. My students perform Harry's works and learn the complex tuning system of his instruments, and I encourage them to create new instruments of their own. I'm also putting together a minor in Harry Partch studies and a concentration at the master's degree level.

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