Music Is Hefty but Still Finds a Good Home By ANDY NEWMAN New York Times August 11, 1999 MONTCLAIR, N.J. -- Dean Drummond turned to his assistant. "I think what we'll do, Eric, is take the quadrangularis out first, shift the crychord over and then pull out the boo," he said. Drummond was not preparing to perform an obscure medical procedure on a patient in a dental chair. He was maneuvering the homemade instruments of a maverick American composer and inventor, Harry Partch. The crychord, a harp-size contraption with only one string, was on its way down the loading ramp of a 24-foot moving truck and into a new home at Montclair State University. Partch, a deeply eccentric, curmudgeonly figure who invented the 43-tone scale and spent his life in exile from the musical establishment, has gradually come to be considered one of the country's greatest musical thinkers since his death in 1974. But his music cannot be performed without his instruments. And his instruments -- like the quadrangularis reversum, an 8-foot-tall marimba with a double staircase of bars like an antebellum mansion, set in a frame of gracefully curved eucalyptus branches, -- take up a lot of space. And space in this part of the world, Drummond has found, is not cheap. So for the fifth time this decade, Drummond, the 50-year-old co-director of an avant-garde music ensemble, Newband, and the official custodian of the Harry Partch Instrumentarium, was on the move. Over the last week, he brought the collection, in four truckloads, from its last home, in a cardboard box factory in Rockland County, down Route 17 to Route 80 to Valley Road, right here to a tidy campus on Normal Avenue. "A great street for us, right?" Drummond asked. THE town of Montclair, which prides itself on being something of an arts center, is getting ready to be excited. The town's cultural affairs director, Paul Ellis, said he had not heard of Partch but welcomed his sound-sculptures, which number more than 30 and include a set of gongs made from the nose cones of propeller planes. Montclair, Ellis pointed out, is home to one of the finest municipal art museums around, the Montclair Art Museum, which has two resident theater companies and scads of boutiques, art-house movie theaters and a folk music club. And as if that were not enough, Montclair State itself is home to the Yogi Berra Museum. For Drummond and the instruments, the road has been a long one. A former student of Partch's who, at 16, played the eucal blossom in the master's ensemble, Drummond became the de facto guardian of the instruments in 1991. At first, he found space for them in a loft on West 31st Street in Manhattan near an entrance to the Lincoln Tunnel. Soon after, Drummond and his wife moved to Nyack, N.Y., and found a home for the instruments in Nyack High School. In 1993, Newband was named ensemble-in-residence at the State University of New York in Purchase, N.Y., but when a new music dean came in last year, Drummond said he was told that the music department needed the Partch room for other purposes. So, last August, Newband signed a lease on a piece of the Quality Carton Corporation factory in Sloatsburg, N.Y. The space was ideal -- more than 3,600 square feet, and it came with a loading dock -- but Newband could not afford the rent of $1,800 a month. Drummond began shopping for a new institution. When Montclair State, within an hour or two's driving distance for the dozen or so members of Newband, expressed interest in June, Drummond leaped at the opportunity. The new quarters are not quite ideal -- the collection is now divided up into three rooms in two different buildings, one of which is crammed floor to ceiling. The quadrangularis and the boo, a pyramid-shaped bamboo marimba painted in bright colors, are being stored in a conference room because Drummond does not expect to use them in the next couple of years. But having found a home for a national treasure has given Drummond an enormous sense of relief. Partch, who often incorporated hobo and vagabond imagery into his highly theatrical, percussive music, was himself a legendary wanderer. Over the course of 40 years, he lugged his instruments to Wisconsin, Illinois, and Petaluma and Sausalito, Calif., and a converted laundry in Los Angeles before settling in San Diego. Partch spent a spell in New York in the 1940's, Drummond said, but got scared out. "He declared that you'd have to be luckier than he was to make it here," Drummond said.

TOP