Newband is a contemporary music ensemble devoted to the performance of microtonal music. The group was founded in 1977 by musicians Stefani Starin and Dean Drummond. As a youth, Drummond performed with maverick composer Harry Partch in a unique ensemble of microtonal instruments that Partch designed and built himself; Drummond performed in the premieres of Partch’s Daphne of the Dunes, And on the Seventh Day Petals Fell in Petaluma, and Delusion of the Fury, as well as on both Partch Columbia Masterworks recordings made during the late 1960s.
Inspired by Partch's example, Drummond began to invent instruments of his own, creating the "zoomoozophone" and "juststrokerods," metal instruments tuned to subsets of Harry Partch's 43-tone microtonal scale. After Partch's death in 1974, Partch's instruments had fallen into disuse and disrepair, being used only occasionally for revivals of Partch's compositions. In 1990, Drummond acquired all of Partch's instruments for Newband. With assistance through residencies at the State University of New York at Purchase (1990-1999) and at Montclair State University (1999-present), Drummond was able to insure and repair all of the instruments, duplicating many of them with new materials.
The Partch instrument collection is now the largest component of Newband, and these instruments are used for performances and recordings of Partch's music. Combined with traditional acoustic and electronic instruments as well as those developed by Drummond, Newband also commissions new works, including Julia Wolfe's Steam, three works by Elizabeth Brown, and many works by Drummond.
As part of their residency at Montclair State University, Newband offers courses to college students that are based around the special instruments of Newband's ensemble, including "Microtonal Music Ensemble" (for which students may compose new works), a study of Partch's life, instruments and musical theories, and "Music Instrument Repair and Invention," in which students replicate Partch's instruments and develop new instruments.
A percussion instrument is a musical instrument that is sounded by being struck or scraped by a beater including attached or enclosed beaters or rattles struck, scraped or rubbed by hand or struck against another similar instrument. Excluding zoomusicological instruments and the human voice, the percussion family is believed to include the oldest musical instruments.
Harry Partch was an American composer, music theorist, and creator of musical instruments. He composed using scales of unequal intervals in just intonation, and was one of the first 20th-century composers in the West to work systematically with microtonal scales. He built custom-made instruments in these tunings on which to play his compositions, and described his theory and practice in his book Genesis of a Music (1947).
A metallophone is any musical instrument in which the sound-producing body is a piece of metal, consisting of tuned metal bars, tubes, rods, bowls, or plates. Most frequently the metal body is struck to produce sound, usually with a mallet, but may also be activated by friction, keyboard action, or other means.
The boobam is a percussion instrument of the membranophone family consisting of an array of tubes with membranes stretched on one end, the other end open. The tuning depends partly on the tension on the membrane and partly on the length of the tube.
Bent Sørensen is a Danish composer. He won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 2018 for L'isola della Città (2016).
Alice Anne LeBaron is a United States composer and harpist.
An experimental musical instrument is a musical instrument that modifies or extends an existing instrument or class of instruments, or defines or creates a new class of instrument. Some are created through simple modifications, such as cracked drum cymbals or metal objects inserted between piano strings in a prepared piano. Some experimental instruments are created from household items like a homemade mute for brass instruments such as bathtub plugs. Other experimental instruments are created from electronic spare parts, or by mixing acoustic instruments with electric components.
Bruce Mather is a Canadian composer, pianist, and writer who is particularly known for his contributions to contemporary classical music. One of the most notable composers of microtonal music, he was awarded the Jules Léger Prize twice, first in 1979 for his Musique pour Champigny and again in 1993 for Yquem. Some of his other awards include the Composers, Authors and Publishers Association of Canada's Micheline Coulombe Saint-Marcoux prize in 1987 for Barbaresco and the Serge Garant Prize from the Émile Nelligan Foundation in 2000.
Genesis of a Music is a book first published in 1949 by microtonal composer Harry Partch (1901–1974).
Dean Drummond was an American composer, arranger, conductor and musician. His music featured microtonality, electronics, and a variety of percussion. He invented a 31-tone instrument called the zoomoozophone in 1978. From 1990 to his death he was the conservator of the Harry Partch instrumentarium.
Makoto Shinohara is a Japanese composer.
Marc Sabat is a Canadian composer based in Berlin since 1999.
Preludio a Colón, for soprano in fifths of a tone, flute, guitar, and violin in quarter tones, octavina in eighth-tones, and harp in sixteenth-tones, is a musical composition by the Mexican composer Julián Carrillo, written in 1922. The title is indicative of Carrillo's "Sonido 13" [thirteenth sound] revolution.
Bart Hopkin is a builder of experimental musical instruments and a writer and publisher on the subject. Hopkin runs the website windworld.com, which provides resources regarding unusual instruments.
Sampo Haapamäki is a Finnish composer. He has won several international composition competitions.
Stranger to Stranger is the thirteenth solo studio album by American folk rock singer-songwriter Paul Simon. Produced by Paul Simon and Roy Halee, it was released on June 3, 2016 through Concord Records. Simon wrote the material over a period of several years, perfecting it and rewriting it to his liking. Its music is experimental, making use of custom-made instruments by composer and music theorist Harry Partch. Three of the songs on the album are collaborations with Italian electronic artist Clap! Clap!.
Mathew Rosenblum is an American composer whose works have been commissioned, recorded and performed by musical groups such as the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, the Thailand Philharmonic Orchestra, the American Composers Orchestra, Opera Theater of Pittsburgh, FLUX Quartet, the New York New Music Ensemble, the Raschèr Saxophone Quartet, the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble, and Newband among other ensembles, in venues throughout North America, Europe and Asia including the Andy Warhol Museum, Leipzig's Gewandhaus, the Tonhalle Düsseldorf, Thailand's Prince Mahidol Hall, as well as Merkin Hall, the Guggenheim Museum, the Miller Theatre, The Kitchen, Carnegie Recital Hall, and Symphony Space in New York City. Rosenblum's music has been recorded on such labels as Mode Records, New World Records, Albany Records, Capstone Records, Opus One Records, New Focus Recordings, and the Composers Recordings Inc. label, and has been published by Edition Peters, of Leipzig, London, and New York.
Elizabeth Brown is an American contemporary composer and performer, known for music described as otherworldly, which employs microtonal expression, unique instrumentation and a morphing, freewheeling language. Her work is frequently commissioned for specific ensembles and has been performed internationally in solo, chamber and orchestral contexts at venues including Carnegie Hall, Boston's Symphony Hall, the Smithsonian Institution, and the Hanoi National Conservatory of Music. She has written extensively for flute, unconventional instruments such as the Partch complement and theremin, and the traditional Asian shakuhachi and đàn bầu; she combines them in original ways that mix Western and Eastern, ancient and modern, and experimental and conventionally melodic sensibilities. Composer and critic Robert Carl calls Brown a "gentle maverick" whose avant-gardism bends and subverts traditional tropes with an unironic, unpretentious manner "that is fresh and imaginative, but never afraid of beauty, nor of humane warmth."
