Dean Drummond

Dean Drummond's Café Buffé, libretto by Charles Bernstein: sound recording and libretto now available

a microtonal opera scored for the instruments of Harry Partch and Dean Drummond

Charles Bernstein

Drummond on the set for Daphne of the Dunes by Harry Partch, playing a harmonic canon, La Mama Experimental Theater, 1994. Hat by Alice Farley. Photo by Jeffrey Starin.

Sound file of live performance (52:29): MP3
Libretto: summer stock (December 2014)

Harry Partch videos

Charles Bernstein

Dean Drummond narrates this German documentary on Harry Partch:

An earlier BBC documentary on Partch

The world swirls around me
It's a mystery I'm here at all
The world swirls around me
It's a mystery I'm standing here at all
Got a telegram from eternity
Said it was time for me to call

•

There's no time like the present
And the present's already gone
No time like the present
And the present it's already gone

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PoemTalk

From left: Laynie Browne, Harryette Mullen, Simone White

LISTEN TO THE SHOW

Simone White, Harryette Mullen, and Laynie Browne joined Al Filreis to talk a six-page section of Harryette’s new book Open Leaves. The book, subtitled “poems from earth,” was published by Black Sunflowers Poetry Press of London in 2023. The section discussed by the group is titled “Chasing Dirt” and consists of two epigraphs, a prose-poem paragraph, a mixed media artwork titled Silent Talks by Tiffanie Delune, and a sequence of three-line poems across four pages of four poems each. Since PennSound’s Harryette Mullen author page did not yet include a recording of Harryette performing poems from Open Leaves, we asked her to read “Chasing Dirt” at the start of the recorded session. The pages from Open Leaves are available HERE.

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