Ron Drummond

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ronald Norman Drummond (born 17 October 1959, in Seattle) is an American writer, editor, and independent scholar.

Contents 1 Writer 2 Editor 3 Scholar 4 Designer 5 Traveler 6 External links

[edit] Writer

Ron Drummond is the author of "The Sonic Rituals of Pauline Oliveros" [1] (Uncle Jam and The Music Paper of New York, 1986); a critical fiction about the novels of Steve Erickson, "The Frequency of Liberation" [2] (SF Eye, 1993); "Ducré in Euphonia: Ideal and Influence in Berlioz" (2003 Cambridge Music Festival Programme, Cambridge UK, 2003); and the introductory essays for the 8-volume edition in score and parts of The Vienna String Quartets of Anton Reicha (Merton Music[3], London, 2006), among numerous other essays, fictions, reviews, and interviews.

[edit] Editor

As an editor, Drummond has worked extensively with the novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany, most notably on the essay collections The Straits of Messina (Serconia Press, 1989) and Longer Views (Wesleyan University Press, 1996), the novel They Fly at Çiron (Incunabula, 1993), collection Atlantis: Three Tales (Incunabula/Wesleyan, 1995), and a novel-in-progress, Shoat Rumblin (2002); he was the publisher of Çiron and Atlantis. Drummond is also a four-time proofreader and editorial redactor of Delany's most famous novel, Dhalgren (Bantam Books, 1974; Wesleyan University Press, 1996; Vintage Books, 2001); because of his work, the Third and later printings of the Vintage edition of this typographically complex novel are considered by the author to be the most accurate rendering of the text ever published. Delany writes, "Ron's editorial acumen is the highest I have encountered in a professional writing career of more than thirty years." In March 2006, Drummond was an invited lecturer at a two-day international academic conference on Delany's life and work held at SUNY Buffalo, where he gave a talk on "Editing Samuel R. Delany".

Drummond has also worked extensively with novelist John Crowley, publishing Crowley's short story collection Antiquities (Incunabula, 1993), editing the novels Dæmonomania (Bantam Books, 2000) and the electronic versions of Ægypt and Love & Sleep (ElectricStory.com, 2002). He is currently preparing a museum-quality 25th anniversary edition [4] of Crowley's classic 1981 novel Little, Big, featuring the art of Peter Milton, a critical introduction by Harold Bloom, and the typographical design of John D. Berry. Crowley writes, "Ron's work [on Dæmonomania] was at one end meticulous and painstaking, and at the other large-spirited and helpful with the biggest questions of the book."

[edit] Scholar

An independent scholar, Drummond is an excavator and advocate of the music of several Czech composers of the Classical Era, especially Anton Reicha (1770-1836) and Pavel Vranický (1756-1808). He spearheaded the movement to restore Reicha's string quartets to the repertoire, co-editing (with Henrik Löwenmark) the first edition in 200 years of the eight Vienna quartets, and facilitating several modern Reicha premieres by string quartets in the U.S. and Europe, most notably of the G major quartet Opus 48 No. 2 in a concert by the Coull Quartet at the 2003 Cambridge [UK] Music Festival. In the 1970s, Drummond collaborated with his father, physicist James E. Drummond, on a system for satellite-based solar power collection and transmission; their papers on the topic were included in several conference proceedings and in the published committee hearings of the Space Science and Technology Subcommittee of the U.S. House of Representatives (1976).

[edit] Designer

From September 2002 through June 2003, Drummond created an original design for the World Trade Center Memorial called A Garden Stepping into the Sky. A group of interested Seattleites sent Drummond to New York City in December 2002 for three weeks to talk with New Yorkers and concerned officials about his design; he met with top officers of the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and the Port Authority of New York and New Jersey. Praised by New York novelist and critic Samuel R. Delany and architecture critic Herbert Muschamp, Drummond's design was the focus of a documentary by the award-winning independent filmmaker Gregg Lachow and was featured on CNN.com and Seattle's KOMO-TV News. Drummond submitted the Garden Steps to the official international design competition for the WTC Memorial in June 2003; it was among the 5,200 submissions not chosen.

[edit] Traveler

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, Drummond hitchhiked extensively throughout the United States and Canada. He spent the winter of 1978-79 at the Stillpoint Hermitage of Gia-fu Feng, a Taoist Monastery in the Colorado Rockies, and served as caretaker of the high California desert land of Grandfather Semu Huaute, the Chumash Indian shaman, for most of 1985. His first visit to the Isle of Skye in December 2003 provided the point of departure for "Broken Seashells," [5] an essay/meditation on ancestral memory and the music of Jethro Tull, published in the Fall Winter 2005-06 issue (#4) of the CalArts literary journal Black Clock.

Ron Drummond currently lives in Troy, New York.

[edit] External links

• On-line resume with links
• Dreaming of Dao Gaia
• Broken Seashells
• The Sonic Rituals of Pauline Oliveros
• The Frequency of Liberation
• A Garden Stepping into the Sky
• No Royal Directive: Joseph Haydn and the String Quartet
• Jupiter in the Age of Enlightenment
• Aperçu of Apotheosis Beethoven dancing
• Czech Classicism: The Sweat of the Brow
• The String Quartets of Anton Reicha
• Anton Reicha: A Biographical Sketch
• On First Hearing the Stochastic Kaleidophon of Carter Scholz
• The Dumpster Concerto
• Merton Music String Chamber Music Catalog 2006/2007
• The 25th Anniversary Edition of John Crowley's Little, Big