In 1952, Mills College students banded together with professional musicians from around Oakland, taught themselves how to play Harry Partch’s array of strange, self-made instruments, and put on the composer’s King Oedipus.

Oedipus garnered a surprising amount of national coverage (surprising in that it got any at all), including (most likely) the newsreel footage that Open Culture posted on its website yesterday.

In this report, the announcer identifies cloud-chamber bowls “derived from atomic research” (!) and a 72-stringed kithara as byproducts of Partch’s search for “the elusive tones that exist between the notes of a regular piano.”

Whether you think Partch was “kooky,” as Open Culture puts it, or not (see the comments following the article), this newsreel is intriguing in that it takes Partch’s search for new musical resources seriously. The tone is not jokey or disbelieving, but straight-up, delivered with the same seriousness as the latest update on the virtual front of the Cold War.

Maybe it was because he was a communist, but you don’t hear much about Wallingford Riegger anymore. Two years before Riegger went in front of the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1957, Gilbert Chase made a point in his book America’s Music of singling out the composer as “the leading native-born American composer who composes with twelve tones.”

Granted, that’s a pretty small group to be out in front of, but you get the point: Riegger was generally well respected, a composer who had emerged from the hotbed of avant-garde musical activity in 1920s New York City with a style at once daring and grounded in traditional technique. He was flaky, but not too flaky.

Dichotomy (1931-2) is one of his earliest works that typify what Riegger was all about, the first piece of his that showed the maturity he would later exhibit in his third and fourth symphonies.

His earliest success here in the US (he studied in Germany for a few years) was his Study in Sonority.

On Facebook, Joe McKesson celebrated the birthday of Roy Harris (1898-1979) yesterday.

Part II is here. Harris’s Third Symphony (1939) is his most famous work, but I also like the music on the Louisville Orchestra’s recordings from 1960: his concert piece Kentucky Spring, Violin Concerto, and Symphony No. 5, all written in the late 1940s.

As Beth Levy points out, you’ll see the words log cabin, Oklahoma, and Lincoln in the opening sentence of almost every biography ever written about Roy Harris.

Although he was a Sooner for only five years, almost everyone in music circles identified him as being quintessentially Western. Arts patron Mary Churchill had this to say about her meeting with Harris in Paris, where he was studying in the late 1920s: “[he was] wild and worn; but gave off a wonderful western farmer air in the middle of the Place de la Concorde.”

Serge Koussevitzky said that “nobody has captured in music the essence of American life–its vitality, its greatness, its strength–so well as Roy Harris.” That Harris shared a birthday with Lincoln–both were born on February 12–only added to the mystique.

Harris (1898-1979) certainly didn’t dispel any of the myth making, and even helped cultivate it. He was a lot like Bob Dylan that way: both built personas to promote themselves that have ended up enveloping–and even overshadowing–their music.