Solo Piano Music by Peter Garland on Cold Blue

from the Amazon.com Web page for the recording being discussed

Yesterday this site announced that the latest album of music by John Luther Adams would be released by Cold Blue Music this coming Friday. On that same date Cold Blue will also release a new album of two piano compositions by Peter Garland, “Three Dawns” and “Bush Radio Calling.” Once again, Amazon.com has created a Web page to process pre-orders for this new release.

Both of the selections on this album have a literary infrastructure. Each of the three movements of “Three Dawns” is based on a poem by Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo. Indeed Rabéarivelo was the one to collect those poems under the title Three Dawns. The poems were originally written in French; but Garland first encountered them in English translation, included in an anthology entitled The Negritude Poets. His three movements were composed between 1981 and 1982. Sadly, limitations of “space in packaging” did not allow for the poems’ texts, or a summary of those texts, to be included with the recording. Thus, at best the attentive listener is likely to be drawn to the moody quietude of Garland’s “responses” to the “call” of Rabéarivelo’s texts.

A bit more background is provided for “Bush Radio Calling.” This was composed in 1992 in New Zealand. It was written for an experimental music-theater work entitled Just Them Walking, which was presented by the avant-garde theater company Red Mole. Garland’s album is dedicated to the memory of the two founders of this company, Alan Brunton and Sally Rodwell. The title “Bush Radio Calling” refers to a network of Aboriginal radio stations operating in the Australian outback.

In this case there is room on the CD sleeve to include a synopsis of Just Them Walking, and the track listing gives titles for each of the nine movements in “Bush Radio Calling.” That said, I have to confess that I had more than a little difficulty aligning the movements with the narrative of the synopsis. My guess is that this is one of those you-had-to-be-there experiences.

In reviewing my past experiences with listening to recordings of Garland’s music, I found that I was drawn primarily to his capacity for imaginative approaches to sonority, particularly when working with percussion instruments. On this new album the solo piano music is performed by Ron Squibbs; and, to some extent, he appreciates the diversity of piano sonorities that arise from the marks that Garland committed to paper. Nevertheless, I have to confess that, more often than not, I felt as if each of these tracks would withdraw into a rhetoric of blandness that never really established a firm grip on my attention.

This, of course, is a matter of personal taste; and others may have different opinions!