William Winant Plays Peter Garland on Cold Blue

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

Tomorrow Cold Blue Music will release its latest album of the music of Peter Garland. The entire album is devoted to a single composition, a nine-movement suite entitled The Basketweave Elegies. The music was scored for solo vibraphone; and the performer on the album is William Winant, no stranger to those that follow contemporary music performances in the San Francisco Bay Area. For those that do not wish to wait until sunrise tomorrow, Amazon.com has created a Web page for processing pre-orders.

My wife and I probably first encountered Garland’s music after we returned from Singapore in 1995. That was when we found his Walk in Beauty CD, which presented performances by pianist Aki Takahashi and the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. The trio of violinist David Abel, pianist Julie Steinberg, and percussionist Winant had formed in 1984; and we had seen them in performance at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art later in that decade. While we knew nothing about Garland when we purchased the album, all of the performers on Walk in Beauty motivated us to purchase the album. Since that time we have acquired a moderate number of Garland albums, the most recent of which have been on Cold Blue.

Ironically, I have had very little contact with listening to his music in concert performances. As might be guessed, my primary link to the performance of his music was pianist Sarah Cahill. Ironically, her performance of the six-movement Walk in Beauty suite for solo piano took place at the first Old First Concerts program for the current year.

Garland’s approach to composition has been described as “radical consonance.” There is a simplicity in his approach to structure that escorts the ear on its journey through each of the movements that he assembles for a suite structure. The structure for The Basketweave Elegies dates back to medieval structures in which a “refrain chorus” alternates with distinctive “verse” movements.

The music was conceived as an homage to the late artist Ruth Asawa, whose woven structures figured significantly among her many creations. Thus, one of the best ways to approach listening to the album as a whole is to appreciate the interleaving of thematic content, both within and between the suite’s movements. (It goes without saying that Winant’s execution of Garland’s score contributes significantly to guiding that listening approach!)