Peter Garland: From Vibraphone to Pipe Organ

According to my archives, I have not written about the music of Peter Garland for over two years. My last encounter was a solo vibraphone performance by William Winant of a nine-movement suite entitled The Basketweave Elegies. On that occasion, I cited Garland’s music as having been described as “radical consonance.” That concept reminds me of my student days at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, when I enjoyed many enthusiastic discussions with a graduate student in music at Boston University. I remember that, in the middle of an intense argument over serial techniques, she burst out, “You want to know what the music of the future will be? It’s triads!”

Cover of the album being discussed (from its Amazon.com Web page)

There is no shortage of triads in Garland’s music. Nevertheless, he knows how to deploy them in imaginatively engaging progressions. His latest album is a seven-movement composition for pipe organ whose full title is “Plain Songs: ‘Love Comes Quietly’: (after Robert Creeley).” Creeley’s influence is revealed not only in the program note on the CD sleeve by Garland but also by the poem itself:    

Love comes quietly,
finally drops
about me, on me,
in the old ways.
 
What did I know
thinking myself
able to go
alone all the way.

Three of the movements have been given titles. Two of those titles reflect the stillness of the composer’s “radical consonance:” the fifth (“The Maze of Longing”) and the last (“Stone, / like stillness”). The third, on the other hand, is a set of variations on a medieval planctus (plaint). The source is “Planctus de obitu Karoli” (lament on the death of Charlemagne). Ironically, this is the shortest track on the album; and I must confess that I have yet to sort out the theme from the variations!

In that context it would be fair to say that the composer is more focused on mood than on structure. Creeley’s poem seems to reflect the emergence of revelation. It would thus probably be fair to say that Garland had composed music for meditation, leaving the nature of the meditation itself entirely up to the listener. From a personal point of view, I have to confess that I have never been particularly good at meditation. Nevertheless, I had little trouble focusing my attention on each of the seven movements of “Plain Songs.”