Search - Peter Garland :: Walk In Beauty

Achingly beautiful minimalism

Jan P. Dennis | Monument, CO USA | 03/30/2004

(5 out of 5 stars)

"I live in on the outskirts of the desert Southwest, in Monument, Colorado. I have made numerous excursions-pilgrimages to the unique, blasted, spiritually-drenched landscape of Southern Utah/North-Central New Mexico depicted in this entirely remarkable disc. And I have never come away with anything other then entire awe. And I can say without equivocation that the music of Peter Garland captures the geographic splendor of this magnificent desolation as nothing else can.Minimalism, the MO of this disc, represents an entirely apposite approach to depicting the desperate glories of this stark, startling landscape. Endless azure sky; arid, mesquite-sage wilderness, dotted by buttes and mesas; no settlements for hundreds of kilometers: a wilderness, but one suffused with magic. Land of enchantment, indeed. How to capture its subtle, wayward, unharnessable glories? Live there. Learn its secrets. Drink deep of its subtle wisdom. Meditate on its eldritch beauty. And that's exactly what Peter Garland did.Others, notably Georgia O'Keeffe and Ansel Adams, have sought to capture its magic in paint on canvas and black and white photography. Indeed, entire communities (Santa Fe and Taos) have sprung up as graphic art-testimonies to its arcane, mysterious hold on the human spirit.Here, Peter Garland, a transplanted Easterner, lured by the indomitable magic of this landscape, has found, serendipitously, the perfect aural vehicle for its monumental splendors: The prodigious gifts of Aki Takahashi and the Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio. Takahashi, a pianist of magnificent and exceptional gifts, imbues the spacious compositions of Garland with a yearning, Sehnsuct-filled desperation/home-longing never before encountered in music. Space and sonority constitute her tools. Peculiar affinity, her method. These combine with Garland's visionary compositions to produce music never before heard, music of the highest accomplishment, music of ravishing beauty, music of uncompromising starkness and skeletal austerity. But of soul-devastating splendor.Think Tony Hillerman, William Least Heat Moon, Dances with Wolves, Geronimo, Dee Brown, Edward Abbey, purged of their anger, put to music, and you get a poor picture of the glorious enchantment offered up here. One of my all-time favorite discs."

Arresting beauty of suggestive simplicity and place

Rachel Abbinanti (tusai1@aol.com) | Chicago | 09/01/1999

(5 out of 5 stars)

"There is a very vibrant strain in American art that we rarely encounter, like an aesthetic still in exile,or one still submerged beneath the surface of market flash and postmodernist force fields. The Video artist Bill Viola has devoted his work to place and has written about it along with Lucy Lippard both have informed us of the rarely encountered mysterious cultural bound importance people attach to a place,a view of a modest mountain overlooking a quiet river near a forgotten oyster bar. Peter Garland's music has found an equivalent to this set of hidden cultural values of place. He emerged from the new generation of American composers rejecting the New York Establishment 12-Tone Serial language. Well being more West Coast bound his music has been forever more attuned with pure beauty without the European conceptual baggage that seemed to only grow into forever more convolutedness of concept."Walk in Beauty" for piano solo is a great example of Garland's musical language, dare I say language for that is a European perspective. His music more elicits,solicits again an evocative place, and a place, a sonoric one we all seem to know. One of simple melodic beauty, but not necessarily a predictable or a shaped one. Garland has an evocative interesting voice, and although he utilizes tonal and modal schemes,usually very static, his textures seem to drift gently,like wind chimes, chimes that interface with winds from the Gulf,lucious ones. In "Walk in Beauty" the extreme upper registers of the piano is utilized with a gentle repetition of single tones around an emerging melodic shape,with simple yet authoritative chords as punctuation. Likewise the inspired placeset in motion the more extended piano solo here "Jornada del Muerto"(Journey of the Dead One) and is about the vastness and emptiness of the forbidden American West, brings one (in Garland's words) "face-to-face with death". This piece elicits a real space in southern New Mexico,where Garland had resided. This is a multi-movement sonata-like work of density,but one that is penetrable,with modal like broken chords set off with missing registers in the center of the piano. We tend to hear then each hand's argument. Aki Takahashi is a gifted interpreter here, sensitive to Garland's voice. Abel-Steinberg-Winant Trio also are fine senstive players. It's curious how Garland's penchant for staticness of music materials resolves in an unpredictable beauty,where lines of the trio here seem to be a collective emotive argument, or not an argument at all, simply an affirmation of a simple melodic tale."