Peter Garland: Three Dawns and Bush Radio Calling
Cold Blue
Ipso facto, performances featuring a single performer and instrument present a composer's work and sensibility in its purest form. Consistent with that, the two solo piano pieces performed by Ron Squibbs on this new Cold Blue release offer an untainted portrait of Peter Garland's composing style. Long-time devotees of the label will likely be familiar with his work, given that he's been part of eight Cold Blue releases, but for those coming to his music anew, Three Dawns and Bush Radio Calling offers a fine entry point.
That said, these works, recorded at Mechanics Hall, Worcester, MA in August 2019 and September 2020, aren't pure artistic expressions in the sense of having no extra-musical connections. Composed in the early ‘80s, the three-movement Three Dawns is loosely based on texts by Malagasy poet Jean-Joseph Rabéarivelo (1901-37), and the ten-part Bush Radio Calling, written a decade later in Island Bay, New Zealand, was created for Alan Brunton's surreal music-theatre piece Just Them Walking as presented by the experimental theatre company Red Mole.
Garland's bio characterizes him as not just composer but world traveler and musicologist, and certainly the impression crystallizes through the hearing of these pieces of someone whose work's informed by a wealth of travel experiences and time spent in far-flung locales. Of course, each listener hears music through a personal lens and invests that listening with a lifetime of associations (that includes me hearing a smidgen of “Jingle Bells” in “Mrs. Shadrock (Princesa Reprise),” the seventh movement of Bush Radio Calling). As I listen to these samplings of Garland's music, for example, I hear the sounds of New Zealand and Australia but not the strains of North America and the United Kingdom (he was, in fact, born in 1952 in Portland, Maine). I also hear the personal expression of a composer whose music feels as grounded in the folk music of a particular people and locale as scholarly study.
Written in Santa Fe, New Mexico, Three Dawns has had, in Garland's own words, “a difficult history due to its wide intervals and a notational problem in the first movement that has long baffled pianists,” but any such hurdles Squibbs overcomes in his gripping treatment. Two succinct parts bookend a plaintive and subtly regal central movement, the outer frames beguiling in their buoyant, sing-song character and interlacing patterns. It's the softly chiming middle one, however, that proves most stirring in the way it slowly, gracefully, and methodically unfurls for twelve resonant minutes.
Though the title of Bush Radio Calling refers to Aboriginal radio stations in the Australian outback, the play itself presents a surreal story-line. In the simplest of terms, Just Them Walking has citizens, directed by The Voice of Bush Radio, leaving urban blight behind for the Remote Experience Zone (REZ). Adventures ensue involving a killer dog spreading a deadly virus, a steamboat trip upriver to Hiruharama, and an on-boat pantomime performance by the El Niño Theater Company until the Bridge to Nowhere is reached and crossed. Garland himself participated in the production, which featured him as the pianist.
One needn't, of course, know the play details to derive listening satisfaction from the music, though awareness of them does help lend the music context. At the work's start, “Ringatu (Variations on a Chord by Dane Rudyar)” lives up to its billing in obsessively worrying over a chord, something “The Bridge to Nowhere” revisits at the work's semi-ecstatic close. Whereas a similar emphasis on block chords carries over into the aggressive second movement, “Visions of El Niño Doctor,” the subsequent “Visions of El Niño Cieguito” changes things up by alternating between loud and hushed episodes. A programmatic element also surfaces during “The Bellbird's Song” in chiming chords and patterns suggestive of bird vocalizations. Cumulatively, Bush Radio Calling advances like a journey down a winding river, with the trip abundant in vivid contrast and striking scenery. Perhaps the strongest compliment one might pay is to say how much hearing it makes one long to experience it as part of a newly enacted treatment of the play.July 2021