Peter Garland is the conscience of American music. At a Henry Cowell conference in the mid-'90s, he gave a long diatribe attacking everything wrong with the American musical establishment, not excluding the conference itself - and received a long standing ovation. Which he deserved. As editor of the important journal Soundings, Garland published much of the most important music, by Nancarrow, Lou Harrison, Tenney, Budd, and many, many others, long before anyone else took an interest.

But the fascinating dichotomy about Garland is the contrast between his angry, intransigent musicologist persona and the delicate, intuitive beauty of his music. He wrote some early noisy works with sirens and huge piano clusters under Varese's influence, like Three Strange Angels (on Border Music below), but his mature music is written in soft, repeating melodic and textural figures that never come back the same way twice. The two long piano pieces on the Walk in Beauty album - Walk in Beauty and Jornada del Muerto - are especially beautiful, the former explicitly evoking the ghost of Erik Satie at one point, the latter a long journey through mysterious yet comforting musical landscapes. There are a lot of gorgeous, major Garland works not yet on disc: his string quartet "In praise of Poor Scholars", the Roque Dalton Songs. Luckily, they get played in New York by Essential Music. - Kyle Gann

Border Music, What Next? Recordings WN0008

Walk in Beauty, New Albion NA052CD

Nana + Victorio, Avant AVAN 012

Back to Recommended Composers

return to the home page