Peter Garland: The Birthday Party, by Aki Takahashi

Peter Garland: The Birthday Party

by Aki Takahashi

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1.	The Birthday Party: I. The Toasts (Remembrances) 08:36	buy track
2.	The Birthday Party: II. Erik Satie Shows Up (Again) and Stays (Until the Bottle is Finished) 07:55	buy track
3.	The Birthday Party: III. The Birthday Cake 04:26	buy track
4.	The Birthday Party: IV. Afterwards. Autumn Evening (aki no kure) 07:26	buy track
5.	Blessingway: Night Song 08:07	buy track
6.	Blessingway: Daylight Song 07:08	buy track
7.	Amulet: I. First Movement 02:04	buy track
8.	Amulet: II. In Memoriam Shafi Hakim 03:41	buy track
9.	Amulet: III. March 01:42	buy track
10.	Amulet: IV. Fourth Movement 02:17	buy track
11.	Amulet: V. Homage to Harold Budd 04:49	buy track
12.	Amulet: VI. 2nd March 02:24	buy track
13.	Amulet: VII. "The Echo of Nothingness..." 03:25	buy track

about

On first hearing, the piano music of Peter Garland (b 1952) creates a feeling of dislocation, then astonishment: It is so very different from the contemporary concert music we are familiar with. The composer's intent, his emotional directness is immediate－despite the unusual sound world and different sense of time that these pieces exhibit. Time itself appears to be suspended, and rhythm, melody and harmony are transformed into quite different entities in a universe parallel to our own－as accessible but not quite of it.

The three pieces on this CD, The Birthday Party (2014), Blessingway (2011-12) and Amulet (After Roberto Bolaño) for 4 pianos (2010), are quite different in nature from much of Garland's previous writing for piano, more lyrical than dramatic in feeling. The Birthday Party in particular is the work of an artist looking back－pensive, even nostalgic, open to musical associations. The Birthday Party is explicitly a study in both memory and loss; in Garland's own words it is not just a "toast" to Aki Takahashi, the dedicatee, on her birthday, but also to ". . . those who are still with us [and to] our friends and loved ones who are no longer alive."

Blessingway takes its title from a Navajo ceremony, but its use here must be seen as reflecting a purely personal association of some kind for Garland rather than any literary or musical connection to the ceremony in the piece. It is generally broad and sonorous in character, with subtly changing chordal melodies in the right hand over prominent bass parts with their own independent rhythmic profile; a resonant field is created between treble and bass not unlike that which one finds in much of his percussion music.

Amulet was written for Aki Takahashi. She herself consecutively recorded all four parts before they were mixed down. Garland's original concept, explained in his introduction to the piece, was ". . . that these are not four separate pianos; but rather they form one big piano, the sum of their parts." The title Amulet references to a high degree a novel of the same name by the Chilean/Mexican writer Robert Bolaño (1953-2003), particularly its last five pages.

Amulet is in large part a humorous work, albeit one with a dark side. As Garland describes it, a comparison to some of the great comic actors of the silent screen era can help explicate some of the contradictions of his piece: "As the films of Chaplin and Keaton or the plays of Samuel Beckett show us, pathos can be the 'other side' of humor－which differentiates it from tragedy, which lacks that humorous aspect. So there is an element of humor and (restrained) melodrama in this music."

credits

released May 12, 2017

Aki Takahashi, piano

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New World Records Brooklyn, New York

Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc., which records under the label New World Records, was founded in 1975.

We are dedicated to the documentation of American music that is largely ignored by the commercial recording companies.

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