Peter Garland: Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1)
Cold Blue

The enigmatic mysteries associated with wintertime moon viewing is captured by musicologist and composer Peter Garland on his latest Cold Blue release. Presented in six parts, Moon Viewing Music is realized on this thirty-four-minute recording by percussionist William Winant, a new-music champion who's appeared on hundreds of recordings by esteemed artists such as Roscoe Mitchell, Joan Jeanrenaud, and John Zorn, using three large knobbed gongs and one large tam-tam.

Moon viewing can be done at any time of year, of course, but for Garland the activity is at its most transfixing during the winter, when the moon rises over landscapes blanketed by snow and strewn with leaf-stripped trees. Under such conditions, even the darkest night sees a setting eerily illuminated by moonlight, and abetted by the absence of animal, bird, and insect sounds the setting takes on a disarmingly lonely quality, what Garland refers to as “an inscrutable stillness.”

Neither the gong nor the tam-tam is a conventionally melodic instrument, yet in using three of the former Garland is able to exploit pitch contrasts to suggest melody. However, because that melodic potential is circumscribed by the instrumentation, the work exemplifies a minimalistic and even somewhat ambient character when the melodies generated by the gongs are so unadorned. Such qualities are immediately evident in the opening “Living alone in the woods…” and subsequent “Even more so…” when the gongs' simple oscillations in pitch alternate with the understated accents of the tam-tam and the vibrational aura generated by the gongs. Resonance and decay also become key aspects of the sound design, too, when space is maximized in the writing and score.

In keeping with the stillness associated with moon viewing, the parts unfold slowly and with the pitches low. A poetic character is also present in the work that's reinforced by the fact that each piece is paired with a haiku or short poem, a move that explicitly suggests connections between the words and sound material. While the six parts form a unified whole, there are subtle differences between them, whether it be rooted in formal structure or mood. Whereas much of the material assumes a rather meditative character, “Only the moon…,” for example, exhibits an urgency verging on agitation.

March 2018