Peter Garland: Plain Songs: “Love Comes Quietly” (after Robert Creeley)
Cold Blue Music

Composer Peter Garland set a number of goals for himself in creating the organ work Plain Songs. Inspired by the writing style of poet Robert Creeley (1926–2005) and specifically his 1967 poem “Love Comes Quietly,” Garland aspired to write music that would share many of its qualities and be expressive, transparent, and clear. The result, a seven-movement setting commissioned by and written for organist Carson Cooman, achieves all of those goals and then some. Performed by Cooman on the C. B. Fisk Opus 139 organ at the Memorial Church of Harvard University in October 2024, Plain Songs manifests the simplicity, honesty, directness, and beauty of a quaker hymn. If anything, its humble, unadorned presentation amplifies the impact of music that speaks, like Creeley's writing, with a vernacular tongue.

In keeping with the humble character of the piece, Garland shares credit for the work by acknowledging the contributions Cooman made to the piece with respect to its timbral and textural qualities and to the collaborators' fellow producers Scott Fraser and Jim Fox. Listeners acquainted with the distinguished recordings Fox has released through Cold Blue will be equally well-acquainted with the large volume of music Garland has shared through the label. Plain Songs joins earlier releases such as The Basketweave Elegies (2023), Three Dawns and Bush Radio Calling (2021), Moon Viewing Music (Inscrutable Stillness Studies #1) (2018), After the Wars (2015), and String Quartets (2009), plus appearances on four of the label's anthologies. He's found a kindred spirit in Cooman, who's a contemporary music specialist and has had more than 300 works written for him by over 100 composers. Harvard's Memorial Church was a natural location for the recording of Plain Songs given that Cooman's currently Research Associate in Music and Composer in Residence at the site.

From the outset, Garland eschews grandiose, declamatory gestures for long, soothing tones that immediately ease the listener into the work's peaceful sound realm. A melancholy quality pervades the opening movement as tones gently overlap and intone, the material evoking the image of an organist playing at an empty country church in the 1800s and lost in the music. The timbral beauty of the Memorial Church organ resonates through the second movement when one plangent chord follows another. Its lamenting tone anticipates the subsequent movement, which carries the title “Variations on ‘Lament on the Death of Charlemagne'” and is suitably plaintive and in its dignified way poignant too. Animated by warm chords, the radiant fourth injects optimism into the work, after which the chorale-like fifth follows an intricate series of winding paths in “The Maze of Longing.” The rising patterns that introduce the sixth movement might call early Philip Glass to mind, but make no mistake: Garland's his own man. The earnest spirit that lends the music so much appeal remains firmly in place until the seventh part, “Stone,/Like stillness,” ushers the work to a harmonious close.

July 2025