Peter Garland

Peter Garland (Portland, Maine, 1952) is an American composer who also distinguished himself as an editor and writer on music. He trained at the California Institute of the Arts, where he studied with Tenney and Budd and gained his BFA in 1972. Like some of his teachers, he kept his distance from both the academic and the commercial spheres.

His name is linked above all to the journal Soundings, which he edited and directed between 1971 and 1991. Its pages carried scores by avant-garde and experimental American composers such as Lou Harrison, Nancarrow and Partch, alongside works by writers of his own generation. Garland travelled extensively and was influenced by the musics of Mexico and Indonesia, a debt reflected in his frequent use of exotic instrumentation.

His output is small and lyrical. A large part of his production is for piano, and he wrote several pieces for the pianists Herbert Henck and Aki Takahashi. His most ambitious work is The Conquest of Mexico, a dance drama with shadow puppetry. In more recent works, such as Love Songs and Another Sunrise, he combines broad, open sonorities with a harsh rhythmic vitality, alternating these with passages of restrained sweetness. In 1993 he received a fellowship from the German Academic Exchange Service (DAAD) in Berlin, and in 1994 he was awarded a grant by the Asian Cultural Council to study and travel in Japan.

Garland is remembered both for his catalogue of instrumental and vocal works and for his editorial work, which gave visibility to a generation of experimental creators. His essays on music and American culture, as well as his study of Silvestre Revueltas, complete a career that links composition with the dissemination of contemporary music.