This strangely beautiful and sometimes clangorous four-movement piano solo is performed by the much-lauded pianist and new music champion Sarah Cahill, who commissioned the work.
The composer writes about the piece: “Each of the transparent and self-contained movements takes as inspiration a Chinese poem or Japanese haiku…. I explore the quality of resonance in the piano: not just the notes played on the keyboard, but the sense of echo and fade produced by a very deliberate use of pedaling, and the sustaining and release of piano keys after notes and chords are sounded. It creates a sense of timbral color and acoustic perspective…. Each movement is like a single image, simply stated with relatively little temporal or thematic development….”
1 Spring View: “The nation is ruined, but the mountains and rivers remain.” (after Tu Fu)
2 “Summer grass / all that remains / of young warriors’ dreams.” (after Basho)
3 Occasional Poem on an Autumn Day: “When I’m at peace I let everything go.” (after Ch’eng Hao)
4 “A snowy morning / and smoke from the kitchen roof— / it is good.” (after Buson)
“Sarah Cahill, new music’s tireless advocate.” —New York Times
“Apart from being an exceptional pianist and muse to scores of inventive composers, Sarah Cahill is a first-rate communicator who specializes in connecting the music she plays to broader streams of everyday life.” —Time Out New York
“Sarah Cahill…as tenacious and committed an advocate as any composer could dream of” —San Francisco Chronicle
“Sarah Cahill… giving us the benefit of her phenomenal technique, her instinctive command of recent aesthetics, and quite possibly the most interesting repertoire of any pianist around.” –Village Voice
"Garland’s After The Wars, commissioned and performed by pianist Sarah Cahill, alternates ruggedness and delicacy, oppressive weight fringed with luminosity in a powerful evocation of desolation and scarred hope.”—Julien Cowley, The Wire magazine
“Timbre over melody, near and far as themes, resonance as the main focus; around these principles Peter Garland composed After the Wars. The piece, in four sections, covers a tight twenty minutes. . . . In the area of development in time or of themes, little happens, but in the dynamic depth of harmony and interplay between keys, strings and soundboard, Garland and Cahill reach the intense quality of Chinese poems and Japanese haiku that served as inspiration. It seems so to speak for itself: the expressive power of sound itself is a primary concern, but with his radical sense of tonality Garland shows that this is anything but obvious. A student of Harold Budd and James Tenney, Garland also excels in experimenting with an interplay between beauty and innovation…. It’s a seesaw also between the cerebral and the physical, between the seemingly quite easy and the handsomely complex. Cahill plays After the Wars with a velvety touch that twinkles and chirps in the more melodic passages. She also animates Garland’s resonances with a passion that thunders and rumbles. Roaring and raging swirls of construction and dismantling (and back again) offer sparks of comforting hope.” —KindaMusik (The Netherlands)
“Reaffirming its status as one of the most exciting innovations in the recording and marketing of modern composition since the introduction of magnetic tape, Cold Blue Music‘s series of “singles”—a new, minimalist or post-minimalist work rarely longer than twenty minutes, premiered on its own disc in the label’s usual beautiful packaging—issues three new gems…. Pianist Sarah Cahill plays Peter Garland‘s After the Wars without pardon. Garland explains that the agonistic nature of the piece reflects the fact that even after the guns go silent, ‘war leaves scars that take a long time, if ever, to heal.’ Each movement is based on a Chinese or Japanese poem. ‘Summer grass / all that remains / of young warriors’ dreams’ is the most bellicose. Apparently, in the region, summer is traditionally the season of war. And of course the bombs were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the month of August.”—Stephen Fruitman, Igloo Magazine
“There is an interesting use of space and time in this work. On the surface, it’s quite simple, but the sounds develop over the span of the four movements as you slowly grow accustomed to the underlying structure…and after listening to this disc several times, I wanted to hear more. I guess that, in itself, is a recommendation.”—Kirk McElhearn, MusicWeb International
credits
released September 1, 2015
Sarah Cahill, piano
After the Wars (October 2007 / January–April 2008, Winnegance, Maine)
was commissioned by Sarah Cahill, to whom it is dedicated.
Peter Garland is a composer, world traveler, musicologist, and writer whose music is always informed by his well-traveled
ear and intense personal vision. “[Garland] is an avatar of an experimental American tradition…a composer of mesmerizing music; and in many ways, the musical conscience of my generation.” (Kyle Gann, Chamber Music magazine) His music appears on eight Cold Blue Music releases....more
side a: a prestigious engineer dies, goes to heaven, and marvels at the construction of the golden gate
side b: lazy summer evenings at sunset spent with friends chamber pot blues
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