Liner Notes:

Between Time is a piece for solo percussionist and fourteen layers of bowed percussion. The piece began during the spring of 2020. As concert life went quiet during the pandemic, I found myself writing algorithms: mathematical equations that germinate into databases of notes and harmonies – seeds for musical worlds. Like a personal Goldberg Variations, I would leave these musical generators playing in the living room all afternoon long.

Between Time was a particular algorithm that I kept returning to one afternoon after the next. After a year of living with the piece, I decided to find a way to notate the music for acoustic instruments. I am overjoyed to hear the results in Michael's sensitive performance.

-- Matt Sargent

The Basketweave Elegies is a nine-movement work for solo vibraphone by composer Peter Garland. It takes its title from two sources: firstly, it is partially written in homage to the late sculptor and visual artist Ruth Asawa, famed for intricate, hanging sculptures composed of small pieces of iron wire that she bent into place by hand. Secondly, it references the traditional practice of basket-weaving. Garland finds resonance between the careful, painstaking placement of Asawa’s wires and the woven canes of basket weavers with his own compositional practice. All are centered around intention and care.

The work itself is a reflection on traditional skills and activities and how our culture attributes value to certain pursuits and not to others. Garland’s music is a celebration and lament of these tasks that are often reduced to chores – tasks to be automated and accelerated to match cycles of production. Why mold harsh materials into place at risk of injury for the sake of something that will ostensibly serve as an object hanging in a gallery? Why spend hours weaving a single basket? Surely such items could be made more quickly and safely with the use of machinery. Garland’s question is: what would be lost if they were?

-- Michael Jones


Bios:

Michael Jones is a percussionist based in San Diego, California. His creative and scholarly work focuses on touch, resonance, rhythm, and the phenomenology of percussion objects. He regularly appears with the percussion ensemble red fish blue fish and other contemporary music projects around southern California. He has performed on the the Ojai Music Festival, LA Philharmonic’s Noon-to-Midnight Festival, the Other Minds Festival, the Dog Star Orchestra Festival, and the Hartford New Music Festival. He has completed residences at the Nief-Norf Summer Festival (Tennessee), the Darmstadt Courses for New Music (Germany), the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity (Canada) and others. He can be heard on the Naxos, New Focus, Edition Wandelweiser, Cold Blue, and New World labels. He holds degrees from the University of Hartford, where he studied with Benjamin Toth, and the University of California, San Diego, where he studies with Steven Schick.

Matt Sargent (b. 1984) is a composer, guitarist, recording engineer, and music technologist based in upstate New York, where he is an assistant professor of music at Bard College. His music grows from interests in resonance, the making/breaking of patterns, and computer models of musical thought. Over the last decade, his work has focused extensively on musical algorithms and real-time notation systems, which can be heard in his compositions and technical collaborations with other artists.
On his 2018 release, Ghost Music, Bill Meyer writes, “this music isn’t about following in anyone’s footsteps; it uses bare resources to establish a bounded and essential place.” (The Wire Magazine) Recordings of his music can be found on Cold Blue Music, A Wave Press, Marginal Frequency, Weighter Recordings, and Sawyer Editions. As a recording engineer, his production credits include Black Truffle Records, Cold Blue Music, New World Records, and Cantaloupe Music, among many others.

Peter Garland (b. 1952) is a composer, writer, and publisher of Soundings Press. A student of James Tenney and Harold Budd, much of Garland's work could be considered post-minimal although many of his post-minimal works such as "The Days Run Away" (1971) were written in the early 1970s at the same time as the first minimalist works. He is also an expert on Native American music, and on the music of Silvestre Revueltas. He is the author of Gone Walkabout: Essays 1991-. Garland started his Soundings Press series in 1971 after attending a publishing workshop with Dick Higgins at CalArts.