Music for Falling From Trees

Album review

Composer and instrumentalist Peter Broderick was only 21 when he released Music for Falling from Trees, his fourth solo album. The half-hour piece was created as accompaniment for a dance by London-based choreographer Adrienne Hart. The score is essentially a tape montage Broderick created using music he performs on piano, violin, and viola. The seven movements, which Broderick describes as having both composed and improvisatory elements, are evocative soundscapes depicting the episodes in a life of a patient in a mental hospital. The sounds for the most part are lightly processed and have a ruminative, impressionistic quality that could be characterized as new age, but at moments of climax Broderick manipulates them almost beyond recognition, so there is an interesting variety to the score. Broderick has impressive experience as a rock musician (around the time of this recording, he was the violinist for the Danish experimental rock group Efterklang), and the rhythmic regularity and patterns of rock are discernible in many of the movements. This is not an acoustic piece, and the sound is intentionally somewhat rough and reverberant, aptly characterizing the subject of the dance. Broderick's piece should appeal to fans of new age music with a more sophisticated edge, and fans of new music that has a new age ambience.
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