Other Minds is pleased to inaugurate Other Minds Books with Peter Garland’s work of memoir and criticism, Ingram Marshall: A Personal and Musical Appreciation. The composer Peter Garland met the composer Ingram Marshall in 1970; both were students during the early, golden years of The California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) learning electronic music and composition from Morton Subotnick, James Tenney, and Harold Budd, as well as Javanese gamelan from Robert Brown. Out of this Marshall was able to distill his groundbreaking early work for acoustic instruments, fixed media, and synthesizers in which he often utilized what would become one of his signatures: a Balinese gambuh flute. These compositions were the preliminaries for a series of masterpieces that critics often refer to as “post-minimalist”—Fog Tropes, Alcatraz, and Savage Altars, to name a few. For the last decade or so of his life, Marshall taught a new generation of composers at Yale, most famously the pianist Timo Andres, who wrote a touching remembrance of his former teacher for the New York Times.

Garland’s book begins with the author hearing the news of Marshall’s death and then turns into a memoir of their glory days in the orange groves (and clothes-optional swimming pools) of CalArts and then their shared years in the Bay Area drinking the newly ascendant California reds between premiers of the music that would make their names. Having laid the background of Ingram his friend and fellow student, Garland turns to Marshall’s music and spends fifty pages giving both a primer and master-class to the music of one of the most important, and least attended to, American composers of the past fifty years.