Still in his early twenties, Peter Broderick has the CV of a middle-aged journeyman. He's played a variety of stringed instruments for, like, every indie band in the Pacific Northwest. He moved to Copenhagen for a live stint with some mad Danes, Efterklang, and played on Library Tapes' A Summer Beneath the Trees. Amid all of this collaboration, he's eked out several of his own albums, ranging in style from post-classical (Float) to folk (Home). His catalog is consistently enjoyable and well-played, but we're still waiting for him to produce a major work. This isn't it, but it has a good excuse: Music For Falling From Trees is a score for a modern dance by Adrienne Hart, and standalone scores tend to be faintly anemic. It's like someone offering you half of a sandwich, then giving you just the bread. (There are some self-sufficient exceptions, like Jóhann Jóhannsson's Englabörn, which Music For Falling From Trees resembles.)
Broderick's score is surpassingly lovely, but it doesn't synthesize his influences into a unique voice-- "Patient Observation" is a dead-ringer for Kronos Quartet Performs Philip Glass, with a roundelay of longing strings conveying a lonely, enigmatic grandeur. "Electroconvulsive Shock", with its taut two-tone foundation, suggests the same affinity, and elsewhere, you'll hear unreconstructed echoes of Max Richter, Elodie Lauten, and many other composers of a post-minimal bent. Of course, trying on different voices is exactly what a musician Broderick's age should be doing. He wears them well, and will surely come into his own once he stops ticking items off of a to-do list and develops more focus. His development seems stunted only because of his prodigious output, which makes a brief career feel much longer than it is.
That said, fans of plain-old pretty (myself included) will get plenty of spins out of Music For Falling From Trees. It's musical air-freshener at worst, and inspired homage at best. The dance's themes of infirmity and redemption are writ large in the song titles, but it's Broderick's technique, not the narrative, that captivates. What you notice is the control of his pacing on "An Introduction to the Patient", the implacability with which lines of force gather on "Pill Induced Slumber", the liquid cadence of "The Path to Recovery". And standout track "The Dream" offers a hint as to what might well become Broderick's mature style-- heavenly drones spill into a light-footed dance for piano and pizzicato strings. It's a crystal-clear expression of an impulse that flits through most of Broderick's music, where he condenses folksy, jubilant themes out of masses of understated tone. It's exciting to hear his talent develop in something like real-time (given the fast pace of his output), as he finds his way toward a breakthrough that seems tantalizingly close at hand.
