Inspiring
Heights:
Joan Tower
by Peter Aaron
““... My father was a mining engineer, and when
I was nine his work took him and the family to Bolivia, Chile,
and Peru,” recalls Tower, who these days lives in Red
Hook...
... I had a nanny of Incan descent who would take me to
the Saints Days celebrations in La Paz [Bolivia], where they
let me play along on the native percussion instruments. That’s
where I developed my love for percussion, dance, and rhythm.”
Thanks to a succession of piano teachers, she discovered Beethoven,
Chopin, Debussy, and other influential greats.
After the family moved back to the States, Tower studied
composition at Vermont’s Bennington College and at Columbia
University, where she received master’s and doctorate
degrees. While in New York she fell in with the rigorously
exacting movement known as serialism (which uses sets of musical
elements like note length, silence, and volume arranged into
patterns without regard for “traditional” tonality),
gaining inspiration firsthand from two of the approach’s
leading paragons, Milton Babbitt and Charles Wuorinen. She
joined the Bard faculty in 1972 after making a name for herself
as the writer of such complex works as “Prelude for
Five Players” (1963) and “Hexachords” (1970).
But eventually Tower found herself becoming increasingly
alienated from the intensely regimented serialist style. In
1973, she attended a performance of French composer Olivier
Messiaen’s otherworldly “Quartet for the End of
Time,” which had an immediate, galvanizing effect on
her artistic direction. “I was flabbergasted by its
simplicity, its directness,” she says...CONTINUE...
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