Inspiring Heights:
Joan Tower
by Peter Aaron
As one of America’s foremost contemporary composers, Bard College
professor Joan Tower has racked up quite a healthy shelf of honors
during her nearly 50-year career: inductions into both the American
Academy of Arts and Letters (1998) and Harvard University’s Academy
of Arts and Sciences (2004); a full concert of her work for Carnegie
Hall’s Making Music Series (2004); an honorary doctorate from
the New England Conservatory (1972); prestigious posts as composer-in-residence
with the Orchestra of St. Luke’s (since 1997), Utah’s Deer
Valley Festival (since 1998), the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra (1985-1988),
Connecticut’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival (1995-2003), and
the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center (2007-present); numerous
commissions from the New York Philharmonic; and the lucrative, highly
coveted Grawemeyer Award for musical composition (1990), of which she
is the first female recipient.
This year, however, Tower found herself up for a true trifecta, garnering
not one but three Grammy nominations for 2007’s Made in America
(Naxos Records), her latest recording. The disc, which was recorded
by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra conducted by Leonard Slatkin, received
nods in the categories of Classical Album and Orchestral Performance,
and the title work itself was nominated for Best Classical Contemporary
Composition. While the litany of above prizes from the conservatory
world is enough to make any composer salivate, the Grammy recommendations
represent (this goes to press prior to the awards ceremony, which was
set for February 10) a whole new level: acknowledgement by the recording
industry, the chance to mingle and get acquainted with her peers in
the pop field, and, at long last, some real recognition from far outside
the, er, ivory tower of the classical realm. But guess what? She didn’t
go.
“No, I’m not,” says the renowned composer and pianist,
who turns 70 this year. “It’s partially because of the
cost of going; my husband and I would have to pay our own airfare,
and [the Recording Academy, which runs the event] wants another $300
for him to get in. Plus I would have to buy a fancy dress to wear.
I’m flattered to have been nominated, of course, but from what
I’ve heard it’s really all about the pop and country genres.
Jazz and classical are like fourth-class citizens at the Grammys, which
is a shame.” A shame, indeed. But few modern composers have done
as much as Tower to reach across the seemingly unspannable divide between
popular and classical forms and to promote the work of their living
peers. Over the years, she has participated in countless panels and
lectures and organized several festivals honoring female composers.
And as a composition it’s “Made in America” that
best embodies her populist approach. A sweepingly dynamic piece commissioned
by 65 community orchestras from all around the U.S., the work ingeniously
uses a motif from “America the Beautiful” as its theme. “It
allows people to relate to the piece, no matter who they are,” explains
Tower. Since its inception the piece has been performed by orchestras
in all 50 states, with Tower working directly with and conducting several
of them. “Made in America,” as well as its namesake CD’s
companion compositions, “Tambor” and “Concerto for
Orchestra,” is infused with the composer’s rich lyricism,
splashy colors, energetic rhythms, dramatic dynamics, and explosive
percussion—the final trait one the New Rochelle-born orchestrator
attributes to the years she spent in South America as a child.
“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. Soon after, Tower began to adopt the
graceful and organic technique for which she is now so revered; taking
a leaf from her geologist father, several of Tower’s greatest
efforts reference the colorful worlds of minerals and nature—“Black
Topaz,” “Platinum Spirals” (both 1976), “Silver
Ladders” (1986), “Big Sky” (2000), the ballet “Stepping
Stones” (1993), and “Sequoia” (1981), which resoundingly
evokes the imposing majesty of a massive redwood tree by utilizing
a full symphonic orchestra and some 25 percussion instruments.
“What impresses me about Joan’s music is its directness—how
it is projected straight to the listener, and that includes the performers,” says
fellow composer, Bard professor, and Grawemeyer recipient George Tsontakis. “There
is no sleight-of-hand, no parlor tricks; what you hear is what you
get. And what you get is about inventive rhythms, robust direction
forward, and dimensional clarity. But she probably would rather I just
tell you that it knocks your socks off—and okay, it often does
that as well.”
One of Tower’s works has knocked the socks off many in the classical
world, though not by design. Commissioned in 1986 by the Houston Symphony
to write a fanfare in honor of its 150th anniversary, she composed
the first of her five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman, which has since
become her most lauded and performed series of compositions. But the
series has also provoked much controversy, as many have taken its title
as an affront to both Aaron Copland’s “Fanfare for the
Common Man” and the still largely male-dominated conservatory. “[The
title] is an homage to Copland and to women, that’s all it is,” she
says. “But people have made such a big deal about it being some
political thing. I’m definitely a feminist, but I never thought
that [the series] would become such political pieces.”
Of course, given the current state of the world and America’s
place within it, many are likely to see “Made in America”—with
its episodes of crashing dissonance and the liberties it takes with
our unofficial national anthem—as yet another protest piece. “The
beauty of [“America the Beautiful”] is undeniable and I
loved working with it as a musical idea,” writes Tower in the
liner notes to Made in America. “Perhaps it was my unconscious
reaction to the challenge of how do we keep America beautiful, dignified,
and free. [In the piece, the “America the Beautiful” motif]
is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep
interrupting, interjecting, unsettling it, but “America the Beautiful” keeps
resurfacing in different guises, as if to say, “I’m still
here, ever changing, but holding my own.”
Much like the composer herself.
Tribute concerts in honor of Joan Tower’s 70th birthday will
take place on February 23 at 2pm at the Chelsea Museum, 22nd Street
and 11th Avenue, New York, and on February 24 at 2pm at DIA:Beacon
in Beacon.
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