John Antes
Born March 24, 1740 in Frederick, Pennsylvania
Died December 17, 1811 in Bristol, England
Composed around 1780.
The earliest chamber music by an American-born composer was written in Egypt, published in London, dedicated to a Swedish diplomat, and lost for nearly 150 years. Around 1790, the prominent English music publisher John Bland issued a set of parts titled, in fractured Italian, “Tre Trii, per due Violini and Violoncello, Obligato. Dedicati a Sua Excellenza il Sigre G.J. de Heidenstam, Ambassatore de Sa Maj il Ri de Suede a Constantinopel, Composti a Grand Cairo dal Sigre Giovanni A–T–S, Dillettante Americano. Op. 3.” A copy of Bland’s edition, missing its first violin part and still of uncertain authorship, turned up in the 1941 catalog of Otto Haas, an English dealer in rare music, and was purchased by the Sibley Library of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester. Haas’ catalog had also reached the desk of Dr. Carleton Sprague Smith, Chief of the Music Division of the New York Library, who suspected that “Giovanni A–T–S” was John Antes, a minister, missionary, watchmaker, inventor, instrument maker and amateur composer born near Bethlehem, Pennsylvania in 1740 who was known to have written numerous hymn tunes and accompanied anthems. The last piece needed to solve this musicological puzzle was discovered in 1949, when Roger P. Phelps found another copy of Bland’s publication (lacking only the final page of the cello part) in the Moravian Church Archives at Winston-Salem, North Carolina while researching his dissertation on early chamber music in America. No other copies of the music had been found by 1961, when Donald McCorkle, then director of the Moravian Music Foundation in Winston-Salem, edited Antes’ Three Trios, Op. 3 for publication.
The tortuous history of the Three Trios is an analogue to the dizzyingly varied life of their composer. John Antes, born in March 1740 in the tiny farming community of Frederick, Pennsylvania, midway between Allentown and Valley Forge, was the son of a German immigrant minister who was instrumental in establishing the Moravian Church in his new country. (The family’s original name — “von Blume” — had been changed a century before to the Greek equivalent — “Antes” — in order to avoid religious persecution during the Thirty Years’ War.) The following year Heinrich Antes moved his family to the banks of the Lehigh River to help found the town of Bethlehem and become its first justice of the peace. Young John was taught by his father and at the Moravian boys’ school in Bethlehem, where he received an excellent general education and his only formal training in music, though he also benefited immeasurably from the rich musical life of the Moravian community, which reached beyond the highly developed vocal and instrumental works used for church services to encompass organ- and instrument-building and an ambitious tradition of secular music with frequent, highly skilled performances of works both home-grown and imported from Europe. Antes is known to have constructed several keyboard instruments around 1760 as well as at least five violins, one viola and a cello, perhaps the first string instruments made in America. (One violin and the viola are in the Moravian museums in Nazareth and Lititz, Pennsylvania.)
In 1764, Antes went for further religious training to the Moravians’ mother settlement at Herrnhut, forty miles east of Dresden; the following year he moved to the Rhineland town of Neuwied to learn watchmaking. He was ordained as a minister in 1769 and early the next year became one of the first American Christian missionaries in Egypt. Antes’ decade in Egypt, which had been ruled ruthlessly since 1517 by the Ottoman Turks, was marked by hardship and peril, and culminated on November 15, 1779, when he was captured by a Turkish bey and severely beaten in an attempt to extort money from him. No gold was forthcoming, however, and the bey soon tired of his sanguinary exercise, but Antes had to spend the next two years convalescing, during which he kept his creative faculties sharp by composing. Missionaries were not sent from Germany to relieve him until 1781, when he returned first to Herrnhut and two years later to Neuwied; in 1785, he was assigned as treasurer to the Fulneck Moravian community in West Yorkshire, England. The 45-year-old Antes married later that year and thereafter applied himself to such mechanical projects as devising a music stand that turned pages by depressing a foot pedal, building a weaver’s loom, and suggesting improvements not just the common door lock but also to piano hammers, violin bows and the tuning mechanism for violins and violas. Antes remained active musically and became a friend of the London violinist and impresario Johann Peter Salomon, through whom he probably met Joseph Haydn during that Austrian master’s two residencies in England in the 1790s — Haydn noted in his 1791-1792 diary the existence of a “Mr. Antis [sic], Bishop [sic] and minor composer.” In 1808, Antes and his wife retired to Bristol, where he died three years later.
The Three Trios, Op. 3, are Antes’ only known secular music, though both the missing earlier opus numbers and a detailed letter that he sent on July 10, 1779 to the musically inclined Benjamin Franklin, whom he had met in Philadelphia sixteen years before, indicate that he also composed at least a half-dozen string quartets; these have never been found. The Trios, published by Bland sometime before he sold his business in 1795, appeared with a dedication to Johann Balthasar von Heidenstam, Sweden’s ambassador to Constantinople from 1782 to 1791. Since Antes left the Middle East the year before Heidenstam arrived there, it is unknown how, or if, they met and what purpose the dedication was intended to serve.
Antes’ Trio No. 2 is a remarkable achievement for a sometime composer with little formal training who lived his life in the musical hinterlands, showing both a thorough understanding of the forms and idioms of the day and a significant innate talent; it is a loss that Antes left such a tiny musical legacy. The careful balancing of the three parts, with the violins paired equally and the cello both carrying the bass and participating in the motivic discussion, is evident from the outset. The first and last of the Trio’s three movements unfold largely within the sonata-form model that Antes’ better-known European contemporaries were still perfecting (Haydn’s Op. 33 Quartets and Mozart’s Symphony No. 34 and Idomeneo were written at the same time), beginning their expositions in a dark minor mode before moving to brighter tonal climes, creating a drive for resolution through the surprisingly spacious development sections, and achieving satisfying formal closure with the return of the opening themes in the recapitulations. The thematic material is pleasing, rhythmically vital, well matched to the instruments, logically distributed and skillfully developed; there are even extensive “false recapitulations” of the opening themes in the wrong key in the central episodes, one of Haydn’s favorite techniques. Expressive and formal balance is provided for the outer movements by a gently lyrical and finely crafted Andante.
George Gershwin
Born September 26, 1898 in Brooklyn, New York
Died July 11, 1937 in Hollywood, California
Composed in 1919.
Gershwin joined the Tin Pan Alley firm of Remick in 1914 (at the tender age of sixteen) as a “song plugger,” a pianist who played through the latest sheet music issues for any interested customer. He quickly became familiar with the most popular styles of the day, and was soon composing his own music — the piano rag Rialto Ripples dates from 1917, and his first hit, Swanee, was written in mid-1918 and introduced in a revue at the opening of the Capitol Theatre on Broadway on October 24, 1919. Even from those earliest years, however, Gershwin hoped to become more than just another dispenser of pop tunes, and in August 1919 he began two years of formal study of harmony, counterpoint and form with the Hungarian-born composer Edward Kilenyi, Sr. In addition to his regular exercises for Kilenyi (among which was an orchestration for two bassoons, two horns, viola, cello and bass of Bach’s chorale Freu’ dich sehr, O meine Seele), in 1919 he wrote a little string quartet piece in a gentle, slow blues style that the young composer called Lullaby. Gershwin never intended that this classroom creation be published or performed in public, but he enjoyed having some of his string-playing friends give it an occasional private reading. He thought enough of the Lullaby’s tune, though, to borrow it for use in the twenty-minute, one-act opera (i.e., sung throughout) Blue Monday, which was interpolated into George White’s Scandals of 1922. White cut Blue Monday after just one performance on the grounds that it was too gloomy, but the show’s bandleader, Paul Whiteman, was so impressed with Gershwin’s talent that the following year he commissioned him to write a concert piece for piano and orchestra — Rhapsody in Blue. The Lullaby, however, remained unperformed in public until the harmonica virtuoso Larry Adler played it with string quartet at the 1963 Edinburgh Festival in Scotland (a most unlikely site for a Gershwin premiere!). The Juilliard Quartet shortly thereafter took up the piece in its original string quartet form, and played it in Washington, D.C. in 1967 and in New York a year later. The score was published for the first time in 1968 in versions for string quartet and string orchestra, and given its recording premiere by the Juilliard Quartet in 1974.
Samuel Barber
Born March 9, 1910 in West Chester, Pennsylvania
Died January 23, 1981 in New York City
Composed in 1936.
Premiered in December 1936 in Rome, by the Pro Arte Quartet.
Samuel Barber, who first revealed his considerable talents to the world with his sparkling _Overture to “The School for Scandal_” in 1932, had his standing as one of America’s brightest young composers reaffirmed when, three years later, he received both the Pulitzer Traveling Scholarship and the American Prix de Rome. (He was awarded a second Pulitzer Prize in 1936, the first composer to be so honored.) The purpose of these awards was to allow their recipients to work and study abroad (the Prix de Rome prize included free room and board in that city), and in August 1935, Barber sailed for Europe. In Rome, he lived, somewhat uncomfortably, in what he called “the expatriated Harvard-Club atmosphere” of the American Academy. He did not like his room at the Academy (he refused to unpack his trunk for the entire two years of his stay!), but he was very fond of his studio, away from the main building in a made-over stable, which he described as “full of charm. I love the garden, the pines by moonlight, Rome in the distance, the yellow stone stairs.” He took every opportunity to explore the city’s ancient monuments and art works, reporting in great and enthusiastic detail, for example, on one excursion when some of the Academy students were invited to crawl about on dusty scaffolding, erected for restoration work just six feet from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel, to investigate Michelangelo’s great frescos. “Since these are perhaps the paintings which have impressed me most of anything I have ever seen, you can well imagine that I shall never forget this morning,” he wrote home.
During the spring of 1936, shortly after completing his First Symphony, Barber and Gian Carlo Menotti, his frequent companion of those years (the Menotti family compound on the Italian side of Lake Lugano was perhaps Barber’s favorite place in all of Europe), wandered through Switzerland and Austria, settling for the summer and early autumn in a little lodge rented from the local game warden at St. Wolfgang, just east of Salzburg. In this idyllic spot, at the foot of a mountain, with a stream trickling along the side of the house, Barber composed the chorus Let Down the Bars, O Death, the song I Hear an Army and his only String Quartet. By early November, he was back in Rome to prepare for the premieres of the First Symphony and the Quartet the following month. The concerts were a success. Barber set out immediately for America to hear Artur Rodzinski present the first American performance of the Symphony with the Cleveland Orchestra on January 22, 1937, just a month after its premiere. On July 25th, Rodzinski again conducted the score, at the Salzburg Festival, making it the first American piece heard at that prestigious event. The chief conductor of the Salzburg Festival at that time was Arturo Toscanini, who was to begin his tenure with the NBC Symphony later that year. Toscanini asked Rodzinski if he could suggest an American composer whose work he might program during the coming season, and Rodzinski advised that his Italian colleague investigate the music of the 27-year-old Barber. By October, Barber had completed and submitted to Toscanini the Essay No. 1 for Orchestra and an arrangement for string orchestra of the slow movement from the Quartet — the Adagio for Strings. Toscanini performed the Essay No. 1 and the Adagio for Strings on his November 5, 1938 broadcast with the NBC Symphony, and the Adagio was an instant success. It was the only American work that Toscanini took on his tour of South America. Sibelius praised it. The audience at its 1945 Russian premiere, in Kiev, would not leave the hall until Stokowski encored it. It was the music broadcast from New York and London following the announcement of the death of President Roosevelt. The Adagio for Strings continues to be recognized as one of the masterworks of our time.
Barber’s String Quartet follows an unusual formal progression. The composer considered the work to be in just two movements: a large, fully worked-out sonata form, followed by the Adagio and an abbreviated recall of the opening movement. This structure places the Adagio, with its plaintive melody, rich modalism, austere texture and mood of reflective introspection, at both the formal and expressive center of the Quartet, and it is the music which remains strongest in the mind when the work is through. The opening movement, in B minor, provides an effective foil to the Adagio. Its first theme, given at the outset in unison, is energetic and rather deliberately modern in its aggressive harmony. Barber’s innate lyricism is manifested, however, in the contrasting second and third themes: one, presented in chordal fashion, is delicately modal in its harmony; the other is a simple, wide-ranging melody initiated by the first violin above an almost static accompaniment. These three themes are developed and then recapitulated to round out the movement.
The lyricism, harmonic richness and emotional expression of the String Quartet are characteristic of Samuel Barber’s musical language. In his Introduction to Contemporary Music, Joseph Machlis ranked Barber as an “American Romantic,” along with Howard Hanson, Virgil Thomson and Norman Dello Joio. David Ewen summarized the reasons for this classification: “Barber belonged to the American conservative composers … in that he paid considerable attention to architectonic construction, was not afraid to yield to fluent melodic writing, preferred simplicity to complexity, and was ever in search of a deeply poetic idea.” Barber fostered his ability to write accessible and affective music throughout his life, and this Quartet is one of his earliest masterpieces.
Ruth Crawford Seeger
Born July 3, 1901 in East Liverpool, Ohio
Died November 18, 1953 in Chevy Chase, Maryland
Composed in 1931.
Premiered on November 13, 1933 in New York City by the New World String Quartet
Ruth Crawford Seeger followed parallel careers as a composer and folk music scholar. She was born in East Liverpool, Ohio on July 3, 1901 and raised in Florida, and took her professional training in composition and piano at the American Conservatory of Music in Chicago, where she met Carl Sandburg and contributed folksong arrangements to his The American Songbag. In 1929, she moved to New York to study with composer and musicologist Charles Seeger, and there became associated with such other American avant-gardists as Cowell, Ruggles, Copland and Blitzstein. The following year she won a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first awarded to a woman, and spent a year studying in Berlin and Paris. She and Seeger were married after her return to New York in 1931, and she enjoyed a fruitful period of creative work during the following years as both composer (in some of the most advanced styles of the day) and folk music collector, transcriber and arranger. In 1936, the Seegers moved to Washington, D.C., where Ruth became associated with John and Alan Lomax at the Archive of American Folk Song at the Library of Congress. During the remaining seventeen years of her life, she concentrated on preserving and disseminating American folk music, of which her stepson, Pete Seeger (born in 1919), became a leading advocate and performer.
In the application for a fellowship that she submitted to the Guggenheim Foundation in the autumn of 1929, Crawford proposed to use the grant to write “one major work of the general magnitude of a symphony, and various minor works for smaller combinations. Also to continue my studies in orchestration and composition, in Paris and Berlin.” The following March the Foundation informed her that her proposal had been accepted, the first fellowship they had ever granted to a woman, and she began preparing for her residency in Europe. She booked passage to Southampton in August, started collecting advice and letters of introduction from friends and musicians in New York, studied the scores and aesthetics of Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Prokofiev, Ravel, Honegger, Berg, Bartók, Hindemith and other leading European modernists, and sketched out two movements of a fearless string quartet in the most up-to-date style of the day. She arrived in London in late August 1930, toured the city, and then made a slow journey through Holland, Belgium and Germany, taking in concerts of contemporary music and meeting musicians along the way, before settling into Berlin in September. She was disappointed at having only a brief, unproductive meeting with Hindemith and none at all with Schoenberg, but she met many other musicians as she immersed herself in Berlin’s avant-garde music scene and worked on the string quartet she had begun in New York. (Her projected symphony never materialized.) In April 1931, Crawford headed for Paris by way of Budapest (where she met with Bartók), Vienna (where Alban Berg — “a grand, towering, rich personality, yet very simple,” she confided to her diary — gave her encouragement and advice after examining some of her scores) and Munich (where she attended the premiere of the extraordinary “opera in quarter-tones” titled Die Mutter by the Czech modernist Alois Hába). By the time she returned to New York in November 1931, Crawford had spent the summer in Paris with Charles Seeger, met Honegger, Ravel and Roussel, had a short lesson with Nadia Boulanger, and finished her String Quartet 1931.
The Quartet was premiered by the New World String Quartet on November 13, 1933 at New York City’s New School on a concert that Henry Cowell had organized under the auspices of the Pan American Association of Composers. Crawford’s work was enthusiastically received, and it has remained her most highly regarded composition and the one that sustained her reputation as a composer during her years of involvement with folk music and after her death in 1953. The Quartet’s third movement was recorded just a month after the premiere as the initial release in Cowell’s visionary New Music Recording Project Series (Charles Ives underwrote the costs of the recording); Cowell published the complete score in 1941 in the first issue of the New Music Quarterly that he edited. The work was heard at Columbia University in 1949, when it excited the admiration of composer and Herald Tribune music critic Virgil Thomson (“… thoroughly absorbing. It is in every way a distinguished, a noble piece of work. It is also a daring one and completely successful”), and recorded complete in 1960 by the Amati String Quartet in Goddard Lieberson’s pioneering Modern American Music series on Columbia. The Composers Quartet, formed at the suggestion of Gunther Schuller, played it at their debut concert in Carnegie Hall in 1965, recorded it for Nonesuch in 1973, and later took it on their tours around the world. It was recorded by the Arditti Quartet in 1992 and Ensemble Adventure in 2000, and Christoph von Dohnányi and the Cleveland Orchestra recorded Crawford’s orchestral version of the third movement in 1998. When the Fine Arts Quartet performed the work in New York in 1970, critic Andrew DeRhen wrote in High Fidelity/Musical America that it sounded “fresh and original even today…. Miss Crawford knew how to communicate directly and with great expressiveness in a dissonant modern idiom. There is no faddishness here.” DeRhen’s words still apply.
The Quartet’s opening movement is restless in mood and complex in detail, but simple in its fundamental conception: a continuous theme of largely disjunct motion is wrapped with independent accompanimental lines that usually move by scale steps. At the outset, for example, the first violin plays the opening gestures of the wide-ranging, often lyrical theme above quick, anxious comments from the cello, which is soon joined by the viola and second violin. The “through-line melody” continues in the first violin and is passed to the other instruments as the movement unfolds. (Crawford carefully marked in the score where these transfers of the melody, which she labeled “Solo,” occur.) The movement becomes more agitated until it reaches a climax with a wildly leaping, cadenza-like passage in the first violin, given above forceful trills in the lower instruments. The music immediately quiets for the coda, in which the melody, supported only by hushed, sustained notes, reemerges, shared between the second violin and viola.
The second movement, the Quartet’s scherzo, evidences Crawford’s meticulous craftsmanship. The movement is largely derived from the brittle, staccato lines that chase each other in close but inexact imitation at the outset; a contrasting idea, three quick punctuating notes begun with a wide leap, is introduced a few measures later. In his 1995 study of Crawford’s music, Joseph N. Straus summarized the process by which the movement then grows: “Her melodies often give the impression of living organisms, like amoebas that change shape as they move. They expand and contract, surge forward and hold back, twist and turn, move forward and shrink back, and, all the while, their intervallic identity shifts and changes.”
In response to a request from Edgard Varèse for a discussion of the String Quartet 1931 that he was planning to include in his course at Columbia University in 1948, Crawford sent an analysis of the work’s last two movements: “The underlying plan [of the third movement] is heterophony [i.e., two or more versions of the same melody] of dynamics — a sort of counterpoint of crescendi and diminuendi. The crescendo and diminuendo in each instrument occur in definite rhythmic patterns, which change from time to time as the movement proceeds. The crescendos are intended to be precisely timed; the high point is indicated to occur at some specific beat of the measure…. No high point in the crescendo in any one instrument coincides with the high point in any other instrument…. The melodic line grows out of this continuous increase and decrease; it is given, one tone at a time, to different instruments, and each new melodic tone is brought in at the high point in a crescendo.
“The fourth movement is written in two voices. Voice 1 is played by Violin 1, Voice 2 by the three other instruments [in unison]. Voice 1 begins with a single tone; at each succeeding entry one more tone is added until, at measures 52, 53 and 54, and again at measures 55-57, there are twenty tones in the group or entry. Voice 2 begins with twenty tones, decreasing to one tone at measure 57. At the Turning Point in measure 57 and 58, both voices settle on a single tone, and the two processes are then reversed.
“The thematic material of Voice 2 consists of a ten-tone row, given ten appearances, each repetition beginning with a successive tone of the row…. The tonal material of Voice 1 is free.
“The two voices are written to be independent of each other dynamically. Voice 1 begins its single tone fortissimo and, with an increase in the number of tones in each entry, it decreases in dynamics to pianissimo at measure 55. Oppositely, Voice 2 begins its greatest number of tones at measure 3 with pianissimo, and increases in tone to fortissimo as the number of tones in each entry decreases. There is therefore a sort of dissonance within each voice between volume in dynamics and number of tones, and also a sort of dissonance between the two voices, in volume and number.”
Leonard Bernstein
Born August 25, 1918 in Lawrence, Massachusetts
Died October 14, 1990 in New York City
Composed in 1941-1942.
Premiered on April 21, 1942 in Boston, by clarinetist David Glazer and the composer.
Leonard Bernstein had already accumulated a formidable curriculum vitae by the time he wrote his Clarinet Sonata at the age of 23. Born in 1918 to a Russian Jewish family who had settled in Massachusetts, he attended the prestigious Boston Latin School as a youth and took piano lessons from Helen Coates (whose influence on his life he recognized by dedicating to her his 1954 book, The Joy of Music) and Heinrich Gebhard (a pupil of Leschetizky). In 1935, Bernstein enrolled at Harvard, where he studied with some of the country’s most distinguished pedagogues: Tillman Merritt (theory), Walter Piston (counterpoint and fugue) and Edward Burlingame Hill (orchestration). After his graduation in 1939, he entered the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia to polish his already impressive piano technique with Isabelle Vengerova, and further his skills in conducting (with Fritz Reiner) and composition (Randall Thompson). He spent the summers of 1940 and 1941 at Tanglewood, where he became a student and protégé of Serge Koussevitzky, music director of the Boston Symphony, and eventually his assistant. In the autumn of 1942, Bernstein moved to New York City, working for a short time for Harms Publishing Company arranging popular pieces for piano under the pseudonym Lennie Amber (Bernstein means “amber” in German). A year later, he was chosen by Artur Rodzinski as his conducting assistant with the New York Philharmonic, and on November 14, 1943, took over a concert for the ailing guest conductor Bruno Walter at very short notice. The national broadcast of the program went ahead as scheduled, and the 25-year-old Bernstein was instantly famous. The rest of his career is now legend.
At the end of the 1941 Tanglewood season, Bernstein traveled to Key West, Florida to seek some relief from persistent autumn attacks of hay fever, and there began what became his first published piece, the Sonata for Clarinet and Piano. (A piano trio, a piano sonata, a violin sonata and a few songs and piano pieces from his student days are still unpublished.) The Sonata was completed in February 1942 in Boston, where Bernstein had gone to teach and continue his studies with Koussevitzky; the score was published by Harms the following year. The Clarinet Sonata was written on Bernstein’s own initiative, without commission, and was probably intended as a modest trial of the acceptance of his concert music. Though he could not explain why he chose the clarinet for the first work of his maturity, he did recall buying a clarinet in a pawnshop in 1939, “so I must have been inclined towards the instrument. Anyway, I know I fooled around with it…. I’ve always loved the Clarinet Sonata, particularly because it was my first published piece. I remember how proud I was of it and, for that matter, I still am — in spite of a certain student element in the work.” The Sonata was premiered by the composer and clarinetist David Glazer at the Institute of Modern Art in Boston on April 21, 1942, but the score was dedicated to David Oppenheim, a young clarinetist in the Tanglewood orchestra who was one of Bernstein’s closest friends at that time. The work is in two concise movements. The first, lyrical rather than virtuosic, is much under the influence of Hindemith, who was in residence at Tanglewood in 1941 (probably the “student element” to which the composer referred). The second movement, which juxtaposes several sections in alternating slow and fast tempos, begins with a reflective theme based on a tiny arch-shaped motive. The fast episode in bristling 5/8 meter which follows presages some of Bernstein’s dance music of later years. The reflective music returns in transformation, and passes through a Latin-influenced bridge passage that Bernstein said was a souvenir of his visits to Key West nightclubs. A final traversal of the nervous fast music closes this early product of Bernstein’s incomparable genius.
Joan Tower
Born September 6, 1938 in New Rochelle, New York
Composed in 2007.
WORLD PREMIERE.
Joan Tower was born in New Rochelle, New York on September 6, 1938, and went to South America with her family at age nine. Her father was a mining engineer whose assignments necessitated frequent family moves to Bolivia, Chile and Peru, but he always found a piano and a teacher to nurture his daughter’s musical interests. Tower returned to the United States at the age of eighteen to attend Bennington College and Columbia University, where she earned a doctorate in composition. After finishing her professional training, she taught at Greenwich House, a settlement house in New York, while also composing and performing as a pianist. In 1969, she helped found the Da Capo Chamber Players, a highly acclaimed ensemble which won the 1973 Naumburg Award for Chamber Music; she continued her association as pianist and composer with the Da Capo Players for fifteen years. Since 1972, Tower has taught at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, where she is now Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She is also active in working with performing groups and students in residencies throughout the country, and has served as Co-Artistic Director of the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival; she has been Composer-in-Residence for the Orchestra of St. Luke’s in New York since 1999.
Joan Tower’s compositions have been performed by major orchestras, ensembles and soloists throughout America and abroad. A performance of Sequoia by the New York Philharmonic and conductor Zubin Mehta was broadcast from the United Nations on WNET-TV. She was named “Musician of the Month” by the September 1982 issue of High Fidelity/Musical America, and was the subject of a documentary program produced by WGBH-TV and broadcast nationally on PBS; the film won Honorable Mention at the 1983 American Film Festival. Her many other distinctions include awards and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, Koussevitzky Foundation, National Endowment for the Arts, New York State Council on the Arts and Massachusetts State Arts Council, as well as the prestigious Grawemeyer Award from the University of Louisville in 1990, the first woman ever to receive that honor. She has also been elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters, named a recipient of the Delaware Symphony’s Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composers, and inducted into the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University. In January 2005, Carnegie Hall’s Weill Recital Hall featured a retrospective concert of her work. Joan Tower is the first composer chosen for the ambitious new “Made in America” commissioning program, a collaboration of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer made possible by Ford Motor Company Fund, through which her composition Made in America was performed during the 2005-2006 season by smaller-budget orchestras in every state in the union; the Naxos recording of the work by Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony was nominated for three Grammy Award, including Best Classical Contemporary Composition.
A Gift began in 2006 as a special birthday present, a duet for flute and clarinet, commissioned from Tower by a music lover in Portland, Oregon for his sister. The composer described the piece as “a short duet of about three minutes duration based on the [Rodgers & Hart] tune My Funny Valentine. I happen to love that tune and in fact used it when I was trying to learn how to improvise.” That Gift, rooted in both the sonorities of wind instruments and one of the finest melodies in the American songbook, was the seed for this full-scale quintet for flute, clarinet, horn, bassoon and piano. My Funny Valentine is not a theme for variations or fantasia in A Gift, but rather a subliminal musical idea, often floating in the background, sometimes forgotten completely, occasionally rising in fragments to conscious awareness. The song’s essential melodic component — a simple progression of adjacent scale notes — is hinted at softly by the flute at the outset, and provides the kernel from which most of the work’s step-wise thematic material evolves. Tower has teased from these motivic atoms a variety of musical and expressive states implied by the titles she gave to the work’s four movements — With Memories, With Song, With Feeling, To Dance With.
©2008 Dr. Richard E. Rodda