Tower: White Water

White Water is the fifth of Joan Tower’s seven string quartets, and, like the others, it proceeds as a single, continuous rush of music. Energy comes from rhythmic propulsion, rising lines of notes, and circling figures. At the same time, the music illustrates the element of water—moving or still—and is inspired by the concept of water, in a work by the video artist Bill Viola, as the medium through which people undergo birth, death, and rebirth.

Introduction

Joan Tower has, in her own words, “come to love the way string quartets are so deeply creative and passionate about the music they play. They are really like four composers at work.” This was, however, a perspective that arrived rather late in her career. Earlier, as a professional pianist, she concentrated on chamber groups involving the piano. She did not compose her first string quartet until 1994, when she was 55. It was then followed by another four in the decade between 2002 and 2011. No. 3 (“Incandescent”) was destined for the Emerson String Quartet, the others for younger American quartets.

All Tower’s quartets came after her compositional move away from a twelve-tone (atonal) style and towards an embrace of tonal elements—including, even, consonant chords. However, there still remained abrasive harmonic clashes and a vigorous rhythmic drive, as in her string quartet White Water.

History

White Water was commissioned by Chamber Music Monterey Bay as a response to an installation created in 2002 by the video artist Bill Viola: Going Forth By Day. The installation has five screens, each displaying a video about a particular stage of life, with water a common component in all of them. 
Tower was particularly struck by this element: “When I saw Viola’s work, I was quite fascinated with how he used water as an encompassing image which influenced everything I saw about the ‘person’ inside the water. My piece is not directly associated with what he specifically did, but it does have a strong connection to the image of water as a powerful basic idea and action. The many glissandos hopefully create a ‘fluid’ environment that connects the various ideas and registers together, while ‘white water’ somehow implies more rapid ‘cascading’ types of action which occur throughout the piece.”

Tower: White Water for String Quartet

Tower wrote the work in 2011 for a first performance by the Daedalus String Quartet in Carmel, California, on April 14 of the following year. A recording by the same group was released in 2016 on an album with two other Tower quartets and her Dumbarton Quintet, for piano and string quartet (2008), featuring pianist Blair McMillen.

Form and Analysis

Playing continuously for 20 minutes, the quartet starts with the viola slowly introducing one of the main motives: a rising scale of four notes (G–A-flat–B-flat–B-natural). This is not a major or minor scale but one that lifts through a half step, a whole step, and another half step. It announces a kind of tonality that is strong but decisively not traditional. The scale grows as it is repeated—by the cello, the second violin, and the viola—until it shoots upward in glissandos (finger slides between notes).

The entry of the first violin brings a faster pace and a dynamic rhythm (short-long-short-long), which is soon broken up by more glissandos and a return of the four-note scale motive, with cascades. A short passage of calm for the second violin and viola (almost all white-note pitches) is followed by a rush of activity into a cello solo that restores the scale motive and rises to a D.

However, the short-long-short-long rhythm is soon reintroduced, and its energy moves the music into racing triplets, punctuated by—and eventually combined with—glissandos. When a new resting place has been found on E, the first violin ascends on the scale motive to a super-high solo that builds tension; this is released in another race of notes, with the instruments, at first, in rhythmic unison.

The unison texture disintegrates into a long rush of trills, small fluctuations around pitches, and tremolos between notes. The activity slows down into the work’s most sustained musical image of smooth water, though an insistent flow remains implicit. Falling out of euphony, the instruments start to race again. Another slowing brings back the scale motive, rising in broad octaves to a last bubbling torrent and a spacious close.

Connections

White Water is typical Tower: its development is powerfully communicated to the listener. Without referring to older music directly, she recaptures the Classical-era impulse and shows how small motives can generate continuous movement or stationary swirling. Most of her music is similarly for small instrumental groups, in which the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, and textures can be handled without regard for word-setting. But abstraction, as in this quartet, is often balanced by visual or dramatic imagery.

Like all her quartets, Tower’s White Water plays continuously, immediately distancing it from the traditional string quartet multimovement form. Another distinguishing feature is the poetic title, with the genre and number (“String Quartet No. 5") as subtitle. Tower does not place her quartets in the great history of the form but in the immediate present. On the other hand, there is an echo of the most traditional classical device, sonata form: the work is shaped by reappearances of its opening gesture and a structure that may be understood as a repeated exposition, a development, and a recapitulation.

Legacy

With this quartet, Tower provided a model of determination, fine technique, and expressive immediacy to composers of the next generation, such as Augusta Read Thomas. White Water, which is one of her most frequently performed compositions, has played a notable part in projecting that model, and it continues to do so.

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Article by Paul Griffiths