The Poetics of Sound
Composer Joan Tower challenges the hegemony of drama in classical music
by David Maddox
In classical music, the physical dimensions of sound tend to play a secondary role to a foreground filled with the coded language of melodic and rhythmic transformation. Small sonic features hide behind those elements and get overwhelmed by the demands of a formulaic dramatic shape (introduction, development, climax, denouement) that controls the listener's attention.
The dominance of monolithic dramatic forms and traditional coding systems has come under attack from several directions in music—from John Cage, with his reverence for sound itself; from electronic composition dominated by qualities of sound like timbre, attack, duration, decay, and frequency (rather than notes); and by pop music from rock forward. When rock musicians plugged their guitars into amplifiers, they unleashed a chaos with broader implications for how people hear music. Hip-hop goes even further, making pop music no longer a matter of getting your hands on a good tune and dressing it up.
Much of classical music has appeared unwilling to take up the intellectual challenges of these uses of sound, attributing its own cultural marginality to a failure to "connect" with audiences that must be repaired by making audience-friendly music. But once electronic composers hit the "on" switch of their primitive synthesizers, there was no going back.
Joan Tower has all the credentials of a major American composer in the expected sense. She writes for traditional instruments and ensembles, and her pieces have been performed by most of the major U.S. orchestras. She has achieved great recognition, including a stint as composer in residence at the St. Louis Symphony and winning the Grawemeyer Prize in Composition (the first woman to do so). She trained at a prestigious academic program (Columbia), where she studied with Otto Luening. Luening was a pioneer of electronic music, and in Tower you hear a composer who rises to the intellectual challenges that come after electronic music while continuing to work within traditional compositional methods and materials.
Sound itself achieves parity with notes in various ways in Tower's writing. Many of her works have slow passages that allow listeners space to contemplate the resonance of an instrument, like the natural beating patterns of a pitch sustained over time. Rapid passages may have double articulations or flutter tonguing in the winds that create secondary sounds and phantom pitches. Tower is acutely attuned to the sonic phenomena that occur in extreme registers of many instruments, and seems particularly sensitive in handling piano and winds. She has an affinity for dark, woody sounds.
Bringing these elements out requires a willingness to simplify the texture to provide room for subtle effects and to repeat material, and the ability to do both without slowing the music to a halt. Tower is no minimalist, but she finds a way to make "small sounds" an essential part of her music. Other composers share this ability and intellectual curiosity about sound (Gyorgy Ligeti, for example), but they are rare.
As part of its BMI Composer-in-Residence program, the Blair School of Music will perform a good sampling of Tower's music on Jan. 29. The concert includes "Sequoia," her first orchestral work, as well as a string quartet and several compositions for wind and chamber ensemble. One of the chamber pieces, "Black Topaz," offers conspicuous evidence of the way that Tower balances sound and notes; it also includes a piano part to be played by Blair Dean Mark Wait, a superb interpreter of contemporary music.
