Towering Talent
America’s most popular female composer takes center stage at Schermerhorn
by John Pitcher
Contemporary classical music can often seem like a math problem. It’s music that’s widely known (and feared) for its stark dissonance and geometric complexity, a cerebral sort of art that’s quite frankly easier to respect than love.
American composer Joan Tower is well aware of modern music’s off-putting reputation. So you can imagine her surprise last June when her music was warmly—and even enthusiastically—received during a hard-hat concert celebrating the new Schermerhorn Symphony Center.
“The Nashville Symphony wanted to thank the construction workers with a concert and barbecue,” Tower says. “The program was all my music, and I was worried these guys would hate it. But after the concert this roofer came up with the most wonderful compliment. He said he had only come for the barbecue and planned to sleep during the concert. But he said he ended up loving my music, and the rest of the audience seemed to love it too.”
Nashvillians will get the chance to enjoy Tower’s music again this weekend, when the Nashville Symphony Orchestra under guest conductor Anu Tali presents the composer’s Chamber Dance, part of the NSO’s American Encores series. (For music fans who can’t get enough Joan Tower, the NSO will release an all-Tower CD on the Naxos label next year.)
Certainly, there is much to admire in Tower’s music. Her works are full of colorful harmonies and vigorous rhythms. This is goal-oriented music in the best sense of that phrase, music of unfailing thrust and momentum, contemporary music that you can actually, dare we say, love.
Of course, truly great music appeals to both the heart and mind, and in that respect Tower’s music is both appealing and smart. It’s especially remarkable for its structure. A typical Tower piece will begin slowly, even haltingly, as if the notes are straining to break free of gravity. But once loose they rush forward with speed and momentum, ultimately reaching a climax of white-hot emotional intensity before ending once again with music that’s soft and slow.
“The structure of my music is like an arch, and that kind of organization is something I learned from playing Beethoven,” Tower says. Like Beethoven, Tower began her career not as a composer but as a concert pianist, and it’s hard to overstate the importance of that background. During the 18th and 19th centuries, most important composers were also conductors or instrumentalists. They were performers who wrote music for the public.
But for much of the last century, serious composers behaved more like theoretical scientists than musicians. They worked as university professors instead of as performers, and many didn’t play an instrument at all. They were pointy-heads writing faculty lounge music for other pointy-heads.
“Separating composing and performing was a bad split,” Tower says. “It cost composers a lot of their audience.”
These days, Tower doesn’t have to worry about finding an audience. The American Symphony Orchestra League (ASOL), a national nonprofit group representing orchestras, reports that Tower was the most performed living American composer during the 2005-06 season, and the fourth most frequently performed American composer of all time (right behind Aaron Copland, George Gershwin and Samuel Barber).
Her top-of-the-rung status is due in part to the extraordinary popularity of her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which orchestras play all the time, and for her orchestral piece Made in America, which a consortium of orchestras recently commissioned for performances in all 50 states. Leonard Slatkin, the NSO’s music advisor, attributes Tower’s popularity to the vigor and vitality of her musical style.
“There is a sense of rhythmic vitality in her music that reminds me of Stravinsky and The Rite of Spring,” Slatkin says. “I think the most distinctive feature of her music is the rhythm, even more than the structure. ”
Born in New Rochelle, N.Y., in 1938, Tower began piano studies at 6. Three years later she moved to Bolivia after her father, a mining engineer, got a job there. It was in South America that Tower developed her passion for the red-hot rhythms of Latin dance.
Tower returned to the United States for college and graduate school, eventually earning a doctorate from Columbia University. At the time, Columbia was a hotbed of musical radicalism, a school that embraced the nails-on-a-chalkboard style of atonal music called serialism. Tower could write a screeching modernist piece with the best of them, but in the end she decided her style of rhythmic writing worked better in a format that was more traditional and tonal.
That proved to be a wise choice, since it catapulted her to the forefront of American composers. Unfortunately, though, few other women composers have been as successful. A recent ASOL survey found that during the 2005-06 season, only two of the top 10 most frequently performed living American composers were women (Tower and Jennifer Higdon). So for now, the glass ceiling of classical composing remains sadly in place.
“At least the Nashville Symphony is trying to change things,” Tower says. “They’re playing my music this season, and also the music of three other women—Augusta Read Thomas, Ellen Taaffe Zwilich and Gabriela Lena Frank. I can’t think of another orchestra in America that’s so committed to women’s music.”
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