Joan Tower (Born 1938)
Made in America
Approximately 13 minutes
Composer: Joan Tower (Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938)
Work composed: 2005
Work composed: The work had its premiere in October,
2005 in Glens Falls, New York, performed by one of its
commissioning orchestras, the Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra
Instrumentation: 2 flutes (including piccolo), 2 oboes,
2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone,
timpani, percussion: (xylophone, glockenspiel [bells],
vibraphone, large suspended cymbal, medium suspended
cymbal, low cymbal, wood block, medium maraca, egg maraca [very small], tambourine, sleigh bells, bass drum), strings
American composer, pianist, and teacher Joan Tower has become one of the most successful composers in the American landscape. She is often lauded as the “one of the most successful woman composers of all time,” (The New Yorker first called her this) and, indeed, many American woman composers feel that their careers have been built on Tower’s now giant shoulders. And she makes no apologies for allowing herself to be categorized as a “woman composer” rather than simply a “great composer” in her own right. Tower is very publicly vocal about how women have had near insurmountable obstacles in being recognized as, or even allowed, to be a composer at all throughout history—she honors Mozart’s sister (nicknamed “Nannerl”), Mendelssohn’s sister (Fanny) as just two examples of towering talents kept quiet because of gender. Tower herself has admired other women (in all fields) who have been inspirational and who have forged paths, who she describes as “women who are adventurous and take risks,” and she spares no opportunities to celebrate them now.
Tower has been the recipient of many awards—one of them, perhaps most importantly, in 1990 as the first woman to be awarded the highly coveted Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. She’s been commissioned many times in her career. In 2004, the prestigious Ford (Motor Company’s) “Made in America” series banded together with the League of American Composers, Meet the Composer, and over 60 amateur orchestras from all 50 states, to commission Tower to compose a new piece that would be performed by each contributing orchestra—in essence, a piece that would be heard in every state in America over the course of a year and a half. Tower fittingly titled her piece Made in America. In 2008, a recording of the work with Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony Orchestra won her a Grammy award for “Best Classical Contemporary Composition.” The origins of the commission and Tower’s life experiences played a big part in her inspiration for the work. As Tower explained: “I crossed a fairly big bridge at the age of nine when my family moved to South America (La Paz, Bolivia), where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position. When I returned to the United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility, and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for the cold winters, floors that are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song ‘America the Beautiful’ kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work…”
This iconic American song, America the Beautiful, was written in 1893 by American poet and professor Katharine Lee Bates. Bates had just arrived in Colorado Springs, Colorado to begin a summer teaching position at Colorado College. She penned her poem that summer after she trekked to the top of Pike’s Peak—the views from that fabled pinnacle inspiring her profoundly. It was set to music in 1910 by church organist Samuel A. Ward.
Tower’s Made in America, indeed, opens with a delightful sort of dawning of that iconic American song. First heard are softly rumbling timpani and string tremolos (a quick bowing technique that creates a shimmering effect), as if a sunrise is just beginning to emerge above the horizon. After a few seconds of a crescendo (gradually louder) of the “sunrise,” the clarinets play a brief motive—a long note and then two shorter notes, following the melody of “[Oh] beau-ti-ful…” in America the Beautiful—which is then followed by another musical motive rising through the orchestral instruments—configured on the melodic pattern of “for amber waves of [grain]…” In a beautiful sentiment, the second motive continues rising, blending majestically into the musical sunrise. Tower will use these two musical motives throughout the entire work—a journey itself, of sorts, to musical heights. As the composer explained:
“The beauty of the song [America the Beautiful] is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea—as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, unsettling it, but ‘America the Beautiful’ keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, ‘I’m still here, ever changing, but holding my own.’ A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of how do we keep America beautiful.”
But Tower’s homage to America is far from jingoistic. As an example of her celebrated musical craft, after the opening sunrise section comes to its quiet conclusion, she takes the rising “amber waves” motive and pares it down into something ominous. Here, at about one minute into the work, several notes of that motive begin repeatedly churning upwards in the strings over top of heartbeats in the timpani—far from its original tribute to natural beauty, Tower turns the motive into a menacing march. Another marvelous transformation happens at about eleven minutes, when the “beau-ti-ful” motive is sped up to hyper-speed in the trumpets and winds, creating a kind of manic babbling.
But amidst these “more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting,” warmer and more tonal moments peer through, often brief, in a way that remembers the beauty and awe that Bates captured in her poem. The ending section of the work pours out from the top of a big musical climax—here, the babbling trumpets return in force and fanfare, and everything starts barreling headlong toward the work’s conclusion. The final bars finish in a grand crescendo, but unexpectedly, not reaffirming America the Beautiful, rather, ending loudly and without any concrete resolution—as if Tower is telling us that the country’s beauty is fragile.
Florence Price (1887-1953)
Piano Concerto in D minor
Approximately 18 minutes
Composer: Florence Price (Born in Little Rock, Arkansas in 1887; died in Chicago in 1953)
Work composed: 1934
World Premiere:The first performance took place at the
Chicago Musical College (Chicago, Illinois) in 1934, with
Florence Price as the piano soloist
Instrumentation: solo piano, flute, oboe, 2 clarinets, bassoon, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, timpani, percussion (bass drum, snare drum, suspended cymbal, crash cymbals), strings
Violin Concerto No. 2 in G minor, Op. 63
I. Andantino
II. Adagio cantabile
III. Allegretto
Born in Arkansas, Florence Price was a gifted pianist as a child. Fostering her daughter’s talents, her mother enrolled her at the New England Conservatory for college musical studies. At New England, Price studied piano, organ, and composition with some of the leading teachers in America—but she had to “pass” as Mexican to avoid the scourges of racial prejudice against African Americans. After graduating from the Conservatory, she had a brief collegiate teaching career, but soon returned to Arkansas, married, and began a family life. In 1927, however, yet another brutal lynching in Little Rock persuaded Price, her husband, and children to move north to Chicago as part of what has been called the “Great Migration” of African Americans fleeing oppression in the South. In Chicago’s South Side, the Chicago Black Renaissance was awakening, with the likes of Louis Armstrong and Mahalia Jackson.
Although already busy as a concert pianist, organist, teacher, and composer, in 1931 Price entered a national composition competition. Price was awarded the top prize in 1932 for her submission of her (first) Symphony in E minor. The work soon was championed and performed by the Chicago Symphony conducted by Frederick Stock, and Price is now known as the first Black American woman to have written a symphony as well as to have one performed by a major American orchestra. The Symphony’s reception was overwhelmingly positive. Riding on the welcome waves of that success, and knowing that Price was an exceptional keyboardist, Chicago’s conductor Stock also encouraged Price to compose a piano concerto. Price’s response was her Piano Concerto in D minor, also known as her Piano Concerto in One Movement, in 1934. It was premiered that same year at the Chicago Musical College with Price herself as the piano soloist. Again, the reviews were very positive.
Despite her moments of fame, Price continually struggled for recognition during her lifetime, as did so many other African American artists. She would continue to be hindered from building her career by two deeply set prejudices in American society. As she wrote in 1943 to Serge Koussevitzky, the famous conductor of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, Price described the shameful hurdles that she faced:
“To begin with I have two handicaps—those of sex and race. I am a woman; and I have some Negro blood in my veins. Knowing the worst, then, would you be good enough to hold in check the possible inclination to regard a woman’s composition as long on emotionalism but short on virility and thought content;—until you shall have examined some of my work? … As to the handicap of race, … I should like to be judged on merit alone—the great trouble having been to get conductors, who know nothing of my work … to even consent to examine a score.”
Koussevitzky never answered her request, perhaps proving the very prejudices that she was struggling against.
As with so many of her other works, however, within several years Price’s Piano Concerto was forgotten. After her early death in 1953 due to a stroke, even the score of the Concerto seemed lost to the ages. In 2009, however, many of her manuscripts were found in her abandoned summer home in St. Anne, Illinois, outside of Chicago. This treasure trove was a great help in rediscovering this truly gifted American composer, including, at first, some parts of the Concerto. Finally, in 2019, a complete manuscript was found in the St. Anne house, and this Concerto (with thanks to editors Nick Greer and Clovis Lake) can now be heard as Price first premiered it. And this is, indeed, a very fortuitous discovery, for Price’s Concerto is truly exceptional. A lone trumpet begins the first movement, Andantino (not too fast), with a short unhurried little motive that has an easy-going African American Spiritual character to it. The motive is then answered by the upper winds. The trumpet, winds, and the horn, then trade the motive between them in a call-and-response sequence. As nearly all of Price’s works do, she’s celebrating the rich heritage of African American music and yet uncannily enveloping it into a classical sound. This Spiritual-esque motive will drive this first movement through many a musical moment, but next comes the unexpected—a lengthy solo piano cadenza, alive with drama and gorgeous chord progressions. When the orchestra returns, the air becomes filled again with that opening Spiritual motive, but now, the tempo feels a little quicker, and the motive has acquired an urgency. The Concerto begins taking on a sense of narrative and Price creates some exceptional musical adventures. An especially spine-tingling moment occurs at about three minutes—the piano solo begins a series of step-wise descending octaves, and as its intensity grows, the orchestra begins to sneak in behind it in unison, with instrumental colors that make this passage sound increasingly diabolical, but ending in a most majestic climax. In much the same way as Liszt used a brief motive in his tone poems (and piano concertos) and transformed them throughout the entire work, so does Price here in this Concerto. Price’s transformations, too, are enchanting and varied, from the diabolical to grand, lyrical to mighty—in just seven short minutes in this movement, Price circumnavigates a universe of magical musical moments, filled with, as piano soloist Michelle Cann said, “beauty and power.”
Though the work is titled Piano Concerto… in One Movement, there are, in fact, three distinct movements, but the separations between them are extremely brief. Hardly a breath separates the end of the first movement from the second, Adagio cantabile (slowly, in a singing style). This is one of Price’s richest and most gorgeous pieces of music. The strings deliver a brief introduction of lush and floating chords, and then the piano and oboe enter into a long and dreamy duet. The whole movement is a rhapsodic hymn. Some of the pianist’s musical tapestry is densely packed like jazz chords, and at times, the momentum of the rhapsodizing builds into an exquisite climax in the manner that makes Spirituals so poignant. The movement indeed sings, and again, in just its few minutes of length, the depth of its emotional character is vast and intoxicating.
With little pause, the third movement begins, slowly at first with a brief up-and-down oscillation figure played by the winds. Shortly, the tempo picks up, Allegretto (light, graceful, and moderately fast) and Price takes that short introductory figure and speeds it up into a ragtime feel. Thus begins a Juba dance. The Juba was well known to African Americans—before Emancipation, antebellum slave owners feared that enslaved peoples would use drums to transmit secret, subversive codes, and therefore drums were banned. Instead, African Americans created a dance, which came to be known as the Juba, that used body slapping and stomping to supply the rhythms for the dancers—but Price uses some orchestral percussion instead. Price particularly loved this dance form, and used it as the third movement in each of her symphonies. Each is filled with character and exuberance, but the addition of the piano to the dance in this Concerto may be her most cheerful Juba of them all. Syncopation (music that stresses the weak beats of the measure, typically with complicated rhythms) fills the movement, giving the music a jaunty, spring-in-your-step kind of delight. As for syncopation, at about one minute into the dance, Price creates a lengthy, splendid series of jangled off-beats in the piano, almost to the point of being disorienting, only to save it after a few bars—this episode happens twice, and each time, when the music gets back on track, the feeling of jubilance is extremely satisfying. The pianist plays with their fingers dancing all over the keyboard in a virtuosic showcase. And when this delightful dance comes to its final section, the soloist and orchestra conclude in a riot of joy.
Ludwig Van Beethoven (1770-1827)
Symphony No. 4 in B flat-Major, Op. 60
Approximately 35 minutes
Composer: Ludwig van Beethoven (Born in Bonn in 1770; died in Vienna in 1827)
Work composed:1806, on a commission from Count Franz von Oppersdorf of Silesia (part of modern day Poland).
World premiere: The premiere occurred as a private
performance at the Vienna home of one of Beethoven’s
patrons, Prince Franz Joseph von Lobkowitz, in March, 1807, with Beethoven conducting. The first public premiere was performed in Vienna in April, 1808 at the Burgtheater, Austria’s national theater.
Instrumentation: flute, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons,
2 horns, 2 trumpets, timpani, strings
Symphony No. 4 in B flat-Major, Op. 60
I. Adagio – Allegro vivace
II. Adagio
III. Allegro vivace
IV. Allegro ma non troppo
In the autumn of 1806, Beethoven was invited to attend a private performance of his Symphony No. 2 at the residence of Count Franz von Oppersdorff in Silesia (at the time, a part of Prussia situated in modern-day Poland). The Count further commissioned Beethoven for a new symphony, which Beethoven was happy to accept. By this time in 1806, two of his most forward-thinking large-scale works had just recently premiered but they were meeting with considerable negativity from the Viennese public: his Symphony No. 3, “Eroica,” in 1804 and his sole opera Leonore (later renamed Fidelio) in 1805. Beethoven was grateful for Count Oppersdorf’s vote of confidence, and he obliged the commission with his Symphony No. 4 which premiered the next year in 1807.
The Fourth is one of Beethoven’s most good-humored and joyful symphonies. Oddly, the Fourth’s more genteel sentiments have been overlooked for the fieriness of both the groundbreaking Eroica Symphony and the pathos-turned-triumphant Fifth Symphony. The techniques that Beethoven experimented with here became inspirational both for him and for composers to follow, and a listener will often be surprised to hear passages and tonal colors that foreshadow music yet to come. Perhaps most important and musically ingenious, though, is how Beethoven experiments with musical motion—of his surprising compositional techniques used to move music forward.
Notwithstanding the cheer that will dominate this Symphony, however, the introduction begins with stunningly beautiful mystery. Over a static, sustained chord in the winds, the strings then slowly descend through a sequence of ethereally evocative, falling intervals. Glowing with an inner strength while it meanders in a kind of timelessness, this sequence is not only one of the most imaginative symphonic introductions, but one that would capture the imaginations of composers to follow. Brahms would emulate it in the fourth movement of his Second Symphony, as did Mahler in the opening of his First, for example, and Beethoven himself saw its potential and explored the idea even further in the beginning of his towering Ninth Symphony. But here, after those drifting downward intervals, a section of pizzicatos (plucked strings) and ever-changing keys seem to wander aimlessly and in the shadows—as conductor Leonard Bernstein described it, “tip-toeing its tenuous weight… through ambiguous keys.” But all this mystery soon leads toward a wonderfully unexpected change of atmosphere.
Suddenly, a massive fortissimo (very loud) chord in the full orchestra stops all motion, and the strings break out with several super-fast sets of notes shooting upwards, creating a kind of musical “rip.” These rips then lead directly into the first movement proper, Allegro vivace (fast and lively), where a series of seven of these rip motives sound hilariously as though Beethoven is musically trying to crank up the Symphony’s engine. It’s a wonderful bit of humor, and when the symphonic machine starts moving, there’s hardly any stopping the forward momentum. Filled with lyricism, this is surely one of Beethoven’s most freely joyful musical works. And the upward rips will populate the musical landscape all throughout the movement, but one particularly inventive moment occurs around eight-and-a-half minutes. The volume here drops dramatically, and as the violins repeat these short little rip motives at a whisper, the timpani rumbles in the background—it’s a remarkable moment where although the momentum has almost stopped, the sonic disturbance that the rumbling timpani creates keeps the movement’s energy moving, like electricity brimming before a thunderstorm, giving the strings a chance to rev up the engine again with volume and rhythm. From this point forward everything bustles to the end, building up to several emphatic chords, and then the engine simply stops.
The slow second movement, Adagio, is a marvel of both motion and beauty. For motion, Beethoven turns to a unique rhythm which later became regarded as the “timpani motive.” The movement begins with this solo motive first heard in the second violins (but which will shortly after be heard in the timpani)—two different pitches, a fourth of an interval apart, crisply tick-tock like a heartbeat back and forth. Although this timpani motive isn’t outrightly present in every bar, it continually finds pride of place as a solo throughout the movement. But almost without fail, nearly every bar does indeed rustle with some variation of that motivic energy, overtop of which the winds often sing long and lovely tunes, with variations and wanderings that are as fresh and simple as any music Beethoven ever wrote. The underlying energetic commotion, however, isn’t so much restlessness as it is quietly gleeful, as though the heart is thrumming along in sheer happiness. Hector Berlioz was particularly mesmerized by this movement and described it in a most enchanting way:
“[It] seems to have been breathed by the archangel Michael… standing on the threshold of the Empyrean.”
The third movement scherzo, Allegro vivace, is a fun romp with devilish energy. Its structure has two contrasting sections in the first section, Beethoven creates a kind of rhythmic dissonance by fitting two-beat phrases into three-beat measures, on which, again, Berlioz whimsically commented that the “cross-rhythms have in themselves real charm, though it is difficult to explain why.” Then appears a counter melody where the bassoon (an integral instrument in this entire Symphony) and the cellos recall the falling intervals in the strings from the Symphony’s mystery-rich introduction, but which is now humorously recast so that it seems that the downward intervals will continue forever. The second, lovely and slower contrasting section (Trio) is a serene call-and-response, first between the winds and upper strings, then between the upper winds and lower winds and horns. The greatest fun about this Trio, though, is how Beethoven transitions it back to the return of the first section—the strings begin to quicken up their rhythm, until suddenly they’re in the original fast tempo with the two-versus-three beat feel, and racing upwards into this next section as if they’re stumbling over themselves in excitement. The two sections repeat again, but most comical is that when the movement comes to its seeming end, the horns then tag on two inflated notes, in an almost absurdly braggadocio manner, to which the full orchestra puts a stop to them with a final chord.
The final movement, Allegro ma non troppo (fast, but not too much so), is filled with motion, joy, and excitement. To end such a Symphony of movement and wit, Beethoven chooses the grandest of all motion makers: perpetual motion—a technique in music that uses a rhythmic device that plays continuously (like a very fast-moving metronome). Here this technique is launched in the very first bar by a near constant whirlwind of sixteenth notes (a typically very quick rhythm) in the strings. The sixteenth notes rarely quit throughout the entire movement, but over top of their constancy is a delightfully relaxed, lyrical theme in the flute that comes and goes. The sixteenth notes get passed between nearly all the instruments—listen especially for several manic solos in the bassoon and clarinet along the way—even though they’re often stomped on by several outbreaks of fortissimo (very loud) chords in the full orchestra. But mainly, the rhythm chatters away with verve and gaiety, until almost the very end. Just before the final bars, Beethoven brings everything to a halt, and several bars seem to question what all the madness was about—first the first violins, then bassoon, then the violins and violas, play a little bit of the flute’s relaxed lyrical theme, each of their phrases separated by fermatas (a note held indefinitely longer than written)—and then three bars of sixteenth notes catapult this great Symphony to its final, joyful conclusion.
© Max Derrickson
