Joan Tower (b. 1938)
Rising (2009)
It’s no secret that American music has been strongly shaped by the influence of prominent female composers. One of the most significant is Joan Tower, whose incisive, colorful writing for instruments and voices in any number of contexts has garnered many awards; drawn many champions; and found a ready, enthusiastic audience. Her musical language was strongly shaped by the experience of spending her formative years in Bolivia, which she cites particularly for ensuring that rhythm is an integral element in her compositions. Indeed, pulsing energy is a hallmark of her writing in pieces like Sequoia and Petroushkates, the latter a widely-performed chamber score for flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano. It’s also abundantly evident in Rising, a 2009 work for flute and string quartet.
Rising was written for the flute virtuoso Carol Wincenc and, while it offers some brilliantly soloistic writing for the flute, it’s quite balanced in content and potent in expression. The ideas behind the piece are probably best expressed in Tower’s note on it:
“I have always been interested,” she writes, “in how music can ‘go up.’ It is a simple action, but one that can have so many variables: slow or fast tempos, accelerating, slowing down, getting louder or softer – with thick or thin surrounding textures going in the same or opposite directions. For me, it is the context and the feel of the action that matters. A long climb, for example, might signal something important to come…A short climb, on the other hand, might be just a hop to another phrase. One can’t, however, just go up. There should be a counteracting action which is either going down or staying the same to provide a tension within the piece.
“The main theme in RISING is an ascent motion using different kinds of scales — mostly octatonic or chromatic — and occasionally arpeggios. These upward motions are then put through different filters, packages of time and varying degrees of heat environments which interact with competing static and downward motions.”
© Jonathan Blumhofer
Reproduction Rights: This program note may be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with a credit to the author.