Joan Tower: Uncommon Composer

JOAN TOWER by Lara Pellegrinelli Uncommon Composer

TOWER JOAN TOWER , one of America’s most celebrated living composers, is known for what The New York Times aptly describes as works that are “expertly wrought, full of character, and instantly communicative.” In many ways, they mirror the voice of their creator. Tower herself is undeniably gregarious and opinionated, not to mention downright funny. So it’s a bit surprising to discover that the 83-year-old espouses a minimalist philosophy when introducing audiences to her new pieces. “The less I say the better,” she states with perfect seriousness.

Aft er its world premiere in July, a brand-new cello concerto gets its fi rst Cleveland Orchestra performances as part of the season’s opening weekend. Craft ed by composer Joan Tower especially for cellist Alisa Weilerstein, A New Day refl ects the dynamics of Tower’s own life.

ose-lav

WEILERSTEIN Yet, if awards off er some measure of Tower’s ability to connect with listeners, she can rest assured that her music — with its rhythmic tenacity and assertive orchestration — speaks for itself. The fi rst woman composer to win a Grawemeyer Award (a $100,000 cash prize), Tower recently received the League of American Orchestra’s Gold Baton, its highest honor, and was named Musical America’s Composer of the Year in 2020. When asked what if anything she would like people to know before they hear The Cleveland Orchestra’s fi rst performances of A New Day (2021) on October 14 and 17, a cello concerto commissioned jointly for Alisa Weilerstein by Cleveland and three other orchestras, Tower refers to the note prefacing its score: “I wrote the music with love to Jeff , my partner for 48 years, who turned 94 in April of 2021. While composing this piece, I realized that our long time together was getting shorter, becoming more and more precious with each new day.” The dedication is both tender and weighty in its brevity. It reveals Tower’s own emotional vulnerability, which the concerto expresses perhaps more keenly than any of her previous works. It seems to wear its heart on its sleeve.

The Jeff of whom she writes is Jeff Litfi n, a spouse who prefers to remain out of the public eye. She dedicated one previous work to him, Island Rhapsody (1989), “for something with love and sensuousness.” Tower shares only that he is a photographer, writer, and businessman,

describing him as something of an artistic polyglot. “He knows about art, photography, music,” she says. “I have a doctorate in music, and he knows more about it than I do. He remembers everything.” (Tower can also be frustratingly modest.) Their life together is the concerto’s point of departure. It cycles through a typical day, using broadly descriptive titles for its four movements: “Daybreak,” “Working Out,” “Mostly Alone,” and “Into the Night.” Carefully chosen, they off er windows into the composition, though Tower is quick to point out that A New Day isn’t programmatic.

“This piece is about him and about us — sort of,” she clarifi es. “I say that hesitantly because I don’t want to make too much of these connections. And because the piece has a lot of drama. I don’t want people to assume that we have a volatile relationship!” Of course, the concerto is a dramatic musical form, a cousin of opera with a long history of serving as a metaphor for human relationships. True, concertos can be spectacular vehicles for virtuosity, created by composers such as Mozart and Liszt for their personal use, but the repertoire also symbolizes the role of the individual in society. As conductor and scholar Leon Botstein writes, “mood, expression, the stirrings of the soul and even a sense of melancholy could be realized as a solo instrument worked against, resisted, displaced, led and triumphed over orchestral sound.” The narratives spun in concertos could also be freer and more poetic. For example, Robert Schumann’s only piano concerto explores a duality of being. Written to be performed by his beloved wife Clara, he selected pitches that represent her name in the score literally, an idealized love object encoded into the work.

In A New Day, Tower’s musical protagonist, the solo cello, relates to its orchestral counterpart in ways that are neither heroic nor particularly romantic, communicating instead a fundamentally feminist perspective.

“It is like a marriage between two strong personalities, who have had to learn how to be with each other,” says Weilerstein. “Any good relationship has to have plenty of give. It’s foundational.”

“I think the successful relationship is like a string quartet,” says Tower. “You learn how to bicker and not internalize it, and then bounce back. It took me a few years because I’m extremely feisty — and stubborn, too.” Tower, born in 1938, learned to bounce back early in life when she was uprooted from her home in Larchmont, New York, for her father’s job as a mining engineer in La Paz, Bolivia. A precociously gifted pianist, she attended Bennington College, where a fi rst attempt at composition left her both wholly unsatisfi ed with her eff orts and eager to try again. She eventually earned both a master’s degree and doctor of musical arts from Columbia University. It took a decade for her to reject serialism, the dominant academic style in mid-20th-century America, in favor of a more visceral language informed by her continued activity as a performer. In 1969, Tower cofounded the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players. Sequoia (1981), a work inspired by towering redwoods, established her reputation as an orchestral composer. She has achieved remarkable popularity in that domain with works including her fi ve Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman and the Grammy Award-winning Made in America (2004).

A New Day joins a dozen other concertos by Tower, pieces driven by the character of the instruments — and performers — for whom they were written. “When you commission a new work, even by someone as well-known as Joan Tower,” says Weilerstein, “you never know what you’re going to get. That’s the thrill and the risk. Joan is the most wonderful human being. She’s very pure. That’s something I notice in her music: it’s upfront, honest, and intelligent.” Weilerstein, a 2011 MacArthur Fellow, is both a leading exponent of Bach’s solo cello suites and an enthusiastic advocate for new music; she worked with Osvaldo Golijov on his revision of the concerto Azul (2007) and gave the New York premiere of Matthias Pintscher’s Refl ections on Narcissus (2014). A Cleveland native, she made her professional debut performing Tchaikovsky’s Variations on a Rococo Theme with The Cleveland Orchestra at the age of 13. Following the world premiere of A New Day in July under Peter Oudjian’s direction, the Severance Hall performances mark her fi rst time working with Franz Welser-Möst.

“Alisa has this unbelievable power as a player,” says Tower. “When the orchestra is heavy, she can answer them. This piece is high intensity; she plays it with ferocious energy and virtuosity. The cello is the most beautiful singing instrument and, boy, this girl can sing.”

Lara Pellegrinelli is an arts journalist and scholar. She received her PhD in ethnomusicology from Harvard University and is a contributor to National Public Radio.