6/28: American Summer: Music of Joan Tower & Samuel Barber

Ranging from clear and bright to soft and mellow, the sonorities of flute, oboe, clarinet, bassoon and horn will evoke for us today the special qualities of summer.  Joan Tower (b. 1938) is one of today’s most honored and most-performed American composers. Founder of the Da Capo Chamber Players, she has served as composer-in-residence for the St. Louis Symphony and the Orchestra of St. Luke’s, and has taught composition at Bard College since the 1970s. Her Made in America, as recorded by Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony, won three Grammy awards in 2008. Made in America was commissioned by the Ford Made in America program, the only project of its kind to involve smaller-budget orchestras as commissioning agents of new works by major composers.

Island Prelude was written in 1988 for the St. Louis Symphony oboist Peter Bowman; originally for oboe and string orchestra, it’s been re-scored for oboe and string quartet, and for woodwind quintet, the way we’ll hear it today. Tower says she was partly inspired by “Samuel Barber’s wonderfully controlled Adagio for Strings.” She has reflected further: “The island is remote, lush, tropical, with stretches of white beach interspersed with thick green jungle. Above is a large, powerful, and brightly-colored bird, which soars and glides, spirals up, and plummets with folded wings as it dominates, but lives in complete harmony with, its island home.” It’s not too hard to hear the oboe as the score’s direct representative of this vividly-imagined bird.

The first of the three main sections, Tower says, depicts “a very slow-moving, consonant landscape that gradually becomes more active and dissonant.” There are many shifts of meter, which lend the music a sense of unpredictability. The midsection has complex rhythms and varying, independent thematic lines, with chromatic harmonies and dissonances. A high trill signals a cadenza – here you can get a real aural sense of that soaring bird – and the final portion, harking back to the beginning, is “very slow, sustained, high, and dissonant.”

Samuel Barber (1910-1981) once reflected: “I think that what’s been holding [present-day] composers back a great deal is that they feel they must have a new style every year. This, in my case, would be hopeless. I write what I feel. I’m not a self-conscious composer. It is said that I have no style at all, but that doesn’t matter. I just go on doing, as they say, my thing. I believe this takes a certain courage.” Admired especially for his songs and other vocal works, notably the poignant Knoxville, Summer of 1915, an extended solo aria for soprano and orchestra, Barber also produced masterful instrumental pieces. In fact, his most famous composition is instrumental – the Adagio for Strings, cited above by Ms. Tower. Another standout in his instrumental canon is the Violin Concerto, but today we hear him in woodwind mode, and like Knoxville, the piece was inspired by the sights and sounds of summer.

In his 1981 New York Times obituary, Donal Henahan offered this evaluation of Barber: “One reason for the acceptance won by Mr. Barber’s music – apart from its undeniable craft and thorough professionalism – was its deep-seated conservatism, which audiences could find congenial even at first hearing. Although he often dealt in pungent dissonances and complex rhythms, like most of his 20th-century contemporaries, there was a lyrical quality even to his strictly instrumental pieces that from the first established him as a neo-Romantic.”

The original theme of Summer Music was taken from the evocatively-titled Horizon, a short orchestral score Barber wrote for radio in the 1940s. This work was never published, and was played over the air only once (it was revived in the 1990s by the San Diego Chamber Orchestra). In 1953, the composer turned to its opening theme in response to a commission from the Chamber Music Society of Detroit, which premiered the work three years later. The piece is equally associated with the New York Woodwind Quintet, whose flutist, Samuel Baron, said “It sounds just beautiful,” even before the score was actually finished. The New York Woodwind Quintet subsequently recorded Barber’s final revision. Summer Music has been called a one-movement rhapsody, based mostly on the initial theme. Barber’s biographer Barbara Heyman noted, “The music is quiet and contemplative, incorporating the wit and chatter of the French school of woodwind writing, but without its stridency.”