Title: Made in America
Duration: Approximately 13 minutes
Composer: Joan Tower (Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938)
Work composed: 2005
World premiere: 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
Made in America
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 Towers’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.