Born in 1938, Joan Tower is often described—as she was in the New Yorker—as “one of the most successful woman composers of all time.” Given her stature in the field of music and sheer compositional talent, however, Tower's gender is perhaps immaterial. Highly original, Tower’s music tends to be dissonant and atonal, emphasizing instrumental color over the predictability of traditional major and minor keys. As Tower describes her art, “I like to think that my landscape has a shape. I know pretty much when it's done because I work very hard on the whole sense of a contour and a shape—a beginning, middle, and end. My music is very organic and I won't make a move unless I feel that it's going somewhere and has arrived somewhere and is finishing from somewhere. So I do have a sense of endings, beginnings, and middles. At least I work on that.”
When writing her single-movement composition Made in America, Tower deviates willingly from this musical philosophy, deftly making adjustments in favor of emotional impact and meaning to the performers. The piece's origins are wholly unique: In 2001, a group of small symphony orchestras in the United States decided to pool resources to commission a work by a nationally known composer, something none of the organizations could have afforded to do alone. Interest in the project skyrocketed, and with the backing of several organizations, including the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer (now New Music USA), the consortium soon included 65 orchestras from all 50 states. After the group invited her to fulfill the commission, Tower turned her attention to the project with the variety of ensembles and performing circumstances foremost in mind. To make sure the work was playable by ensembles of all sizes and skills, she consulted instrumentalists and conductors for advice during the creative process. “They told me, 'That's too fast, that's too high, don't feature that instrument,'” Tower said during an interview with NPR’s “Performance Today.” “I wanted the lowest level of these orchestras to play this piece."
Made in America was first performed by the Glen Falls Symphony Orchestra in Glen Falls, NY, in October 2005, and after making its debut in 49 states, received its final performance in June 2007 by the Juneau Symphony in Alaska. Tower describes the thought process that motivated the work in the notes to the score.
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. The beauty of the song 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.
©Jennifer More, 2021