Here’s a good work for Labor Day, to mark Joan Tower’s birthday. However, “Made in America” (2004) really has nothing to do with manufacturing. Rather, it’s a musical appreciation of the United States by a composer who spent many of her formative years (ages 9-18) in Bolivia, where her father managed the tin mines.
Tower describes her inspiration for the work in her program notes:
“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.”
The piece received its first performance in October 2005.
Tower is widely regarded as one of America’s foremost living composers, and is also one of the most successful women in the field.
The Princeton Symphony Orchestra will perform her Suite from Concerto for Orchestra on its season-opening concerts, alongside Rachmaninoff’s “Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini” (with pianist Dmitry Shishkin) and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra (at Princeton University’s Richardson Auditorium, Oct. 17 & 18). For more information, visit princetonsymphony.org.
Happy birthday, Joan Tower, 88 years old today!
