Work
Tower's early music seems to reflect the influences of her mentors at Columbia University and is rooted in the serialist tradition, whose sparse texture complimented her interest in chamber music. As she developed as a composer Tower began to gravitate towards the work of Olivier Messiaen and George Crumb and broke away from the strict serialist model. Her work became more colorful and has often been described as impressionistic. She often composes with specific ensembles or soloists in mind, and aims to exploit the strengths of these performers in her composition.
Among her most notable work is Tower's five part Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, each dedicated to 'women who are adventurous and take risks'. Inspired by Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, the fanfares are scored for 3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba and percussion. The first fanfare was debuted in 1987 and conducted by Hans Vonk. For the second fanfare, which premiered in 1989, Tower added one percussion while the third, debuted in 1991 was scored for a double brass quintet, and the fourth was scored for a full orchestra. The fifth, and final, portion of Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman was commissioned for the Aspen Music Festival in 1993 and was written specifically for Joan Harris.
Read more about this topic: Joan Tower
Famous quotes containing the word work:
“Poetry is the only life got, the only work done, the only pure product and free labor of man, performed only when he has put all the world under his feet, and conquered the last of his foes.”
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“Art should exhilarate, and throw down the walls of circumstance on every side, awakening in the beholder the same sense of universal relation and power which the work evinced in the artist, and its highest effect is to make new artists.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“Poetry, whose material is language, is perhaps the most human and least worldly of the arts, the one in which the end product remains closest to the thought that inspired it.... Of all things of thought, poetry is the closest to thought, and a poem is less a thing than any other work of art ...”
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