DFMM presents featured composer Joan Tower

As part of its inaugural season, the Dallas Festival of Modern Music and Ars Nova Dallas are pleased to be presenting three performances of Petroushskates, a work for Pierrot ensemble by American composer Joan Tower.

Hailed as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time" in The New Yorker magazine, Joan Tower was the first woman to receive the Grawemeyer Award in Composition in 1990. She was inducted in 1998 into the prestigious American Academy of Arts and Letters, and into the Academy of Arts and Sciences at Harvard University in the fall of 2004.

She was the first composer chosen for the ambitious new Ford Made in America commissioning program, a collaboration of the League of American Orchestras (at that time, the American Symphony Orchestra League) and Meet the Composer. In October 2005, the Glens Falls Symphony Orchestra presented the world premiere of Tower's 15-minute orchestral piece Made in America. The work went on to performances in every state in the Union during the 2005-07 seasons.

The Nashville Symphony and conductor Leonard Slatkin recorded Made in America, Tambor, and Concerto for Orchestra for the Naxos label. The top-selling recording won three 2008 Grammy awards: Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance.

Tower has added conductor to her list of accomplishments, with engagements at the American Symphony, the Hudson Valley Philharmonic, the Scotia Festival Orchestra, the Anchorage Symphony, Kalisto Chamber Orchestra and another eight of the Made in America orchestras, among others.

Since 1972, Tower has taught at Bard College, where she is Asher Edelman Professor of Music. She recently concluded her ten-year tenure as composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke's, a title she has held at the Deer Valley Music Festival in Utah since 1998 as well as at the Yale/Norfolk Chamber Music Festival for eight years. Other accolades include the 1998 Delaware Symphony's Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composer, the 2002 Annual Composer's Award from the Lancaster (PA) Symphony, and an Honorary Degree from the New England Conservatory (2006). "Tower has truly earned a place among the most original and forceful voices in modern American music" (The Detroit News).

Among her recent premieres: Angels (2008), her fourth string quartet, commissioned by Music for Angel Fire and premiered by the Miami String Quartet; Dumbarton Quintet (2008), a piano quintet commissioned by the Dumbarton Oaks Estate (their third commission after Stravinsky and Copland) and premiered by Tower and the Enso String Quartet; Chamber Dance (2006), commissioned, premiered, and toured by Orpheus; and Copperwave (2006), written for the American Brass Quintet and commissioned by the Juilliard School of Music. As part of her appointment as Season Composer for 2007-08 by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, A Gift (2007), for winds and piano, was commissioned by Chamber Music Northwest and premiered by the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center players Tara O'Connor, David Shifrin, William Purvis, Milan Turkovich, and Anne Marie McDermott in February 2008. Other CMS premieres included Trio Cavany (2007), performed by Cho-Liang Lin, Gary Hoffman, and André Michel Schub, and Simply Purple (2008) for viola, performed by Paul Neubauer.

Her compositions cross many genres: Can I (2007) for youth chorus and two percussionists; Copperwave (2006), written for the American Brass Quintet and commissioned by the Juilliard School of Music; DNA (2003), a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein and the New England Conservatory Percussion Ensemble, Fascinating Ribbons (2001), her foray into the world of band music, premiered at the annual conference of College Band Directors; Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000), a solo piano piece for John Browning; Big Sky (2000), a piano trio premiered by David Finckel, Wu Han, and Chee-Yun; Tambor (1998), for the Pittsburgh Symphony under the baton of Mariss Jansons; and Wild Purple (1998) for violist Paul Neubauer. Tower's 1990 Grawemeyer Award-winning Silver Ladders was written during her 1985-88 St. Louis Symphony residency, and was subsequently choreographed in 1998 by Helgi Tomasson and the San Francisco Ballet. Her 1993 ballet Stepping Stones was commissioned by choreographer Kathryn Posin for the Milwaukee Ballet.

Joan Tower's bold and energetic music, with its striking imagery and novel structural forms, has won large, enthusiastic audiences. From 1969 to 1984, she was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her most popular works. Her first orchestral work, Sequoia, quickly entered the repertory, with performances by orchestras including St. Louis, New York, San Francisco, Minnesota, Tokyo NHK, Toronto, the National Symphony and London Philharmonia. A choreographed version by The Royal Winnipeg Ballet toured throughout Canada, Europe, and Russia. Tower's tremendously popular five Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by over 500 different ensembles.

In addition to two Naxos recordings, Tower's popular Petroushskates opens the new first recording by the innovative group, eighth blackbird, on the Cedille label. Fanfares Nos. 1-5, Duets, and Concerto for Orchestra with the Colorado Symphony (Marin Alsop) may be heard on Koch; and the disc "Four Concertos" — with Elmar Oliveira, Ursula Oppens, David Shifrin, Carol Wincenc and the Louisville Orchestra — is available on d'Note Records. Turning Points (1995), a clarinet quintet for David Shifrin and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, is on Delos. New World Records features her chamber music, including her first string quartet Night Fields. First Edition celebrates her legacy with the St. Louis and Louisville Symphonies with an all-Tower orchestral disc which includes Sequoia, Silver Ladders, Music for Cello and Orchestra, and Island Prelude for oboe and strings featuring soloists Lynn Harrell and Peter Bowman.

Joan Tower has been the subject of television documentaries on PBS's WGBH television station in Boston, on the CBS network program, Sunday Morning, and MJW Productions in England.

The Pierrot Ensemble

As one might expect, great composers generally leave their marks on history directly through the sound and craft of their music. Bach's seemingly effortless mastery of counterpoint is revered and imitated to this day, and the sheer depth of Beethoven's music casted a shadow that fell the length of the 19th century. Other composers have left their marks in slightly other way - Rimsky-Korsakov and Ravel are both remembered today as among the greatest innovators and practitioners of orchestration while Joseph Haydn, despite his prolific and exceptionally remarkable output, still claims a special pedestal due to his early championing of the string quartet. And then we turn to Schoenberg.

Arnold Schoenberg's development of serial composition, also sometimes called twelve tone composition, is as important and influential as any of the innovators mentioned above. Indeed, a strong case can be made that nearly everything that happened musically in the 20th century was in some shape or form a reaction to Schoenberg's serial techniques. And while Schoenberg was certainly aware of the revolutionary implications of his serialism, he also unexpectedly left his mark on history through his choice of instrumentation for what might be considered his magnus opus, Pierrot Lunaire.

Completed in 1912, Pierrot Lunaire is a 21 poem melodrama based on a German translation of Albert Giraud's poem cycle of the same name. Written in his expressionist style, and thus pre-serial, the work is scored for an ensemble of six musicians: flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano, and a soprano "soloist." The flute player doubles on piccolo, the clarinet player doubles on bass clarinet, and the violin player doubles on viola. And in spite of the mixed reception the piece has received since its premiere, the core quintet of instruments has since become a standard chamber configuration known simply as "The Pierrot Ensemble."

The Pierrot ensemble not only survives, but thrives today. While the flute, clarinet, violin, cello, and piano are still sometimes complemented with singer (as Schoenberg did), or other times percussion, dozens and dozens of composers have found the core quintet more than adequate, with our without doublings. This is perhaps most due to the ensemble's brilliant spectrum of colors and versatility, here recalling a classical piano trio, but then perhaps quickly flirting with the colors of a woodwind quintet or even full orchestra! Indeed, it is a configuration important today not only for it's historical association with Pierrot Lunaire but also for its own exceptional merit.

This year, the Dallas Festival of Modern Music is proud to feature Ars Nova Dallas, performing as a Pierrot ensemble. With a tip of the hat to the creator, we present Arnold Schoenberg's Pierrot Lunaire with Sprechstimme soloist Jessica Abel. And with an acknowledgment of the new life that the Pierrot ensemble has taken on through the course of the 20th and 21st centuries, we offer Joan Tower's thrilling Petroushskates and Barbara White's introspective My barn having burned to the ground, I can now see the moon. Visit our Performance Calendar today to plan your visit!