Tower's musical islands

Synopsis

American composer Joan Tower says explaining her music is “sheer torture for me.” Understandably, she prefers to let her music speak for itself, and many of her works have simple, generic titles like Piano Concerto or Concerto for Orchestra.

But audiences generally prefer more evocative titles, and on more than one occasion Tower has provided them. On today’s date in 1985, the Florida Orchestra premiered Island Rhythms, a celebratory work by Tower commissioned for the opening of Tampa’s Harbour Island. Tower suggested that Caribbean music influenced the livelier outer sections of her new piece, and its central, slower section evoked the image of an underwater swimmer rising slowly but steadily towards the light.

For the St. Louis Symphony’s oboist, Peter Bowman, Tower composed Island Prelude for solo oboe and orchestra in 1989. When pressed to describe what sort of “island” she had in mind, Tower replied with her usual poetic eloquence: “The island is remote, lush and tropical with stretches of white beach interspersed with thick green jungle. Above is a large, powerful and brightly colored bird which soars and glides, … in complete harmony with its island home.”

Music Played in Today's Program

Joan Tower (b. 1938): Island Rhythms; Louisville Orchestra; Lawrence Leighton Smith, conductor; Louisville 6

Joan Tower (b. 1938): Island Prelude; Peter Bowman, oboe; Saint Louis Symphony; Leonard Slatkin, conductor; Nonesuch 79245

On This Day

Births

• 1908 - American composer Leroy Anderson, in Cambridge, Massachusetts

• 1910 - American songwriter and musical composer Frank Loesser, in New York City

• 1911 - American composer and conductor Bernard Herrmann, in New York City

• 1914 - Czech-born Swiss conductor and composer, Rafael Kubelik, in Bychiory, near Kolin

• 1924 - American composer Ezra Laderman, in Brooklyn, New York

Deaths

• 1744 - French composer André Campra, 83, at Versailles;

• 1941 - Polish pianist and composer Ignace Jan Paderewski, 80, in New York City. Buried at Arlington National Cemetary in Virginia (pending the liberation of Poland during WWII) by order of President Roosevelt. He was reburied with honors in Warsaw on June 30, 1992.

Premieres

• 1888 - Wagner: Die Feen (The Fairies), in Munich at the Hoftheater. Wagner composed this opera in 1834.

• 1889 - Glazunov: Symphony No. 2, in Paris

• 1951 - Leroy Anderson: Plink, Plank, Plunk! and Fiddle-Faddle at a Decca recording session in New York City, with the composer conducting (see also June 28)

• 1962 - First modern professional staging of Moneteverdi’s opera L’Incoronazione di Poppea (The Coronation of Poppea) at the Glyndebourne Festival in England, in a version prepared and conducted by Raymond Leppard. The opera premiered in Venice in the autumn of 1642. The opera’s first stagings in the 20th century were both student productions: Smith College in Northampton, Massachusetts, on April 27, 1927 and Oxford University, on Dec. 6, 1927.

• 1985 - Joan Tower: Island Rhythms (commissioned for the opening of Harbour Island in Tampa), by the Florida Orchestra, Irwin Hoffman, conducting

• 1997 - Esa-Pekka Salonen: Giro (revised version) for orchestra, in Porvoo (Finland), by the Avanti! Chamber Orchestra conducted by the composer

Others

• 1729 - Handel returns to London after a trip to the continent to recruit new singers for a new season of Royal Academy opera productions directed by Handel and Heidegger (Gregorian date: July 10). Earlier in the month, when in Halle, Germany, Handel had been invited by W.F. Bach to visit J.S. Bach in Leipzig, but Handel declines.

• 1769 - First documented concert in Boston conducted by the Early American composer Josiah Flagg with his militia band.