by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: a teaching workshop from the trio 1N2ATIV3 with hip-hop dancer and choreographer Christian Townsend
•News briefs: Suburban Symphony announces 2022-23 season, Cleveland Chamber Choir to be featured at an important choral conference, Carl Topilow re-ups with Firelands Symphony
•Almanac: Joan Tower turns 84
HAPPENING TODAY:
Although there are no concerts on the schedule today, there is a free teaching workshop to check out, particularly recommended for those in grades 3-7. It’s titled “Get Your Groove On,” and it’s about the rhythms that tie together music, poetry, and dance.
Kimberly Zaleski (flute, vocals), Trevor Kazarian (cello, vocals, beatbox), and Dylan Moffitt (percussion, mixed media) of the Cleveland-based group 1N2ATIV3 will be joined by hip-hop dancer and choreographer Christian Townsend, who freestyles to the beats and improvisations of the ensemble. Get a taste of their collaboration here.
The workshop is presented by CityMusic Cleveland, and is held on Tuesday evenings in September from 6-7 pm at the Woodland Rec Center.
NEWS BRIEFS:
The Suburban Symphony Orchestra has announced its 2022-23 season, which includes five free concerts on October 2, November 20, January 29, March 19, and May 21. More information on their website.
The Cleveland Chamber Choir will be one of the presenting ensembles at the 2023 National American Choral Directors Association Conference, the group announced last week. The conference takes place February 22-25 in Cincinnati.
And music director Carl Topilow has signed a new contract with the Firelands Symphony Orchestra to remain the ensemble’s music director through the 2024-25 season, Tom Jackson reports for the Sandusky Register. The ensemble is still looking for its next executive director, however, after Tricia Applegate departed this past summer to become director of Ohio Northern University’s Freed Center for the Performing Arts.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
Joan Tower, considered one of the most important living American composers, turns 84 today. Born on this date in 1938 in New Rochelle, New York, she spent some of her formative years in Bolivia, Chile, and Peru before returning to the U.S. as a college student.
Receiving her doctorate in composition from Columbia University in 1968, a year later she became a founding member of the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players. In addition to being the group’s pianist, she wrote several successful works for that ensemble, including the mixed quintet Amazon I (1977).
That was an important period of time: the group won a Naumburg Award, Tower joined the composition faculty of Bard College, and she received a Guggenheim fellowship. A few years after the success of her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), she left the group — though they remain tied together to this day. Tower still teaches at Bard, and the Da Capo have been in residence there since 1982.
More awards have followed. The coveted Grawemeyer Award (she became the first woman to receive that award in 1990, for her Silver Ladders). A set of Grammys for her album with the Nashville Symphony (including Best Contemporary Classical Composition for Made in America). The Gold Baton from the League of American Orchestras in 2019. Composer of the Year award from Musical America in 2020.
Tower is not just a composer who was born in America, but one whose music embodies something important about it. Going back to Made in America, it’s worth reading her composer’s note for the work:
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.