by Jarrett Hoffman
IN THIS EDITION:
•Today: the opening event of the Silent Film Festival, and a lecture recital about “Gaspar Cassadó’s Iberian Legacy”
•Announcements: 20th season from CityMusic, new season of SalonEra from Les Délices, open positions with the Suburban Symphony, and volunteering with the Canton Symphony
•Almanac: Joan Tower and Made in America
HAPPENING TODAY:
The Cleveland Silent Film Festival begins today at 7:30 pm at Masonic Auditorium Performing Arts Center with a screening of a movie celebrating its 100th anniversary: the Harold Lloyd comedy Safety Last! (Pictured: an iconic shot from the film.) The screening will feature organist Clark Wilson, whose accompaniment will “reflect the techniques and materials of the musical performances given in major picture palaces during the heyday of silent film.” Tickets are available online. Read Daniel Hathaway’s interview with Wilson to learn more.
Also at 7:30, at Oberlin Conservatory’s Kulas Recital Hall, violinists Domenic Salerni and Rachelle Hunt, violist Danielle Wiebe Burke, and cellist Katie Tertell will join Hispanic studies scholar H. Rosi Song for a guest lecture recital titled “Lost in Plain Sight: Gaspar Cassadó’s Iberian Legacy.” The program includes two quartets by Cassadó — No. 2 in G and No. 1 in f — as well as the Ravel String Quartet. It’s free.
SEASON ANNOUNCEMENTS:
CityMusic Cleveland has released the schedule for its 20th season, “It Is Music,” while Les Délices has announced season 4 of the SalonEra series.
OPPORTUNITIES:
The Suburban Symphony is actively recruiting bassoonists, trombonists, and bass trombonists. New members are accepted throughout the season. Click here and scroll to the bottom for more info.
And the Canton Symphony will hold a Volunteer Open House on September 21 at 6:00 pm. Find out more here.
TODAY’S ALMANAC:
One of the foremost composers of our time turns 85 today.
Born on this date in 1938 in New Rochelle, New York, Joan Tower 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 continue to orbit one another 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 honor 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.
It’s hard to think of a more fitting concept to have sweep across the entire country — which Made in America did. Sixty-five orchestras from all fifty states pooled their resources as part of the commissioning process. And one by one, over the course of a year and a half, each of them had the opportunity to perform it, beginning with the Glen Falls Symphony Orchestra in New York in 2005 and ending with the Juneau Symphony in Alaska in 2007 — perhaps along the way inspiring performers and audience members alike to consider the challenge of “how do we keep America beautiful.”