The music of Joan Tower, one of this generation's most dynamic and colorful composers, will open the Department of Music's fall 1996 concert series Sept. 14 at 8:15 p.m. in Barnes Hall. The concert is free and open to the public.
Tower will participate in a composer's forum Sept. 13 at 2:15 p.m. in 301 Lincoln Hall.
The Cornell Contemporary Chamber Players will perform Tower's Trés lent and Turning Points. Trés lent (1994) for cello and piano is subtitled "Hommage á Messian" and is Tower's most overt tribute to the French composer whose music has been influential in Tower's own works. The composition will be performed by Elizabeth Simkin on cello and Karl Paulnack on piano, both of Ithaca College. Turning Points (1995) is a one-movement chamber work for a clarinet and string quintet. The piece will be performed by Simkin on cello, Richard Faria on clarinet, Debra Moree on viola and Ellen Jewett and Margaret Cooper on violin. All are Ithaca College music faculty.
Other works on the program are by Igor Stravinsky, Elliott Carter, Samuel Barber and Laurence Bitensky, an Ithaca College and Cornell graduate and recipient of an American Society of Composers and Publishers Foundation Grant to Young Composers.
Tower's bold and energetic music has won large and enthusiastic audiences nationwide. Her Silver Ladders, written in 1987 for the St. Louis Symphony as part of her three-year residence with that orchestra, won the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition in 1990. A recording of Silver Ladders and her Island Prelude was released in 1990 on Nonesuch Records, featuring the St. Louis Symphony with Leonard Slatkin conducting. The symphony also recorded, on RCA, her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (No.1).
Currently the Asher Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College, Tower was the pianist for the Da Capo Chamber Players, winner of the 1973 Naumburg Award for Chamber Music.
Tower's appearance at Cornell is underwritten by Meet the Composer, a program supported by the Ann and Gordon Getty Foundation, the Joyce Mertz-Gilmore Foundation and the New York State Council on the Arts.