Page 17 - Phil Made in America program digital flipbook

Tonight’s concert showcases the talents of our superb orchestra musicians and is steeped
in American sonic touchstones from the 20th century. It features a sparkling overture
composed by Massachusetts native and musical giant Leonard Bernstein, a monumental
and life affirming symphony by Aaron Copland that expands the composer’s own heroic
and popular Fanfare for the Common Man, and an evocative orchestral tone poem by
Joan Tower based on the tune for a cherished national hymn, America the Beautiful.
Made in America never sounded so exciting and epic. Be proud and enjoy!

— Steven Karidoyanes

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The following Program Notes are by Laura Stanfield Prichard

Made in America (2004) Joan Tower
(b. 1938)

Joan Tower’s triumphant, dramatic fourteen-minute Made in America was first played
in 2005-2007 in all fifty U.S. states by a consortium of sixty-five orchestras (funded by
Ford Motor Company and the American Symphony Orchestra League). The Nashville
Symphony’s 2007 recording of the work won 2008 Grammy Awards for Best Classical
Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Orchestral Performance.
The composer describes the inspirations for her music:
“I crossed a fairly big bridge at the age of nine when my family moved to South
America. 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 [with lyrics
by Massachusetts author Katharine Lee Bates] kept coming into my consciousness
and eventually became the main theme for the work. 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: ‘How do we keep America beautiful?’”
[Point of pride here. Not only was the Plymouth Philharmonic Orchestra part of the original
65 orchestra consortium, we performed the New England premiere of this music in October
2005. — sk]

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