Located in the UK
Located in the USA
Located in Europe
- Joan Tower
Night Fields (1994)
- Associated Music Publishers Inc (World)
Programme Note
Composer's Note:
Night Fields, my first string quartet, is dedicated with affection and admiration to the Muir String Quartet. The title came after the work was completed and provides an image or setting for some of the moods of the piece: a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon where waves of fast-moving colors ripple over the field, occasionally settling on a patch of gold.
-- Joan Tower
Night Fields, my first string quartet, is dedicated with affection and admiration to the Muir String Quartet. The title came after the work was completed and provides an image or setting for some of the moods of the piece: a cold windy night in a wheat field lit up by a bright full moon where waves of fast-moving colors ripple over the field, occasionally settling on a patch of gold.
-- Joan Tower
Media
Reviews
Its single-movement structure frames an emotional elegiac outpouring with outer sections of intense vigor and harmonic strength. Its 16 minutes contain a gamut of human expression couched in a harmonically colorful aural garb.
14th February 1996
In the program of standard works, [the Muir Quartet] added the spice of Joan Tower’s Night Fields, a single-movement work written in 1993. The composer concentrated her musical ideas into an explosive, dark-hued piece that spoke passionately to this audience.
In the development of the early melodic and emotional ideas, all four instruments urged through music that built monumental effects from strongly differentiated roles. The music brought out the technical strength of the group as well as its gift for finding the inflection to reveal depths within the flying notes.
4th November 1995
Discography
- LabelNew World Records
- Catalogue Number80470
- EnsembleMuir String Quartet
- SoloistBayla Keyes and Peter Zazofsky, violins; Steven Ansell, viola; Michael Reynolds, cello