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- Joan Tower
Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000)
- Associated Music Publishers Inc (World)
Programme Note
Composer note:
Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000) was commissioned by Franklin and Marshall College for the pianist John Browning who premiered both works at The Ann and Richard Barshinger Center for Musical Arts in Hensel Hall at Franklin & Marshall College on September 16, 2000.
They are from a suite of four movements for piano titled No Longer Very Clear taken from a poem of the same title by John Ashbery. The titles are from selected phrases inside the poem.
In Vast Antique Cubes, I wanted to create a sense of a very large space that moved quite slowly from low to high and higher still. Within this reaching upwards, are suggestions of Debussy and Chopin-two composers whom I played frequently as a pianist. By contrast, in the much more energetic and faster Throbbing Still, the music of Stravinsky and the Latin Inca rhythms that I grew up with in South America, continue to play a powerful role — to "throb still" in my music.
— Joan Tower
Media
Reviews
Continuing in the contemporary music vein, Ms. Huber performed the work entitled No Longer Very Clear by Joan Tower, one of the pillars in the world of American composers today. Each of the four movements relates to a line from the John Ashbery poem, “No Longer Very Clear,” including Holding a Daisy (1996), Or Like a … an Engine (1994), Vast Antique Cubes (2000), and Throbbing Still (2000). It is a challenging and evocative work, thorny, and of great scope (and lasting close to 18 minutes in duration), and Ms. Huber was as persuasive in interpreting it as one could hope for from any pianist.
18th March 2017
Discography
Joan Tower: Piano Works
- LabelKara Huber
- SoloistKara Huber, piano
- Released9th August 2024
