• Joan Tower
  • Vast Antique Cubes/Throbbing Still (2000)

  • Associated Music Publishers Inc (World)
  • pf
  • 10 min

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.
Rorianne Schrade, New York Concert Review
18th March 2017

Discography

Joan Tower: Piano Works

Joan Tower: Piano Works
  • Label
    Kara Huber
  • Soloist
    Kara Huber, piano
  • Released
    9th August 2024

More Info