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    • Joan Tower

    • Ivory and Ebony (2009)

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

    Programme Note

    Premiere
    October 11-17, 2009
    Participants in the 2009 San Antonio International Piano Competition
    San Antonio, TX

    Composer note
    Ivory and Ebony was commissioned by the 2009 San Antonio International Piano Competition in Memory of Andrew Russell Gurwitz and is dedicated to the wonderful pianist Blair McMillen.

    The black and white keys provide the thematic basis for this piece. When they are separate, they offer different but (mostly) consonant pitch collections of various color combinations, but when they are together, the dissonance increases.

    This piece tries to use those separate and together color combinations as a narrative throughout the piece.

    It was also intended to be virtuosic to provide a challenge for the wonderful competitors in the competition.

    — Joan Tower

    Media

    Scores

    Reviews

    Several solo pieces proved especially striking. Ivory and Ebony (2009), written for the San Antonio International Piano Competition, begins with a tolling effect so uneventful that you wondered how tough the contest could have been. The answer came quickly in Andrew Hsu’s incendiary account: before long, he was enmeshed in episodes of speedy, Bartokian complexity and fortissimo Lisztian dazzle. It is the kind of work that sounds as if it required more than 10 fingers, not to mention the agility to shift quickly between styles.
    Allan Kozinn, The New York Times
    9th May 2011
    ...commissioned for the San Antonio [International Piano Competition]... it’s an evocative work in which jazzy tone color and broad emotionalism are expressed through the idea of a rivalry between music made on the black keys and the white keys.

    Tower’s piece begins with a soft, quiet series of repeated chords that alter slightly harmonically, creating a sonic color wash very much in keeping with the Debussy that followed it. Tower makes use of the full keyboard, from deep rumblings in the bass to running passages in opposition directions that reach both ends of the instrument. Amid all this tonal bravura is a little motif, the first three notes of a minor-key scale, that help anchor the music in a narrative context.
    Greg Stepanich, Palm Beach ArtsPaper
    7th October 2009

    Discography

    Joan Tower: Piano Works

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

    American Classics

    American Classics
    • Label
      Naxos
    • Catalogue Number
      8.559902
    • Conductor
      David Alan Miller
    • Ensemble
      Albany Symphony Orchestra
    • Soloist
      Evelyn Glennie, percussion; Blair McMillen, piano
    • Released
      23rd July 2021