Incandescent

Joan Tower wrote Incandescent for the opening of a concert hall in the new Richard B Fisher Centre for the Performing Arts - sensationally designed by Frank Gehry - at Bard College, New York, where she holds a chair of music. Her third work for string quartet, it is dedicated to the Emerson Quartet, who gave the first performance in the Fisher Hall in June last year.

The Incandescent title derives, she says, from the way she works. “What I try to do in my music, and particularly in this piece, is create a heat from within, so that what unfolds is not only motivated by the architecture of the piece (which I consider the most important goal) but also that each idea or phrase contains a strong ‘radiance’ of texture and feeling about it. In other words, the complete ‘action’ of rhythms, dynamic, harmony and register has a strong enough profile that it creates an identity with a ‘temperature,’ one felt rather than observed.”

There are basically five “actions” described in the composer’s own (slightly abbreviated) words as “a three-note collection that initially appears at the very opening of the piece, a narrowly registered dissonant chord, a consonant arpeggiation that creases a ‘melody’ distributed through the instruments, a climbing motive and, finally, wide leaps that first appear in the first violin and are subsequently picked up by the viola.” The extended semiquaver passages that occur throughout, finally arriving at a Vivaldi-like virtuoso cello solo, include, she says, “all these motives in different guises and temperatures.”

The single-movement work lasts about 18 minutes.