부산대학교 도서관

Summary: Even though Joan Tower has won many prestigious awards, her works are not programmed and performed as often as one would expect. This neglect is perhaps due to a lack of information about her and her compositional style. To remedy this lack of information, this treatise presents a biography and surveys the influences on her compositions, including the music of Messiaen, Beethoven, Bartók, Stravinsky and Schoenberg, as well as imagery, poetry and her South American background. The focus then turns to Tower's Violin Concerto, demonstrating her organic style of writing by showing how the music presented in the first fifteen measures of the piece changes and grows into the material for the entire piece. This treatise concludes with an analytical overview to the Violin Concerto, highlighting specific and important aspects of Joan Tower's compositional style. The concerto exemplifies Tower's organic approach to composition not only in developing the particular musical material, but also in unifying all her experiences and influences into an organic whole.