By DAVID PRATT

"Eight months of torture!" That is how Joan Tower describes naming her new piece for the American Brass Quintet. "I kept delaying, until the people at Aspen said, 'We have to have it now.' [The quintet takes Copperwave there this summer.] I wanted the image of something heavy but lustrous; weighted, in a lyrical, arch-like motion." The title also alludes to the stuff of which brass instruments are made. Most trumpets, trombones, etc., are made of leaded yellow brass—comprising 67 percent copper, 29 percent zinc, 3 percent lead, and 1 percent tin. Luster, weight, and force are appropriate associations for Tower's work. From her celebrated Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman to her recent Made in America, her compositions create images of vastness and primal forces. A Tower score—even for small ensemble—is often the aural equivalent of those trillion-mile-wide intergalactic explosions that the Hubble Telescope captures.

Joan Tower (Photo by Noah Sheldon)

Best known for the five Fanfares, Tower, 67, who today serves on the composition faculty at Bard College, came relatively late to brass writing. She grew up as a pianist, and, as the founder of the Da Capo Chamber Players, she had experience composing for winds and strings. Then, she says, "Along came the Houston Symphony in the 1980s, and asked me to write my first fanfare. And I said, 'Hmm, what's a fanfare?' So I looked that up, and I remembered the Fanfare for the Common Man, and I said, 'I'm going to write this for Copland's brass grouping, take snippets of his fanfare, and make it a tribute to him,' because I am an admirer of Copland. So I wrote the piece, but as I wrote I was freaking out because, my God, how does a tuba sound way down there, or a trumpet way up there? And how do they sound together?

"Brass wasn't tangible to me in the way being with Da Capo 15 years got me involved with the flute and clarinet and cello. And where I grew up [in Bolivia, where her father worked for a mining company] we played a lot of percussion, so I had a kind of hands-on, in-the-same-room experience with those instruments. But brass was like from Australia as far as I was concerned! It still feels intimidating, although I'm starting to get it. It takes me forever to get to know an instrument, sort of like getting to know a person. Each instrument has its own DNA, its own culture, virtuosity, and repertoire.

"Anyway, I wrote the Fanfare No. 1 for the Uncommon Woman. I made it a tribute to women who are adventurers and risk-takers, and dedicated it to Marin Alsop." Maestra Alsop's recording of all five Tower Fanfares—plus the composer's Concerto for Orchestra and Duets for Orchestra—with the Colorado Symphony Orchestra (on Koch International Classics) is a stunning landmark. For good measure, the CD was also produced by a woman: arts administrator, consultant, and film producer Karen Chester.

Read an article about the American Brass Quintet.

Australia, of course, does have its own rules and requirements. Tower was not entirely aware, for example, of how low a bass trombone could go. A.B.Q.'s bass trombonist John Rojak kept telling her, "You can make it lower!" And the sheer physical requirements of brass playing limit the length of pieces, and how much any one instrument can do. Trumpeter Ray Mase estimates that the longest one can maintain the brass players' traditional embouchure before the lips start to go numb is about five to six minutes. (Lips do not have fabulous circulation to begin with, as evidenced by their going blue in cold weather.)

But all has worked out well Down Under. "I'm delighted to be working with a group that's so good and so cohesive," says Tower. "They're used to working with living composers; it's not like I'm walking into a situation where living composers are strange to them. I'm very honored to be doing this for them."