Joan Tower
Made In America

born in New Rochelle, New York; September 6, 1938
PREMIERE: Glen Falls, New York; October 2005

COMMISSION: Jointly commissioned by the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer as part of a landmark Ford Made in America consortium of 65 orchestras. 

INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons; 2 horns, 2 trumpets, trombone; timpani, percussion; strings

DURATION: 13 minutes

RSO PERFORMANCE HISTORY: This is the first performance of Tower’s Made in America. While previously planned in the 2019-2020 season, the season’s March 24, 2020 concert was cancelled as a result of the pandemic. 

As a pivotal figure in contemporary classical music, American composer Joan Tower has heavily shaped the landscape for younger generations. Her prolific output encompasses ballet, orchestral, chamber, vocal, and solo instrumental genres. Her single-movement orchestral work, Made in America, utilizes the traditional song “America the Beautiful” as its core thematic foundation.

Tower describes the deeply personal and cultural impetus behind the composition:
“I crossed a fairly big bridge at the age of nine when my family moved to South America—La Paz, Bolivia—where we stayed for nine years. I had to learn a new language, a new culture, and how to live at 13,000 feet! It was a lively culture with many saints’ days celebrated through music and dance, but the large Inca population in Bolivia was generally poor and there was little chance of moving up in class or work position. When I returned to the United States, I was proud to have free choices, upward mobility, and the chance to try to become who I wanted to be. I also enjoyed the basic luxuries of an American citizen that we so often take for granted: hot running water, blankets for the cold winters, floors that are not made of dirt, and easy modes of transportation, among many other things. So when I started composing this piece, the song ‘America the Beautiful’ kept coming into my consciousness and eventually became the main theme for the work. The beauty of the song is undeniable and I loved working with it as a musical idea. One can never take for granted, however, the strength of a musical idea—as Beethoven (one of my strongest influences) knew so well. This theme is challenged by other more aggressive and dissonant ideas that keep interrupting, unsettling it, but ‘America the Beautiful’ keeps resurfacing in different guises (some small and tender, others big and magnanimous), as if to say, ‘I’m still here, ever changing, but holding my own.’ A musical struggle is heard throughout the work. Perhaps it was my unconscious reacting to the challenge of ‘how do we keep America beautiful?'”

Ferdinand David
Concertino for Trombone and Orchestra in E-flat Major, Op. 4 

born in Hamburg, Germany; June 19, 1810
died in Klosters, Switzerland; July 18, 1873 

PREMIERE: Leipzig, Germany; December 14, 1837

INSTRUMENTATION: 2 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, timpani, strings

DURATION: 15 minutes

RSO PERFORMANCE HISTORY: This is the premiere performance of David’s concerto. 

Ferdinand David’s Concertino for Trombone is a glorious example of the nineteenth-century vision of concerto soloist as Romantic Hero, and in this case, an enrichment of the trope of this character as violinist or pianist. Though not the first, this concertino has become the most performed Classical-Romantic solo for trombone, and a staple of trombone repertoire to this day. The original autograph score is lost, but trombonist Sebastian Krause reconstructed an Urtext edition, with extensive scholarly notes, from David’s own transcription of the piece for solo cello.

The history of the concertino’s composition and performance also reveals the role of specific musicians and ensembles in the formation of music history, as well as the norms of music making in nineteenth-century Europe, with musicians being skilled on multiple instruments and also regularly composing, often for each other. The Gewandhaus Orchestra, Europe’s oldest civic orchestra tracing its origins to 1743, adopted the name Gewandhaus (“garment house”) in 1781, for the textile merchants’ building in Leipzig, Germany that it occupied. Multi-talented composer and violinist/concertmaster of the orchestra, Ferdinand David, wrote the trombone concertino for fellow orchestra member Carl Traugott Queisser, also multi-talented as both violist and virtuoso trombonist, and called a Posaunegott (“trombone god”) by Robert Schumann (Neue Zeitschrift für Musik, 6 December 1836, p. 185), with multi-talented composer and conductor Felix Mendelssohn leading the premiere in 1837. David, in turn, later premiered Mendelssohn’s violin concerto in 1845.

Concertino literally means “little concerto,” and indeed, especially with its three movements that flow one into the next, and all the themes from the first movement reprised in the last, it is useful to hear this piece as one unified, sonata-like concept in terms of its form. While David certainly wrote idiomatically for the trombone and lets the soloist showcase all manner of technical virtuosity, the expressive aspect lies in the inherent drama of sonata structure—with its contrasting, conflicting, developing, and resolving themes and keys—working hand-in-hand with the operatic sources, both orchestral and vocal, of the parade of musical styles used convey it all.

For example, the trombone gets to play itself in the first few notes of its opening passage, sounding very much like a heralding trombone in an opera overture, but then immediately switches to the vocal lyricism of a singer. The composer often integrates the instrumental and vocal idioms, of course, but certain episodes stand out as extremely operatic, such as the solo cadenza at the end of the first movement, which David even marked as quasi recitativo—the operatic speak-singing style, sometimes used for narration or dialogue, but in this case, for soliloquy. Similarly deliberate in indication is the Marcia funebre (“funeral march”) of the second movement, in which the trombone again functions both as itself, playing in the processional funeral band, and also as anguished main character, transforming the procession to a full-on dramatic scene.

The versatility of the trombone in this early-nineteenth-century concerto perfectly reflects the history of the instrument, highly valued and much used in the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries for its expressive vocal qualities, then almost completely ignored by the developing instrumental genres of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, but reintegrated into the symphony orchestra and opera orchestra in the early nineteenth century, with famous appearances in Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and in the operas of Rossini and Weber.

Program Note by Dr. Eileen Mah ©2026

Ludwig Van Beethoven
Symphony No. 5 in C minor, op. 67

born in Bonn, Germany; December 16, 1770
died in Vienna, Austria; March 26, 1827 

PREMIERE: Vienna, Austria; December 22, 1808 

INSTRUMENTATION: 3 flutes (one doubling piccolo), 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 3 bassoons (one doubling contrabasson); 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones; timpani; strings

DURATION: 35 minutes

RSO PERFORMANCE HISTORY: This is RSO’s fifth performance of Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5. It was previously performed under the direction of Manfred Blum in 1956. IN FACT, BEETHOVEN’S FIFTH SYMPHONY WAS PERFORMED AT RSO’S VERY FIRST CONCERT. It was also directed by Thomas Elefant in 1986 and 1993 and Guy Bordo in 1998.

The Fifth Symphony of Beethoven is on most everyone’s list of the most popular works of classical music, and few people fail to nod knowingly on hearing the tell-tale dit-dit-dit-DAH of the opening motif. Furthermore, the Fifth’s popularity is no recent phenomenon; even during his lifetime, it was considered to be the archetypal Beethoven symphony. He began sketches on what became the Fifth Symphony in 1804 after the completion of his great “Eroica,” intending to fashion a retrospective tribute to Mozart. Other projects, however, deferred its completion until early 1808. Over the intervening years his deafness had worsened and he felt an increasing despair at his blighted hopes. The result was a work far more profound, musically and philosophically, than his earlier sketchbooks would have predicted.

Because of its heroic content and the timing of its appearance, the Fifth Symphony appealed to the patriotic sentiments of its first listeners. It was written shortly after a devastating French defeat of the Prussians, their military collapse ratified by Napoleon’s dictated peace at Tilsit in the summer of 1807. It is revealing that both of the grandees to whom Beethoven dedicated his Symphony — Prince Lobkowitz and Count Razumovsky —were not only important patrons of Beethoven’s music (for example, in the famous Op. 59 “Razumovsky” quartets) but were ardent foes of Bonaparte and strong German nationalists.

The opening movement begins, of course, with the three G’s and an E-flat, the Morse code-like “V For Victory” motif that at least one story describes as symbolizing for Beethoven, “Fate knocking at the door.” If the story is not true, it ought to be. In any case the motif became a symbol of resistance to Fascism during the Second World War, as the BBC mounted its effective V propaganda campaign and V’s were painted on walls and tapped out on doorways and windowpanes throughout occupied Europe. As the first movement progresses, this “Fate” motif “soon grows hands and feet, and,” as Tovey writes, shamelessly mixing his metaphors, “continues to course through the bloodstream of the developing musical organism.” It not only dominates the first movement but, in modified form, it recurs in the other three to constitute a unifying force in the Symphony. The second movement, marked “Andante con moto,” is a fitting contrast to the dramatic beginning, music of relative simplicity and consolation. The last two movements occur without a break, giving a sense both of continuity and closure to the work as a whole. The third movement, “Allegro,” is in the form of a traditional scherzo, although its message, delivered in the minor key, is more demonic than jesting in spirit — one critic calling it “the musical embodiment of the terror that walketh by night.” The immediate opening of the “Allegro” finale — a sudden release of tension — is a supreme moment, marked by the first appearance in any symphony of trombones. This exuberant music marches relentlessly to its conclusion in one of the most glorious of Beethoven’s symphonic endings.

The premiere of the Fifth Symphony occurred in Vienna on December 22, 1808, in one of the most notorious concerts ever held. The directors of the famous Theater an der Wien had arranged with Beethoven to present some of his works in a spectacular benefit concert. Sorely lacking for patrons and taking advantage of a good thing, Beethoven scheduled a program that was to stretch over four hours, with virtually all the music unfamiliar. The first half alone consisted of the first performance of the Sixth Symphony, the lengthy concert aria, “Ah, perfido,” excerpts from the Mass in C, and the first Viennese performance of the Fourth Piano Concerto. (The star soprano engaged for the aria quarreled with Beethoven, was fired and replaced at the last minute by a young unknown whose voice trembled in terror throughout the piece). After intermission came the premiere of the Fifth Symphony, more selections from the Mass, a fantasia improvised at the piano by Beethoven, and — to provide a “buffo” finish — the hastily put-together Choral Fantasy. Here the under-rehearsed orchestra, long since spent and out of sorts with pianist-conductor Beethoven, broke down in the middle; nothing daunted, the piece was restarted and played through with all the repeats! By the end, most in the audience would have been limp with exhaustion had they not already been half-frozen in the scarcely heated hall three days before Christmas.

Program notes by Robert M. Johnstone