“At First Light”: Remembering Ralph Towner

He disappears for a few minutes, then returns with a handful of scores filled with annotations. The writing is neat and complicated at first glance – and at second glance as well. With patient clarity, Towner points out passages of time articulated in irregular groupings, as if they were the logical consequence of a continuous musical discourse. “There’s a five-four that turns into five-eighths, goes back to two-four, then returns to odd eighths. See?” It sounds like an exercise for highly skilled solfeggio solvers, yet when he hums the melody beat by beat, everything suddenly feels simple, coherent, inevitable. The compositional compactness is evident, as is the awareness that removing even a single note or pause from the overall design would cause the piece to lose its meaning, unraveling and shedding its original grace. Having just turned eighty-three, Ralph Towner opens the door of his Roman home to talk about […]