Joan Tower (b. 1938)

American composer Joan Tower was born in New York but spent a large portion of her childhood living in South America. The traditional music of this area would later inspire many of the rhythms in her compositions. Tower attended college back in the U.S., earning a Bachelor of Music in piano from Bennington College and her Master of Music and Doctor of Musical Arts degrees in composition from Columbia University. She wrote her first composition for one of her undergraduate classes. This was a formative experience for her; she did not think this piece was very good, calling it both “a disaster” and “really bad.” Despite this, she began a long career in composition, stating “for the next 60 years, I tried to do better.”

Tower’s first compositional period was heavily influenced by her mentors in New York: Milton Babbitt, Mario Davidovsky, and Charles Wuoinen. The works she wrote during this time, in the 1960’s and early ‘70’s, were largely serial in conception. Some pieces from this period include Hexachords for solo flute and Breakfast Rhythms I for Pierrot ensemble. It was during this early stage in Tower’s career that she formed the ensemble Da Capo Chamber Players. As a member of this group for 15 years, she performed on piano and wrote music for various combinations of the ensemble members. 

Around 1976, Tower’s style moved away from serialism and towards traditional tonality. She was inspired by George Crumb and Olivier Messaien during this time. One of her best-known pieces, Wings for solo clarinet, is an example from this era. Since this middle period, Tower has based a large amount of her music on octatonic and whole-tone scales, and her compositions often exhibit intensity, energy, rhythmic variation, and short motives.

Tower has been in the spotlight in recent years for two large composition projects: Made in America and Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman. Made in America was a consortium of 65 American community orchestras from all 50 states who, with support from the Ford Motor Fund Foundation, commissioned a piece from Tower called Made in America. She traveled the country to work with 20 of the orchestras and conducted eight of the premieres. 

Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman has been Tower’s feminist response to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man. “I’m a great admirer of Copland, and he influenced me in many ways. So it was a tribute to him, but at the same time, the title of his [fanfare] bothered me, so I turned it around. It’s dedicated to women who are adventurous, take risks, and are visionaries in some sense.” Now a series of six fanfares, Tower’s Fanfares are each dedicated to a different “uncommon woman,” like conductor Marin Alsop.

Tower’s work has been awarded numerous times. She was the first woman to receive the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition and has received commendations from Chamber Music America, the League of American Orchestras, and the GRAMMYs, among others. She has been commissioned by such top-tier orchestras as the New York Philharmonic, the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, and the St. Louis Symphony. Tower has served as a professor of composition at Bard College since 1972 and does not plan to retire in the near future, stating “I’m never going to stop composing, I don’t think.”