Joan Tower

Joan Tower (born September 6, 1938) is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist, and conductor. Her work has been performed worldwide. Since gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem that structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has written a variety of instrumental works, including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman—something of a response to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man—the Island Prelude, five string quartets, and an assortment of other tone poems. Tower was the pianist and a founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her early works, including her widely performed Petroushskates. The New Yorker has called her “one of the most successful woman composers of all time”. Life and career Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1938, Tower moved to Bolivia when she was nine years old, an experience she credits for making rhythm an integral part of her work. She discovered this love for rhythm in the local saint’s day celebrations. There, she learned how to play percussion and then started her musical journey. For the next dec