Joan Tower | |
---|---|
![]() Tower (circa 2003) | |
Born | New Rochelle, New York, U.S. | September 6, 1938
Alma mater |
Joan Tower (born September 6, 1938) [1] [2] is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist and conductor. Lauded by The New Yorker as "one of the most successful woman composers of all time", her bold and energetic compositions have been performed in concert halls around the world. After gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has gone on to compose a variety of instrumental works including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman , which is 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 pianist and 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 .
Born in New Rochelle, New York, in 1938, Tower moved to Bolivia when she was nine years old, an experience which she credits for making rhythm an integral part of her work. Tower 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. [3] For the next decade Tower's talent in music, particularly on the piano, grew rapidly due to her father's insistence that she benefit from consistent musical training. Tower's relationship with her mineralogist father is visible in many aspects of her work, most specifically her "mineral works" including Black Topaz (1976) and Silver Ladders (1986). She returned to the United States as a young woman to study music, first at Bennington College and then at Columbia University where she studied under Otto Luening, Jack Beeson, and Vladimir Ussachevsky and was awarded her doctorate in composition in 1968. [4]
In 1969 Tower, along with violinist Joel Lester and flautist Patricia Spencer, founded the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players where she served as the group's pianist. Throughout the late 1970s and early 1980s Tower wrote a number of successful works for the Da Capo Players, including Platinum Spirals (1976), Amazon I (1977) and Wings (1981). The group won several awards in its early years, including the Naumburg Award in 1973. Tower left the group in 1984, buoyed by the immediate success of her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981).
In 1972 Tower had accepted a faculty position at Bard College in composition, a post she continues to hold today. [4] Tower received a Guggenheim fellowship in 1976. [1] From 1985 to 1988 Tower was composer-in-residence at the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra.
Tower became the first woman recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1990 for her composition Silver Ladders. [5] [6] In 1993, under commission from the Milwaukee Ballet, Tower composed Stepping Stones, and she conducted sections from it at the White House. Other compositions from the 1990s include the third Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, several piano concertos (notably 1996's Rapids (Piano Concerto no. 2) and Tambor (1998) written for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In 1999 Tower accepted a position as composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke's and in 1998 she won the Delaware Symphony's Alfred I. DuPont Award for Distinguished American Composer. [7]
In 2002 Tower won the Annual Composer's Award from the Lancaster Symphony. During the 2003–2004 season two new works were debuted, DNA, a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein, and Incandescent. In 2004 the Nashville Symphony's recording [8] of Tambor, Made in America , and her Concerto for Orchestra earned a Grammy nomination. In 2004 Carnegie Hall's "Making Music" series featured a retrospective of Tower's body of work, performed by artists including the Tokyo String Quartet and pianists Melvin Chen and Ursula Oppens. In 2005 Tower became the first composer commissioned for the "Ford Made in America" program, the only project of its kind to involve smaller-budget orchestras as commissioning agents of new work by major composers, in which her 15-minute Made in America was performed in every state of the union during the 2005–2007 season. [9] In 2008, Tower's Made in America and the recording of it by the Nashville Symphony conducted by Leonard Slatkin won three Grammy Awards: in the categories Best Orchestral Performance, Best Classical Album and Best Classical Contemporary Composition. [10]
She is currently the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, and as a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. She also serves on the Artistic Advisory panel of the BMI Foundation.
Tower's early music reflects the influence of her mentors at Columbia University and is rooted in the serialist tradition, whose sparse texture complemented her interest in chamber music. As she developed as a composer Tower began to gravitate towards the work of Olivier Messiaen and George Crumb and broke away from the strict serialist model. Her work became more colorful and has often been described as impressionistic. She often composes with specific ensembles or soloists in mind, and aims to exploit the strengths of these performers in her composition. [7]
Among her most notable work is the six-part Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, each dedicated to 'women who are adventurous and take risks'. Inspired by Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, four of the six parts are scored for 3 trumpets, 4 horns, 3 trombones, tuba and percussion. The first was debuted in 1987 and conducted by Hans Vonk. For the second, which premiered in 1989, Tower added one percussion while the third, debuted in 1991 was scored for a double brass quintet. The fourth and sixth are scored for full orchestra. The fifth part was commissioned for the Aspen Music Festival in 1993 and was written specifically for Joan W. Harris. [11] [12] The first five parts were added to the National Recording Registry in 2014.
Ellen Taaffe Zwilich is an American composer, the first female composer to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Her early works are marked by atonal exploration, but by the late 1980s, she had shifted to a postmodernist, neoromantic style. She has been called "one of America's most frequently played and genuinely popular living composers." She was a 1994 inductee into the Florida Artists Hall of Fame. Zwilich has served as the Francis Eppes Distinguished Professor at Florida State University.
Mark-Anthony Turnage is an English composer of contemporary classical music.
Shulamit Ran is an Israeli-American composer. She moved from Israel to New York City at 14, as a scholarship student at the Mannes College of Music. Her Symphony (1990) won her the Pulitzer Prize for Music. She was the second woman to win the Pulitzer Prize for Music, the first being Ellen Taaffe Zwilich in 1983. Ran was a professor of music composition at the University of Chicago from 1973 to 2015. She has performed as a pianist in Israel, Europe and the U.S., and her compositional works have been performed worldwide by a wide array of orchestras and chamber groups.
John Harris Harbison is an American composer and academic.
Richard Danielpour is an American composer and academic, currently affiliated with the Curtis Institute of Music and the University of California, Los Angeles.
Melinda Jane Wagner is a US composer, and winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize in music. Her undergraduate degree is from Hamilton College. She received her graduates degrees from University of Chicago and University of Pennsylvania. She also served as Composer-in-Residence at the University of Texas (Austin) and at the 'Bravo!' Vail Valley Music Festival. Some of her teachers included Richard Wernick, George Crumb, Shulamit Ran, and Jay Reise.
Philip Cashian is an English composer. He is the head of composition at the Royal Academy of Music.
Bernard Rands is a British-American contemporary classical composer. He studied music and English literature at the University of Wales, Bangor, and composition with Pierre Boulez and Bruno Maderna in Darmstadt, Germany, and with Luigi Dallapiccola and Luciano Berio in Milan, Italy. He held residencies at Princeton University, the University of Illinois, and the University of York before emigrating to the United States in 1975; he became a U.S. citizen in 1983. In 1984, Rands's Canti del Sole, premiered by Paul Sperry, Zubin Mehta, and the New York Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. He has since taught at the University of California, San Diego, the Juilliard School, Yale University, and Boston University. From 1988 to 2005 he taught at Harvard University, where he is Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music Emeritus.
Augusta Read Thomas is an American composer and University Professor of Composition in the Department of Music at the University of Chicago, where she is also director of the Chicago Center for Contemporary Composition.
Dan Welcher is an American composer, conductor, and music educator.
Matthew John Hindson AM is an Australian composer.
Margaret Brouwer is an American composer and composition teacher. She founded the Blue Streak Ensemble chamber music group.
David C. Sampson is an American contemporary classical composer.
William Jay Sydeman was a prolific American composer. He was born in New York. He studied at Duke University, and received a B.S. degree in 1955 from the Mannes School of Music, having studied with Felix Salzer, Roy Travis, and Roger Sessions. He received his master's in music from the Hartt School in 1958, studying under Arnold Franchetti and Goffredo Petrassi. From 1959 to 1970 he joined the composition faculty at his alma mater Mannes School of Music.
David Frederick Stock was an American composer and conductor.
Gary Alan Kulesha is a Canadian composer, pianist, conductor, and educator. Since 1995, he has been Composer Advisor to the Toronto Symphony Orchestra. He has been Composer-in-Residence with the Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony (1988–1992) and the Canadian Opera Company (1993–1995). He was awarded the National Arts Centre Orchestra Composer Award in 2002.
Charlotte Bray is a British composer. She was championed by the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, London Sinfonietta and Birmingham Contemporary Music Group, BBC Symphony Orchestra. Her music has been performed by many notable conductors such as: Sir Mark Elder, Oliver Knussen, Daniel Harding, and Jac van Steen.
she attended Bennington College in the 1950s...at Columbia University, .. she studied under serialist composers like Otto Luening, Chou Wenchung, and Jack Beeson and earned her doctorate in 1968.
Jeoung, Ji-Young. An analysis of Joan Tower's solo keyboard works. 2009.