Background
Tower was born in 1938 in New Rochelle, New York, United States, but grew up in South America where her father was an engineer. Wherever they were living in South America, he always made sure that his daughter had a piano and a teacher.
Tower was born in 1938 in New Rochelle, New York, United States, but grew up in South America where her father was an engineer. Wherever they were living in South America, he always made sure that his daughter had a piano and a teacher.
She attended Bennington College where she received her BA, and later she studied at Columbia University where she received her MA and DMA degrees. Her compositional teachers included Riegger, Shapey, Milhaud, Brant, and Calabro at Bennington and Luening, Ussachevsky, and Chou Wen-Chung at Columbia.
She taught at Bard College beginning in 1972 and organized the DaCapo Chamber Players. In addition, she received commissions from Richard Stoltzman and Maurice Andre and from the Walter M. Naumburg Foundation for a clarinet concerto. She was chosen composer in residence for 1985-1986 with the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra under the Meet the Composer program.
The best known orchestral work by Joan Tower is Sequoia, whose title comes from the giant redwood trees of California. She wrote of the piece, "the achievement of such great heights by the giant majestic sequoias seems to me an incredible feat of balance. My piece . .. is about simple lines and textures that are at times big, at times very small; and these are held together-'balanced'-by factors such as slowly shifting pedal points and the interaction of the different musical events, objects, and energies at any given moment. " The piece begins on a held note - G - which is gradually expanded.
Although most of her compositions were written for chamber groups, she rewrote her quintet, Amazon, for orchestra. It was given its first performance by the Hudson Valley Philharmonic under the title of Amazon II in 1979.
Her piece Music for Cello and Orchestra (1984) was given its debut performance by Andre Emelianoff, cellist, and Gerard Schwarz, conducting the "Y" Chamber Symphony. Tower increasingly directed her attention to orchestral writing and accepted commissions for four concertos as well as an orchestral work. Chamber Music Tower's chamber music is written for a variety of instruments, including three solo pieces for flute, violin, and clarinet. The first of these solos, Hexachords (1972), was written for flute. In this piece, as in her other early works, she used "maps, " meaning a predetermined series of notes. In this case, it was a "six-note unordered chromatic collection of pitches. "
Around 1974 her style changed, becoming more fluid and using descriptive titles and through-composed techniques. Platinum Spirals (1976) for solo violin was written in memory of her father. Tower looked through his books on the atomic structure of elements for inspiration for the work and found that platinum with its property of plasticity conveyed the quality she was seeking.
Red Garnet Waltz (1977), a piece for piano, is a modern response to a romantic idea, and Wings (1981) for clarinet was written for Laura Flax (clarinetist for the DaCapo Players) and evokes the flight of the falcon, a bird that can glide slowly on thermal currents, but can also fly at 180 miles per hour when necessary.
She wrote two duets: Snow Dreams (1983) for flute and guitar and Fantasy (1983) for clarinet and piano. Breakfast Rhythms I & II (1974 - 1975) for clarinet, flute, piccolo, violin, violoncello, piano, and percussion is a transitional piece in Tower's mind. Her goal of simplifying her musical expression dated from this period. The piece is based on central tones surrounded by other supporting tones - in Breakfast Rhythms I the central tone is B, and in Breakfast Rhythms II it is G sharp. Black Topaz (1976) for piano and six instruments followed, but it was Petroushskates (1980) for flute, clarinet, piano, violin, and violoncello that was performed most frequently.
She released her Tower Violin Concerto in 1992. In 1995, Tower was featured in a dance performance by the International Guild of Musicians in Dance, Celebrations in Collaboration, along with Gary Schall.
During the 2003-2004 season two new works were debuted, DNA a percussion quintet commissioned for Frank Epstein, and Incandescent. In 2004 the Pittsburgh Symphony's recording 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. She is currently the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson.
She believes in the importance of performance to a composer. She often composes with specific ensembles or soloists in mind.
Quotations: "Today we live in a performance world, primarily. People are out of touch with composers, and tend to forget that we're flesh-and-blood human beings. As a performer and composer, I have been in both those worlds, for twenty years, and I see this lack of contact as a big problem. .. . Composing and performing do go hand-in-hand - that's the nature of the musical beast!"
She is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.