Discipline: Music Composition

Joan Tower

Discipline: Music Composition
Region: New York, NY
MacDowell fellowships: 1974
Joan Tower (b. 1938) 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.

Studios

Monday Music

Joan Tower worked in the Monday Music studio.

Given to the residency by the Monday Music Club of Orange, New Jersey, Monday Music Studio is sited next to an enormous boulder deposited by glaciers thousands of years ago. A small dormer once pierced the east slope of the roof, but after damage suffered in the 1938 hurricane, the roof was rebuilt without the dormer. The…

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