Joan Tower (born September 6, 1938 in New Rochelle, New York) is a contemporary American composer who spent much of her early life in South America. She became known for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia, a tone poem which structurally depicts a giant redwood from trunk to needles. Among her other prominent pieces are the Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, which is something of a response to Aaron Copland's Fanfare for the Common Man, her two 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.

Tower's style is of the 20th century, and the 21st. The rhythm and melodic flow of her music are very flexible, not limited by tonality or time signature, and her orchestration encompasses a wide range of tone colors. She teaches that the best pieces are the ones that are not "safe" in terms of sitting within a key or meter or standard group of instruments.

She was the first woman to win the Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition. In addition, she is the first composer chosen for Made in America, an ambitious and groundbreaking commissioning program that is a collaboration of the American Symphony Orchestra League and Meet the Composer. The commissioned work Made in America is to be performed by orchestras in every state in the union during the 2005-2006 season. This is the only project of its kind to involve smaller-budget orchestras as commissioning agents of new work by major composers.

Tower's writing is exclusively instrumental. She has expressed no intention to compose using vocalists or extramusical texts, noting that she simply does not feel that words are required to express anything in music.

She is currently the Asher B. Edelman Professor of Music at Bard College in Annandale-on-Hudson, New York, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and serves on the Artistic Advisory panel of the BMI Foundation. She is a graduate of The Walnut Hill School.

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