Joan Tower  Joan Tower (born September 6, 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". 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. 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, in Vermont, 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. 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). Though 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 accepted a faculty position at Bard College in composition, a post she continues to hold today.