About Joan Tower
Joan Tower is a Grammy-winning contemporary American composer, concert pianist, and conductor. Her work has been performed worldwide. Since gaining recognition for her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981), a tone poem that structurally depicts a giant tree from trunk to needles, she has written a variety of instrumental works, including Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman—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 the pianist and a 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. The New Yorker has called her "one of the most successful woman composers of all time". In 1969 Tower, violinist Joel Lester, and flutist Patricia Spencer founded the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players, where she served as the group's pianist. Tower left the group in 1984, buoyed by the immediate success of her first orchestral composition, Sequoia (1981). Tower became the first woman recipient of the Grawemeyer Award for Music in 1990 for Silver Ladders. She discovered this love for rhythm in the local saint's day celebrations.
Biography source: Wikipedia. The profile adds birthday-specific historical context from the Celebs Birthday Today editorial database.