Joan Tower
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, No. 1
Joan Tower is a child of both North and South America, having been born in New Rochelle, New York in 1939, but raised for ten years–from ages nine to nineteen–in Bolivia. She began her professional musical career as a pianist, studying piano performance at Bennington College in Vermont, and then earning a doctorate in music from Columbia University in 1968, where she studied composition with Otto Luening, Chou Wen-chung, and Vladimir Ussachevsky. She founded the Da Capo Chamber Players in 1969, to feature music of new composers such as herself, John Harbison, Philip Glass, David Lang, Shulamit Ran, and others. She served as pianist for the group until 1984, and the group is still associated with Bard College, where Tower teaches.
The roles of both composer and performer, Tower has said, should be understood by all musicians: “In the 19th century, more often than not the composers and the performers were one and the same people, and that made for a very interesting creative relationship on both sides … We’ve got to get these two back together again.” As such, Tower’s early works were all for chamber groups, often for musicians whom she knew personally.
It was not until 1981, when she was 41, that she composed a piece for full orchestra, Sequoia, commissioned by the American Composers Orchestra. The work was performed by a number of orchestras, including the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, whose music director, Leonard Slatkin, hired Tower as the organization’s composer-in-residence in 1985, a post she held until 1988. During this time she became acquainted with many of the musicians in the group, and wrote pieces expressly with the musicians of that orchestra in mind. Her two most significant works from this period were Silver Ladders (1986), a one-movement orchestral work based on a rising scale, and the Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman (1986), inspired by Aaron Copland’s well-known Fanfare for the Common Man (1943). Tower’s fanfare proved so popular that she composed four other fanfares with the same title, from 1989 through 1993. It is the original 1986 fanfare that Redwood Symphony performs this evening.
The fanfare commemorates “women who take risks and are adventurous,” Tower writes. She dedicated the work to conductor Marin Alsop, then one of the few women conductors in the classical world, who in 2007 was named the music director of the Baltimore Symphony, becoming the first woman to hold such a position for a major US metropolitan orchestra. Tower has been a trailblazer herself for other women composers. Asked in a 1987 interview if she wanted to be known as a woman composer, or simply as a composer, Tower responded: “I think some people are not aware that there are no women composers on their concerts. So for that reason, I do like to be reminded this is a woman composer. I think that’s an important reminder. Other than that, the music is the music and the fact that I’m a woman doesn’t make [a] difference to the music.”
Tower’s fanfare uses the same instrumentation as Copland’s, and its opening timpani and gong quote Copland’s work. The energetic brass lines build to a thrilling climax. As one critic writes, this fanfare is “a call to great deeds for whoever hears it.”