We are pleased to share Manny’s Musings, a preview of the program notes for our upcoming concert. Enjoy these notes, and buy tickets for the concert to hear these pieces played in person.
Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman
Joan Tower (b. 1938)
The career of Joan Tower reads like a map of American classical music’s evolution over the last half‑century, complete with experimentation and reinvention. Born in New Rochelle, New York, Tower spent her early childhood not in the United States but in Bolivia, where her father worked as a mining engineer. This experience shaped her ear in ways that would echo throughout her life. Surrounded by the rhythmic vitality of South American music, Tower absorbed a sense of pulse and propulsion that would later become a great part of her own compositional voice.
When she returned to the United States as a teenager, she had to reconcile moving from a world of vibrant, communal music‑making, to one that felt more formal and codified. Nonetheless, she played it to her advantage. She dove into piano studies (her first love) and completed her doctorate at Columbia University.
In 1969, she co‑founded the Da Capo Chamber Players, a contemporary music ensemble that quickly became one of the most influential groups of its kind. Tower served as a composer and curator for the Da Capo Chamber Players, to help champion new works of her own and others. Great experimentation, successes, and failures followed, and she grew as a result.
By the 1980s, Tower had emerged as one of the leading American composers of her generation. Her music is unmistakably modern but never alienating. She favors clarity over obscurity, and energy over abstraction. Her works often unfold in long arcs of momentum, driven by rhythmic tension and released in bursts of color. She is a composer who thinks in gestures—bold, physical, almost choreographic movements of sound. And she is a composer who trusts the orchestra as a living organism, capable of both brute force and delicate nuance.
Her achievements—including a Grammy Award, major orchestral commissions, and a long tenure as composer‑in‑residence with the St. Louis Symphony—have opened doors for generations of younger musicians. Tower’s advocacy for women in music is not rhetorical; it is lived experience, embodied in her mentorship, her programming, and her willingness to speak candidly about the challenges she faced. Therefore, it was in this context that Tower wrote Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman. The title is, of course, a nod to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, a piece that has become almost mythic in American musical life. Copland’s fanfare, written in 1942, was a wartime tribute to the “common man” whose labor and sacrifices would sustain a nation. Tower’s response, composed in 1986, reframes the idea for a different era and a different sensibility.
The rest of the Musings for “Let’s Fall in (Star-Crossed) Love” are posted in Manny’s Musings on the Bloomington Symphony website. Join us in person on Sunday, February 8 at 2 p.m. at the Gideon Ives Auditorium at the Minnesota Masonic Heritage Center. This concert includes Joan Tower’s Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, Soojung Hong performing Sergei Rachmaninoff’s Piano Concerto No. 1 and selections from Prokofiev’s Romeo and Juliet. Purchase your tickets here.