The career of Joseph Schwantner is perhaps as prestigious as that of any American composer at the end of the 20th and early 21st centuries. His honors include a Pulitzer Prize (Aftertones of Infinity), a Guggenheim Fellowship, and several grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. His commissions include compositions for the New York Philharmonic, Boston Symphony, St. Louis Symphony, and many others. New Morning for the World (1982), composed in honor of Martin Luther King, Jr., is among the most often-performed and well-known pieces for narrator and orchestra since Copland's Lincoln Portrait. Since 2002, he has been a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

Schwantner was born in Chicago on March 22, 1943. His illustrious career began humbly enough as a tuba player in his high school orchestra, but Schwantner was already composing for guitar and arranging pieces for jazz band. He attended Chicago's American Conservatory, where he studied with Bernard Dieter. After completing a bachelor's degree in 1964, Schwantner entered graduate studies at Northwestern University, where he completed master's and doctorate degrees. He held professorships at Pacific Lutheran University and Ball State before arriving at the Eastman School of Music in 1970.

Although trained in the high-serialist school, the mid-'70s saw Schwantner abandon that style in favor of a distinctly coloristic, harmonically rich, but solidly tonal (albeit often "pantonal") sound. His voice throughout the '70s and '80s is often characterized by rich, dark brass scoring, lurching polyrhythms, and mesmerizing ostinati. One favorite technique is the employment of "ringing sonorities," or sounds that are articulated loudly then suppressed and sustained. These sounds resonate with Schwantner's evocative titles like Wild Angels of the Open Hills for soprano, flute, and harp (1977), Aftertones of Infinity for orchestra (1978), and From a Dark Millennium for wind ensemble (1980). His timbral palette is further enhanced by the use of nontraditional instruments like crystal glasses, water gongs, and bowed cymbals. Schwantner's style in the '90s combined occasional excursions into disorienting atonal and vaguely serialist areas with weighty, and often overpowering tonal blocks, and continued to explore new timbres, as in the Percussion Concerto (1994), the Evening Land Symphony (1995), and In Memories Embrace (1996). Schwantner retired from his position at Eastman in 1999 and moved to Yale University, where he served as a professor of composition until 2002. That year, he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.

In 2007, the League of American Orchestras and Meet the Composer chose Schwantner as the second composer for the Ford Made in America consortium. The resulting Chasing Light ... was premiered the following year and by 2010 had been performed in all 50 states. In 2011, Giancarlo Guerrero led the Nashville Symphony on a Naxos recording of works by Schwantner, which included his Chasing Light ... and Percussion Concerto, with Christopher Lamb as soloist. The recording of the concerto earned the performers a Grammy Award. Schwantner has stayed active in the 21st century, presenting master classes and composing. He has published more than 20 new works in the new century, including Angelfire for amplified violin and orchestra (2002), The Awakening Hour for wind ensemble (2017), and a Violin Concerto (2021). The latter was written in commemoration of Gerard Schwarz's retirement from the music directorship of the Seattle Symphony; it was premiered that year by violinist Yevgeny Kutik with Leonard Slatkin leading the Detroit Symphony. ~ Jeremy Grimshaw & Keith Finke, Rovi