Joan Tower is one of the most prominent American composers to emerge in the latter part of the 20th century. She initially made her mark as a pianist but began composing in the 1960s. Her early music incorporated serial techniques, but in the 1970s, she turned to a more approachable style, writing works with more lyrical melodies, powerful rhythmic drive, and masterfully conceived instrumentation. (The rhythmic character of her 1993 ballet Stepping Stones has been compared to that of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring.) In 1990, she became the first woman to win the highly prestigious Grawemeyer Prize for her orchestral work Silver Ladders. Among her other significant works are Petroushkates, Sequoia, and Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman.

Tower was born on September 6, 1938, in New Rochelle, New York. When she was nine, her family moved to Bolivia. For the next decade, her talent in music, particularly on the piano, grew rapidly. She returned to the U.S. to study piano at Bennington College and took instruction in composition from Louis Calabro and Henry Brant. She studied composition with Otto Luening, Jack Beeson, and Vladimir Ussachevsky at Columbia, where she earned a doctorate in 1968.

The following year, Tower helped found the New York-based Da Capo Chamber Players and served as the group's pianist. She also took on a faculty post in composition at Bard College in 1972 and has remained there in that capacity. Tower wrote a number of successful works for the Da Capo Players over the years, including Platinum Spirals (1976), Amazon I (1977), and Wings (1981). The group received several awards in its early years, including a 1973 Naumberg Award. Up to the 1980s, all of Tower's works were scored for solo instruments or chamber ensembles. Her first orchestral composition, Sequoia, came at the relatively late date in her career of 1981. It was an immense success and was taken up by many American and foreign orchestras.

Buoyed by her first effort, Tower began writing more works for orchestra in the 1980s and left the Da Capo Players in 1984. The following year, she became composer-in-residence for the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra, holding that post until 1988. On a commission from the Milwaukee Ballet, Tower wrote Stepping Stones in 1993. The composer conducted a performance of "Celebration," an excerpt from the ballet, at the White House. Among her compositions from this period are the 1996 Rapids, a concerto for piano and orchestra (revised in 2013 as Still/Rapids) that she wrote for her friend, the pianist Ursula Oppens, and Tambor (1998), written for the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. Tower was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1998.

Beginning with the 1999-2000 season, Tower launched a three-year stint as composer-in-residence with the Orchestra of St. Luke's. In 2005, she accepted a commission from the Ford Made in America program, composing the work Made in America, to be played by 65 community orchestras spread across all 50 American states. The piece was played by all the orchestras in their 2005-2006 seasons, and its recording by Leonard Slatkin and the Nashville Symphony won three 2008 Grammy Awards in the fields of Best Classical Album, Best Orchestral Performance, and Best Classical Contemporary Composition. In 2014, Tower wrote a Sixth Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, scoring this iteration for full orchestra as she did for the fourth (later retitled as For the Uncommon Woman); the Sixth Fanfare was commissioned by Marin Alsop and the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra, giving the work's premiere in 2016. Tower earned several high-profile awards in the 2010s and 2020s, including the Composer of the Year Award from Musical America and the Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award from Chamber Music America in 2020. ~ Robert Cummings & Keith Finke, Rovi