Music and the Skillful Listener: American Women Compose the Natural World

6. Joan Tower

129 For me a piece is a completely organic process, based on itself; in other words, the starting ideas provide the fuel for the form of the piece. The whole process is one of listening very patiently to what that piece is trying to do, rather than telling the piece what to do. – Joan Tower1 Numerouspublishedinterviews,featurestories,scholarlywritings,andentries in journals, anthologies, dictionaries, and collections of various kinds–and now Ellen K. Grolman’s 2007 Comprehensive Bio-Bibliography–offer essential background information on Joan Tower.2 She is among the best-known and most well-documented composers in this study. Born to Anna Peabody Robinson and George Warren Tower III in 1938 in Larchmont, New York, an upper-class suburb just north of New York City that borders Long Island Sound, as a young girl Joan Tower enjoyed “ballet lessons, belonged to Campfire Girls, and studied piano.”3 In 1947, at age nine, Tower moved with her family first to La Paz, Bolivia, where she lived until 1952, then to Santiago, Chile, where she spent two years attending an English boarding school, and then finally to Lima, Peru, where she rejoined her family, who had moved there in the interim. The composer would spend ages nine to seventeen in South America, where, Grolman explains, her father “managed all the Bolivian tin mines owned by Hochschild Mines and oversaw their daily operation.”4 Given the singular importance of mining to the Bolivian economy, this was an extremely powerful position, which brought with it significant responsibilities and prestige. The young Joan had enjoyed lessons with an excellent piano teacher while living in Larchmont, and her father made sure that she con6 Joan Tower � Nature All Around Us 130 Figure 6.1. Joan Tower, © Bernard Mindich 2008. Reprinted with the kind permission of the photographer. Joan Tower 131 tinued her studies with the best instructors available as they moved around South America. According to the composer, George Tower was musical and came from a very musical family. His mother was a pianist, and while he became a geologist and a mining engineer, he loved music and played the violin, banjo/mandolin, and he sang–sort of. We often did music after dinner in our house. At first I was the percussionist, because my mother played the piano. But later, as I got better, I took over the piano part, and my father and I would play. My mother sang.5 George Tower’s appreciation of his daughter’s musical talents and Joan’s appreciation of her father’s geological work drew the two close together.6 In an interview with the author in 2006, Joan Tower revealed: “I almost majored in geology; I almost went to the Colorado College of Mines. I loved [my father’s] concept of geology and his love of minerals in the land, and the way formations happen and all of that.”7 Four years later, Tower expanded on the topic: “He loved his work, and exploring the land. I saw him in action.”8 One gets the sense that Joan Tower also loves her work. As Grolman explained , the Tower family “traveled frequently within the country to visit different mines . . . occasionally George would take Joan into the jungle on fishing expeditions.”9 Such treks provided Joan Tower with experiences in nature that were challenging and rare, and almost unheard-of for young “American” girls.10 But Joan did not follow George Tower into geology. Interactions with her father and her years in South America ultimately nurtured Joan’s work as a composer, providing her with sights, sounds, inspiration, and imagery that found their way into her music decades later. After the family’s return to the United States in 1955, Joan eventually attended first Bennington College in Vermont, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in composition in 1961, and then Columbia University in New York City, where she completed her master’s and doctoral degrees in 1967 and 1978, earning one of the first doctorates in composition awarded to a woman in the United States.11 Like many of the composers considered in this study, Tower has been recognized with numerous prestigious awards, including a Naumburg Award in 1973, which she won for her work with the Da Capo Chamber Players, a group she founded and administered starting in 1969 and for which she was pianist for fifteen years; a MacDowell Colony residency in 1974...