Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 1
Joan Tower (b. 1938)

THE STORY

Born in New York in 1938, Tower spent much of her childhood in Bolivia, where her father worked as a mining engineer. She returned to the United States for her studies and received her doctorate in composition from Columbia in 1968. In 1972 Tower joined the composition faculty at Bard College in upstate New York, where she continues to teach to this day. Her honors include a Guggenheim award and three Grammy awards, and in 2020 she was named Composer of the Year by Musical America.

Tower’s six Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman honor various “women who take risks and who are adventurous.” The dedicatee of the fanfare featured this evening is the esteemed conductor Marin Alsop. The title clearly nods to Aaron Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man (1943), and four of the fanfares (including this one) call for the same instruments as Copland’s: four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, and percussion. 

LISTEN FOR

• The bass drum strikes that open the fanfare which draws inspiration from Copland’s fanfare
• How motives are imitated (such as the opening motive in the trumpets) and layered within the brass family: from the trombones, to the horns, and finally to the trumpets
• The separation of brass fanfares by different percussion instruments, including the cymbals, timpani, tam-tam, and tom-tom drums

INSTRUMENTATION

Four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion