Joan Tower
(b. 1938)

Suite from Concerto for Orchestra

Composed 1991, Suite 2024

Born in New Rochelle, New York in 1938, award-winning composer Joan Tower moved with her family to Bolivia at age nine, where her father worked as a mining engineer. She later returned to the United States to study music. Tower credits her years in Bolivia with influencing the Latin American rhythms in her music, while her father’s profession inspired works such as Copperwave for brass quintet. In 1990, she became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Silver Ladders.

Tower’s Concerto for Orchestra was written in 1991 as a co-commission from the St. Louis Symphony, Chicago Symphony, and New York Philharmonic. Conductor Peter Oundjian suggested a reduced orchestration of the work, which premiered at Carnegie Hall in 2025 as the Suite from Concerto for Orchestra.

The Concerto preserves Tower’s characteristic virtuoso interplay, contrasting textures, and sense of ascent. Tower has described one of her trademarks since 1972 as “a theme or strong fragment that goes up,” and the Concerto is filled with such gestures.

The Suite begins with an abbreviated introduction built around F-sharps across different orchestral timbres and registers, reminiscent of Schoenberg’s Klangfarbenmelodie (sound-color melody), alongside C-naturals. Tower explains that the work’s energy emerges from the contrast between large alternating chords and small, fast motives that gradually expand into larger textures. She emphasizes a strong sense of direction and ascent created through scales, tempos, rhythms, and dynamics. 

The title Concerto for Orchestra inevitably recalls Bartók’s famous work, also heard on this concert, but Tower resists that association. For her, the virtuosic passages are not merely displays of technical ability; they are structurally essential, emerging naturally from the music’s accumulated energy.                               

Instrumentation – three flutes and two piccolos, two oboes and English horn, three clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, two bassoons and contrabassoon, four horns, three trumpets, three trombones, tuba, timpani, percussion, harp, piano, and strings

Duration – 12 minutes