Joan Tower was born in 1938 in New Rochelle, New York, but spent a significant part of her childhood in Bolivia, where her father worked as a geologist. Surrounded by mountains, high plateaus and distant horizons, she developed a keen ear for space and sonic mass. The sense of height, tension and physical energy that would later define her music finds its first foothold here.

Tower began her musical life as a pianist. She studied at Bennington College and later at Columbia University, where she pursued both performance and composition. Gradually, her focus shifted: the performer made way for the maker. Yet her background at the keyboard remains clearly audible—in music that often feels strikingly physical, almost athletic, with an immediacy you can sense in the body.

In the 1970s, Tower became part of New York’s contemporary-music scene, notably as a founding member of the Da Capo Chamber Players. While minimalism and conceptual rigor set the tone, she forged a voice that never quite fits the mould. Her music, too, is rhythm-driven, layered, and fiercely energetic, but less a mantra than an engine. She clears her own path — not always fashionable, but unmistakably her own.

With Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, Tower wrote one of her best-known works, along with a title that leaves little to the imagination. Playful yet powerful, it offers a knowing nod to Copland’s Fanfare for the Common Man and has become a kind of musical calling card. Not only because of the music itself, but also because of her singular position as a woman composer.

Although Pépin’s language is unmistakably of today, her music refuses to submit to the aesthetic severity that can seem to typify contemporary composers. Rhythm, colour, and transparency are central, with an orchestral flair that makes her work strikingly approachable. At a time when new music is still too often heard with a frown, Pépin seems entirely at ease with the idea that it may simply sound pleasurable, too.

That her approach resonates is clear from a trophy cabinet growing as fast as her oeuvre. In 2015, Pépin won SACEM’s prestigious Grand Prix Musique Symphonique (the French counterpart of SABAM). Later came a Victoire de la musique classique, and since 2022 she has been a member of the French Order of Arts and Letters. A remarkable string of recognitions for someone who has only just left the starting blocks – oh no, now we are the ones calling her young and promising again.