Joan Tower (born 1938) was an American composer whose use of percussion was reminiscent of Stravinsky and whose music frequently drew its titles from the natural world. Her composition Sequoia for orchestra received many performances and won her national acclaim.

Joan Tower was a composer who combined performance with composition; she was a founder of the DaCapo Chamber Players, a chamber group which performed music of many periods. Her belief in the importance of performance to a composer is best summed up in her own words: "Today we live in a performance world, primarily. People are out of touch with composers, and tend to forget that we're flesh-and-blood human beings. As a performer and composer, I have been in both those worlds, for twenty years, and I see this lack of contact as a big problem.... Composing and performing do go hand-in-hand--that's the nature of the musical beast!" Even...