The Flute Works of Joan Tower

Music and interviews with Joan Tower, Lisa Bost-Sandberg, Patricia Spencer, and Carol Wincenc

Event curated by Nancy Toff

This program explores the flute works of Joan Tower, who is widely regarded as one of the most important American composers living today. In a conversation moderated by flutist-composer Lisa Bost-Sandberg, Tower will talk about her decades of collaboration with flutists. She will be joined by Patricia Spencer and Carol Wincenc, who have worked with her on numerous new works. The program will also feature video performances of four works by Tower: Petroushskates (Patricia Spencer and Da Capo Chamber Players), Hexachords (played by Lisa Bost-Sandberg), the flute concerto (Carol Wincenc), and Rising (Carol Wincenc and the Escher Quartet). Her Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman No. 5 was played at the New York Flute Club in December 2024.

Click here for a link to the January 2026 NYFC Newsletter, which includes an article about this event by Nancy Toff.

Click here for a list of Joan Tower’s solo and chamber works for flute. 

Video of the event:

About the presenters:

During a career spanning more than sixty years, Joan Tower has made lasting contributions to musical life in the United States as composer, performer, conductor, and educator. Her works have been commissioned by major ensembles, soloists, and orchestras, including the Emerson, Tokyo, and Muir quartets; soloists Evelyn Glennie, Carol Wincenc, David Shifrin, Paul Neubauer, and John Browning; and the orchestras of Chicago, New York, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Nashville, Albany, NY, and Washington, DC.

In 2020 Chamber Music America honored Tower with its Richard J. Bogomolny National Service Award; Musical America chose her to be its 2020 Composer of the Year; in 2019 the League of American Orchestras awarded her its highest honor, the Gold Baton. In 1990, Tower became the first woman to win the prestigious Grawemeyer Award for Silver Ladders. She is the first composer chosen for a Ford Made in America consortium commission of sixty-five orchestras. From 1969 to 1984, Joan Tower was pianist and founding member of the Naumburg Award-winning Da Capo Chamber Players, which commissioned and premiered many of her most popular works. six Fanfares for the Uncommon Woman have been played by over 600 different ensembles. She is Asher B. Edelman Professor in the Arts at Bard College, where she has taught since 1972. https://www.wisemusicclassical.com/composer/1605/Joan-Tower/

Lisa Bost-Sandberg is the Teaching Assistant Professor of flute and music entrepreneurship at the University of North Dakota and principal flute of the Greater Grand Forks Symphony Orchestra. As a soloist and chamber musician, she has toured internationally and has performed and presented at new music festivals, National Flute Association conventions, and dozens of universities. Recent engagements include performing as the featured guest artist for the 2025 Electronic Music Midwest Festival, presenting at the 2025 Desert Skies Symposium, and recording for the film score of The Last Twins (music by Jonathan Zalben). She is the bass flutist for the virtual film premiere of Julia Wolfe’s Oxygen for 12 flutes, presented by Carnegie Hall, and she has recorded on the Albany, Cantaloupe, GIA, and North Texas Jazz labels. Her compositions have been recognized by national competitions and performed at major conferences and festivals across the United States and abroad. She was honored to be selected as the 2023 North Dakota Music Teachers Association Commissioned Composer. www.lisabost.com

Patricia Spencer teaches flute and chamber music at Bard College/Conservatory and Hofstra University. With Joan Tower, she was one of the founders of the Da Capo Chamber Players, and she has premiered five of Tower’s works. Numerous composers have written flute works for her, and the number of chamber works written for Da Capo exceeds 150. Patricia Spencer has given many premieres, notably: the New York premiere of Elliott Carter’s flute concerto; r the US premiere of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Kathinkas Gesang als Luzifers Requiem (staged scene for solo flute and electronic sounds); and Thea Musgrave’s Narcissus (for solo flute and digital delay); the Chinese premiere of Ge Gan-ru’s flute concerto, Fairy Lady ‘Meng Jiang’; and the world premieres of Shulamit Ran’s flute concerto, Voices; and Harvey Sollberger’s Riding the Wind I. Spencer’s teachers include Robert Willoughby, Josef Marx, Marcel Moyse, and David Berman. Patriciaspencerflute.com

Carol Wincenc was first prize winner of the (sole) Naumburg Solo Flute Competition, as well as the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from both the US and China National Flute Associations, the National Society of Arts and Letters Gold Medal for Lifetime Achievement in Music, Distinguished Alumni Awards from the Brevard Festival Music Center and Manhattan School of Music, and the Martha Graham Dance Company’s "Five Fearless Women" Award. More than 60 compositions have been commissioned by or written for Ms. Wincenc, and she has premiered five pieces by Joan Tower. She also played the world premieres of Gabriela Lena Frank's Five Andean Improvisations (commissioned by the New York Flute Club for its centennial) and Valerie Coleman's Amazonia. Carol Wincenc has appeared as soloist with the Chicago, San Francisco, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and London symphonies, the BBC, Warsaw, and Buffalo Philharmonics, and the Los Angeles, Stuttgart, and St. Paul Chamber Orchestras and at numerous festivals. She teaches at the Juilliard School and Stony Brook University.

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