Celebrating Women's History Month

This year, we salute five remarkable composers as we celebrate Women’s History Month. Each comes from a unique background, yet all are trailblazers—breaking barriers and expanding the stories that can be told through music.

We are proud to present works by these acclaimed, award-winning composers—Joan Tower, Gabriela Lena Frank, Julia Wolfe, Reena Esmail, and Julia Perry—throughout the summer.

Widely regarded as one of today’s most important American composers, Joan Tower has shaped musical life in the United States for more than sixty years as a composer, performer, conductor, and educator. One of her most popular works, Fanfare for the Uncommon Woman, was first presented by the Festival in 1992. Tower described the piece as “a tribute to women who take risks and are adventurous.”

More recently, audiences may remember Festival performances of Tower’s 1920/2019 led by Giancarlo Guerrero and reflecting on the hard fought victory allowing women the right to vote.

This summer, Made in America opens the Festival’s 2026 season—in the year when our nation marks the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Drawing on America the Beautiful, the work transforms the familiar melody through a series of variations—some intimate and tender, others bold and expansive. “Listen to it this summer—you’ll hear many different versions of this tune. It’s very much like America itself,” Guerrero says.

Included in The Washington Post’s list of the 35 most significant women composers in history, composer-pianist Gabriela Lena Frank places cultural heritage at the heart of her music. Born in Berkeley, California, to a mother of Peruvian/Chinese ancestry and a father of Lithuanian/Jewish descent, she draws on her multicultural roots throughout her work. Extensive travels in South America inform compositions that weave Latin American folklore—poetry, mythology, and native musical traditions—into a Western classical framework.

Her music debuted on the Pritzker stage in 2013, when guest conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya led the Grant Park Orchestra in Tone Poem for Flute and Orchestra. Three additional orchestral works have followed. In December, Musical America named Frank its 2026 Composer of the Year. Her Conquest Requiem will be performed on the Festival’s opening weekend, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero and featuring the Grant Park Chorus.

Recipient of the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for Music, a 2016 MacArthur Fellowship, and Musical America’s 2019 Composer of the Year, Julia Wolfe writes music marked by visceral intensity and relentless power, pushing performers to their limits and commanding audiences’ attention. Drawing on folk, classical, and rock, she fuses genres with a distinctly modern edge.

This season, the Grant Park Music Festival presents its first work by Wolfe as part of a six-orchestra co-commission organized by her publisher. Liberty Bell premiered with the Houston Symphony in September 2025, with performances this year by orchestras in Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Nashville and Louisville, and at Carnegie Hall and the Grant Park Music Festival. In her composer’s note, Wolfe asks how music might embody the nation’s founding promise of liberty. Liberty Bell closes the Festival’s final weekend, alongside Michael Daugherty’s Mt. Rushmore and Ludwig van Beethoven’s Symphony No. 9, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero.

Indian-American composer Reena Esmail works between the worlds of Indian and Western classical music, creating shared spaces for musicians across cultures. She divides her attention evenly between orchestral, chamber and choral music.

Planning the Grant Park Music Festival’s 2026 season and its America 250 focus, Giancarlo Guerrero sought to feature Esmail’s voice after hearing her 2017 work Black Iris, originally titled #MeToo. Written at the dawn of the #MeToo movement, the piece was an impassioned response to sexual violence and harassment. As the power of the movement faded, the work was later reorchestrated and retitled Black Iris, inspired by a painting of the same name by Georgia O'Keeffe.

Black Iris will be performed on the Pritzker stage alongside revolutionary voices of their eras: Sergei Prokofiev, who composed amid profound upheaval in Russia, and Aaron Copland, whose bold, expansive sound helped define American music in the 1930s and ’40s. Esmail carries that spirit forward, blending traditions and widening the conversation.

A distinctive voice in American music, Julia Perry gained international acclaim in her twenties for modernist classical compositions and vocal and choral music rooted in Black American traditions. Her earliest surviving orchestral work, Short Piece (Study for Orchestra), was composed in 1952 and recorded live by the New York Philharmonic in 1965. Writing across orchestral, choral, operatic, chamber, and solo genres, Perry’s style continually evolved in response to the cultural moment.

After moving to Italy in 1951, she built a successful European career, touring and lecturing on American music before returning to the United States at the decade’s end. There, however, opportunities proved far more limited, and several major works of hers went unperformed or unpublished. Perry died in 1979.

Today, renewed research and advocacy are bringing many of her previously unpublished works to light. The Grant Park Music Festival presents Short Piece on June 17, conducted by Giancarlo Guerrero.