Joseph Rivers is a concert and film composer and is on the Music and Film Studies faculty of the University of Tulsa School of Music, where he teaches composition, theory and film scoring.

He recently completed a Concertino for Oboe, English Horn and String Orchestra (excerpt from the 2nd movement: Passionate Hope) was premiered on March 9, 2009 by the University of Tulsa Orchestra with Lise Glaser and Lisa Wagner, soloists.

His Trio for Violin, Violoncello, and Piano was composed in fulfillment of the 2007 Oklahoma Music Teachers Association Commissioned Composers Award, and was premiered by Trio Tulsa in June 2007 during the OMTA Convention in Norman, OK. The work is comprised of three movements: I. Wind, Waters and Sky, II. Agehya's Love, and III. Forest Journey, and reflects the composer's impressions and feelings about the natural landscape and human story of native and pioneer Oklahoma. It is also written in memory of Oklahoma composer, Louis Ballard, one of America's preeminent Native American composers and a personal friend, who died in February 2007.

Rivers 's orchestral tone poem, Echoes of War-Visions of Peace, commissioned and premiered by the Signature Symphony of Tulsa, was recorded by the Czech Philharmonic under the direction of Robert Winstin for inclusion on the ERMMedia "Masterworks of the New Era" CD series, to be released in 2008.

A CD of his compositions for piano, violin, clarinet, and synthesizer, Nuova Avventura, will also be released in Summer 2009.

His other compositions celebrating the Oklahoma centennial include Will Rogers Self-Portrait, for mixed chorus and chamber orchestra, commissioned by the Will Rogers Heritage, Inc. and the Claremore Community Chorus.; a one-act opera, Prairie Dreams, about pioneer Oklahoma; and Lonely People of the Osage , a choral setting of the beautiful poem by Oklahoma poet Winston Weathers about the Osage people near Tulsa.

His compositions also include Tempests Round Us Gather, for mixed chorus and piano with multi-media, commissioned by the Coventry Chorale of Tulsa in honor of its twentieth performance season, and in conjunction with the Smithsonian American Museum of Art exhibition, "The Gilded Age"; and The Exile's Return (Dream Sequence), an orchestral ballet in five scenes, choreography by Ken Bello, premiered February 1997 in Tulsa, OK by the Mid-Illinois Ballet.

He completed a score to the feature film, Brother Mine (Nathan McLeod, director). He is working on a symphony to be premiered during the 2009-10 concert season.

Rivers is a member of BMI, Sigma Alpha Iota (National Associate), Society of Composers and Lyricists, American Composers Forum, College Music Society, and Phi Beta Kappa.

He earned his degrees at the University of South Carolina (B.M. and M.M.), where he studied with Gordon Goodwin and Fred Teuber, and at the University of Arizona (Ph.D.), where he studied with Richard Faith and Edward Murphy.