Tyler Taylor: Embers

Program note written for the San Francisco Symphony.

Tyler Taylor is the 2024 winner of the Michael Morgan Prize from the Emerging Black Composers Project, an initiative launched by the San Francisco Symphony and San Francisco Conservatory of Music in 2020.

Born and raised in Louisville, Kentucky, where he currently resides, Taylor is also a horn player and teacher of composition and horn. He earned degrees in both fields from the University of Louisville, a master’s degree from the Eastman School of Music, and a doctorate from Indiana University. In 2025, he was awarded the Cleveland Orchestra’s Daniel R. Lewis Fellowship, a three-year composer residency with the orchestra.

Taylor describes his music as “creating abstract musical analogies for social-political happenings both present and past.” In previous orchestral pieces, he has used the saxophone to represent othered voices and questioned orchestral hierarchy by reconfiguring the orchestra into smaller ensembles. In Embers, his new piece for the San Francisco Symphony, we follow a voice fighting to be heard, and the musical analogies take both abstract and concrete forms.

The Music

Embers begins with the first violins playing an expressive melody while stifled by heavy practice mutes—a visible, visceral effect. The first five minutes of the piece, dominated by this suppressed voice, evoke melancholy and difficult memories. Taylor says, “when you spend too much time dwelling in the past, there are consequences.” We quickly hear those consequences when the orchestra explodes in a torrent of sound that resets the scene. In the aftermath of this event, the theme from the muted violins appears in various guises. Taylor describes how the theme works its way through every part of the orchestra and serves as the foundation of all of the musical materials heard in the piece. Each time it is heard, it tries asserting itself in new ways: “the responses to these assertions vary from sharp cuts to long waves of sympathetic spinnings-out.”

The theme takes on many different characters throughout the piece: sometimes persistent and rebellious, sometimes mocking (when played by the trombones), sometimes peaceful. An optimistic group of trumpets breaks through briefly, but is cut off aggressively by the rest of the orchestra. Toward the end of the piece, at its climax, the trumpets return, reimagined in the context of the darker sound world that the piece inhabits, “not as bright and radiant, but still very, very powerful.” In his own program note, Taylor writes: 

The word “embers” may evoke a number of associations. The aftermath of a fire—dim, flickering, glowing, ashes that can be stoked back into something powerful and energized. Distant memories echoing into the present.

In a broader sense, Embers reflects on what we are experiencing together as a larger community—united by a need to be heard, the pursuit of peace, and a desire for progress. Neither the piece nor I pretend to provide answers, but it certainly makes room for reflecting on where we stand and what we stand for.