Tyler Taylor: Stoking Embers

Program note written for the San Francisco Symphony.

Tyler Taylor winner of the 2024 Michael Morgan Prize from the Emerging Black Composers Project, first experienced making music through the bell of a horn. His perspective as a horn player encouraged curiosity, reflection, and a love of big orchestration, naturally feeding and shaping his compositional voice.

“You get to look out over the orchestra and take in everything,” he said in a recent interview. “You see the string section, you can even see their music. You can see the woodwinds, you see their music. Sometimes there are large expanses of time where you’re resting and just taking in the sounds of the orchestra.” During these periods, he would reflect not only on the sound of the music, but also on its structure.

Taylor started playing the horn at 12 years old in middle school band. He and his family originally chose the instrument as a way to access higher education. His family did not have a musical background, but his mother, raising two sons on her own with limited financial means, realized that scholarships were available to students who played less popular instruments. His older brother took up the trombone and he decided to learn the horn, quickly falling in love with the instrument and band music.

Before very long, Taylor started to wonder about how music was put together. When no one around him could provide satisfactory answers, he embarked on a self-guided journey. He discovered notation software and, unaware of the rich tradition preceding him, decided to input all of Mozart’s horn concertos so that he could listen to the computer’s MIDI playback and study the scores. (As he later learned, many composers over the centuries, from J.S. Bach to John Adams, have learned to write music by similarly transcribing pre-existing works.)

Taylor brought snippets of musical ideas to his band director who was not equipped to teach him composition, but gave him feedback on his notation. In his senior year of high school, the director suggested that Taylor write a piece for the band. That became his first publicly performed composition, Greenlight. Nowadays, Taylor works with the Louisville Young Composers Orchestra and the Cleveland Youth Orchestra to support the next generation of public school students who may have a similar curiosity around composition, but no other avenue for exploration.

Taylor knew that he wanted to study both composition and horn performance in college, which took him first to the University of Louisville, where he earned his bachelor’s degree, then to the master of music program at the Eastman School of Music, designed to support composers with parallel instrumental studies. For his doctorate, he attended Indiana University, where he majored in composition while minoring in horn and music theory. Playing the big Romantic orchestral composers and large-scale contemporary works in school orchestra fostered his ear for orchestration.

“Sitting in the core of the orchestra, you experience the way the composers have used the horn as a foundation of harmony.” He feels a kinship with Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss (himself the son of a horn player). “As a horn player, I have a deep admiration for composers like Mahler and Strauss, and I think you can see that in my scores. Not stylistically, but in my approach to orchestration and my desire for large orchestras.”

The influence of Taylor’s horn playing on the development of his compositional voice perhaps goes deeper than instrumentation and orchestration. His many hours of reflection and perspective taking in the horn section mirror his approach to the world around him outside the orchestra. He views his early works as having a “youthful, kind of lighthearted and playful” quality, but says that as he began to reflect more critically on the world and his place in it, a shift in tone resulted. He laughed as he said, “I don’t want it to sound pessimistic, but when you’re in early adulthood and starting to look around, some of the things you learn are not the most pleasant.” So he began to explore how he might use symphonic forces as a way to navigate and understand a sometimes difficult world.

Taylor says that winning the Michael Morgan Prize has been life changing. And the prize is not the only recent recognition of his work from a major orchestra. In 2025, he was named the new Daniel R. Lewis Composer Fellow with the Cleveland Orchestra, a three-year position. He describes this career moment as “two pretty big escalations I’m extremely grateful for.”

Taylor says his work creates “abstract musical analogies for social-political happenings, both present and past.” As in Embers, his SF Symphony commission premiering May 22–24 with conductor Cristian Măcelaru, these musical analogies often take the form of “scenarios” that play out like experiments.

When Taylor visited San Francisco for the first time in February 2025 and again in December 2025 for a reading of his earliest drafts with the orchestra at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, he had five minutes of music written and could only answer SFCM orchestra director Edwin Outwater’s question “what happens next?” with “figuring that out!”

During both visits, he described “an overwhelming sense of joy” and walked for miles from Civic Center across the Golden Gate Bridge. Contrasting emotions around national events of the past year have inevitably worked their way into the music as the piece evolved. He struggled to incorporate an optimistic trumpet solo that presented itself to him as a thematic idea, but ultimately realized that it had a place in the piece too. “I read the headlines … and it feels sometimes difficult to have optimism. However, I did think it was important for the piece not to be just doom and gloom the entire time. To offer that optimism is an option.” When the trumpet solo returns at the piece’s climax, it has been transformed by a darker sound world so that it is no longer as bright and radiant, but still powerful—like an ember.