Meet Eric Tuan, Columbia Choirs 2025 Artist-in-Residence

By Celia Wu

Eric Tuan began his musical journey at the age of seven, when he began singing with the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir. By age nine, he started composing short piano pieces. By the time Eric became a teenager, he began writing choral music as well. One early piece he wrote was a choral setting to a Shakespearean sonnet. Coming full circle, this piece was performed by the Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, where Eric now serves as Artistic Director.

Columbia Choirs of Metropolitan Seattle will be welcoming Eric as its artist-in-residence the first week of November, where he will lead workshops with all of its eight choirs and an interest session for local educators, composers, and musicians. The residency will culminate in a concert featuring all eight choirs performing music from Eric’s existing works as well as premiering “A New Land”, a choral piece commissioned by Columbia Choirs that chronicles the journey of a Japanese immigrant.

“A New Land” and many of Eric’s works resonate with the themes of migration, identity, and belonging. I sat down with him to find out what inspired him to combine storytelling with composing music.

To understand what motivates Eric is to understand Eric’s immigrant upbringing. He grew up in the Bay Area, born to parents of Chinese, Japanese, and Filipino heritage. Like many Asian Americans, Eric’s background is diverse, multi-faceted, and a uniquely American story – and these stories are reflected in his music.

In his late 20s, Eric was commissioned to write a piece again for Piedmont East Bay Children’s Choir, with the only stipulation that it should include some spoken text from singers. On a trip to Nagasaki, Japan, with his grandmother (who grew up there), he visited the Atomic Bomb Museum and heard for the first time what his family experienced with the bombing. What he heard on that trip became the inspiration for “Nagasaki,” the choral piece he composed that weaves text, movement, and song to tell his family’s story. In his own words:

‘Nagaski’ creates a sonic depiction of the bomb going off. The second part uses my grandmother’s spoken text about her experience….the third part is a requiem for the victims that brings together three different musical traditions from Nagasaki. There was a Catholic melody, there was a Japanese folk song, and there was a Buddhist melody all woven together in this closing section….I realize marginalized groups in the US are viewed as abstract entities. I wanted to tell stories that bring individual people’s experiences to life; stories that enabled them to be seen as humans and delve into that universality of experience as opposed to being an abstraction.

I hope to lift up voices from the past to be in active dialogue with voices in the present. I think it can reshape the present when we pay attention to the voices of the past.

Eric described another piece he composed, “Echoes of Eureka” as one that he is most proud of. Commissioned by a Chinese American family, Eric uses text and song to tell the story of expulsions, pogroms, and lynchings of Chinese Americans on the West Coast in the late 19th century.

He described “Echoes of Eureka” as a “broad community endeavor where many voices were woven in.” And hearing him describe the process of putting together the piece, it truly does mirror a collage of experiences and voices:

The story of these folks in Eureka has been sitting in the back of my mind for 10 years. I reached out to Humboldt Asians and Pacific Islanders in Solidarity early in the writing process. Their historians sent me primary source material I could use as text. I was able to incorporate poetry by a local poet that is going to be carved into a monument that will commemorate Eureka’s Chinatown. I commissioned a Chinese American children’s book author to write the text for “Why Should I Leave”, the piece that Bel Canto and Con Brio are singing. My students and singers had a lot of ideas about how we could stage the piece in collaboration with our choreographer from Europe. They brought to life people identified in census records that historians had shared. In the middle naming ceremony of the piece, they got to embody one of the folks who was deported and bring their voice to life.

The creation process for “Echoes of Eureka” became the genesis for “A New Land,” the choral piece Columbia Choir has commissioned.

Over the course of multiple visits to Eureka, he was hosted by local activist and artist, Amy Uyeki, who gave him a book of poetry about her grandmother – a Japanese woman who immigrated to Seattle in the 1920s. The book was created in collaboration with her mother and contained woodblock prints, entitled “Passages of the Spirit,” telling of her grandmother’s immigrant journey in short poems. From Eric:

In the Japanese tradition, the image and the text inform and inspire each other. With Amy’s permission, I decided to set several of these short poems about her grandmother’s journey as an immigrant: when she’s leaving Japan, her experiences arriving in a new land, being incarcerated in the camps, and then ending with an expression of gratitude.

I asked how “A New Land” is relevant to today’s times. Eric reflected:

It speaks to the experience that immigrants have when they come to the US or to any new place. It talks about the pain of farewell. It talks about the experience of being in a new place and not knowing where you belong and trying to build an identity there. It talks about the racism and exclusion and the sense of not belonging. And then it winds up with this expression of gratitude for the experience. I think many immigrants can recognize aspects of their journey in that story. And I think folks who are not immigrants can connect to the universality of the immigrant experience because everyone knows what it’s like to say goodbye. Everyone knows what it’s like to not belong.

The people who perform, and enjoy, Eric’s compositions are multigenerational, and multiracial. Same for Eric’s residency at Columbia Choirs – he will conduct multigenerational and multiracial performers for an equally diverse audience. What does he hope singers and the audience will gain from his music?

The great gift of choral music is that it can bring people together to create something that is larger than themselves. To unite their voices while at the same time not losing their individuality. It’s that beautiful meld of different voices, different perspectives that makes a choral performance compelling.

Every one of us brings something different to the same piece of music. When I watch my singers perform “Echoes of Eureka”, some bring a passion to the parts that are about defiance, others bring a passion to the parts that are more contemplative. Everyone brings different strengths, and that’s what creates a powerful musical experience.

I was telling my singers recently, the idea of a multiracial democracy feels like an ideal that is under threat. What better way to show the world that it works than having this multigenerational, multiracial community, singing and sharing, coming together to share stories with another multigenerational and diverse community. It gives me hope for the future to see that it works.

We can come together, we can create beautiful art, not despite of, but in fact, because of our differences.

Celia Wu is a writer, journalist, and educator. She is active with the Asian American Journalists Association and sings with Con Brio Treble Choir, of Columbia Choirs of Metropolitan Seattle, and St. Thomas Episcopal in Medina.  

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Eric Tuan will be in residence November 4–8, 2025 with two events open to the public.

On Wednesday, November 5, Tuan will lead an Interest Session for educators, conductors, and composers, titled “Music that Matters: Commissioning Socially Relevant Repertoire”. This interactive panel will explore how choral music can respond meaningfully to the issues of our time and inspire reflection, empathy, and action. Panelists will discuss impactful repertoire, share best practices for collaborating with writers and communities, and offer practical ideas for conductors and composers interested in socially engaged music-making. This session will take place November 5, 2025, 3:30-5:00pm at Lake Washington High School.

The residency will culminate in a free public concert on Saturday, November 8 at 3:00pm at the world-renowned live music venue, Bastyr University Chapel in Kenmore. Titled A New Land, this concert will feature the World Premiere of Eric Tuan’s new work for Intergenerational Voices, “A New Land.” The concert will include all eight ensembles of Columbia Choirs, presenting Tuan’s music that celebrates belonging and the shared human journey of migration and homecoming. 

While admission is free, donations will be collected at the door, with 20% of proceeds shared with two community partners:

• Bainbridge Island Japanese American Exclusion Memorial Association 
• Chinese Reconciliation Project Foundation