Biography

Nicholas Tran, composer, is a first-generation, queer, Vietnamese-American composer. They began musical studies in sixth grade on the trumpet, picking up piano, and slowly moving into composition. In 2015, they became a QuestBridge Scholar and enrolled at Swarthmore College, originally as a physics and philosophy major. In 2016, they began studying composition with Gerald Levinson. Tran then transferred to the Boston Conservatory (2017-2019) where they studied with Marti Epstein, Curtis Hughes, and Tina Tallon. Tran is now pursuing a Ph.D. in music composition at the Graduate Center, City University of New York, where they are studying with Jason Eckardt and Suzanne Farrin, and was awarded the Graduate Center Fellowship. Tran is currently teaching at Queens College.

In 2021, Tran won the Boston Musica Viva Write it Now! Commission and will have a chamber piano concerto for pierrot ensemble premiered during the 2023-24 season. In 2020, Tran won the National Sawdust New Works Commission, writing for the JACK Quartet and was also commissioned by Ciyadh Wells’ Margins Guitar Collective. Tran has worked with TACETi Ensemble, the Mivos Quartet, and the ContraBAND Ensemble, as well as the Boston Conservatory Composer’s Orchestra and Composer’s Wind Ensemble. Their work has won honorable mentions in the Loadbang 2020 commission and the Juventas 2019 Voices of America competition. His most recent premiere was a percussion solo written for Luke Helker, supported in part by the Koch Cultural Trust.

Fiercely committed to education, Tran completed the 2020 Keep Composers Weird residency in Austin, Texas where they appeared as a guest lecturer at Dobby Middle School. That same year, Tran created a special music program for students with learning disabilities in Boston and put together a peace-building education project centered around the music of Earl Kim. Their academic research focuses on queer listening perspectives, queer phenomenology, and affirmative power structures.

In addition to composing and teaching, Tran believes in creating real world change. They are the current grants administrator for the Woodcock Foundation, where they have stewarded over $1.95M to organizations in democracy, free media, gender equality, and racial equality. Tran has presented and disseminated academic research to these groups, speaking about the politics of sound and the relationships between music and gender. Their academic research focuses on queer relationships with music. In 2022, Tran and their husband co-founded New Arts Music Studio, a teaching studio focused on creating teaching opportunities for early-career musicians.