Composer · New York
Close, intimate attention to the figures whose lives expand what is possible. The sacrifice. The discipline. The persistence before recognition.
Listen to recent work →Subjects
Works
Recent
August Pink
An all-female medical team who treat breast cancer.
For the caregivers.
Echo Spiral
Twenty thousand nerve fibers. Eight-channel cochlear implant. She built it anyway.
For those who turn signal into meaning.
Tai-gi
The language of earliest memory, rendered in sound.
For a sound that carries a whole world inside it.
Silk Spire
A legislator whose conviction outlived her tenure.
For the stillness that carries power.
Maritza & Dianne
Two educators whose belief in their students outlasted everything else.
For the teachers who become something closer to home.
Kernel
Title IX. Thirty seven words that reshaped who gets to play.
For the law that set generations in motion.
Upcoming & In Progress
Premiere · August 2026 · Lavarone, Italy
New Work
World premiere by the Arts Percussion Ensemble, Conservatorio Pollini, Lavarone, Italy.
About
"My music bears witness to the people and the quiet forces that reshape the world."
Elaine Tai is a composer based in New York City. Her music attends closely to people whose lives and work expand what is possible. The legislator who spent her life clearing paths others would walk through long after her. The physicians and nurses who hold people through the hardest thing. The teachers who become something closer to home.
Drawn to intimate sounds inside large forces.
Recent works have been performed at the DiMenna Center and the Juilliard School. She is a 2026 OAcademy Gabriela Ortiz Composing Fellow and holds a Certificate in Music Composition from the Juilliard School Extension Division and engineering degrees from Columbia University.
Composition and engineering are, for her, two ways of asking the same question.
Commission
Every commission begins with a conversation. A person, a moment, a place, a relationship. Who they were, what drove them, what it cost them. The music follows from there.
Orchestras & ensembles
Intimate sounds inside large forces.
Institutions & companies
An artistic partnership. Works about the people inside your organization who built it, shaped it, changed it.
Festivals & residencies
New works developed in residence, with community involvement in the subject and the process.
Individual commissions
A portrait of someone who mattered to you.