About
Nathan Sherwood Liang is a composer from San Francisco whose recent work explores the power of mythology and the natural systems of ecology and geoscience. By engaging with research and conducting interviews—in works like Those Who Favor Fire (2025), Green, green (2025), Species for Harp and Piano (2024), Aeolia (2022), and The Restless Calm (2022)—Nathan investigates the relationship between nature and humanity and attempts to translate scientific concepts into visceral, emotional understanding. Collaborating with other musicians, artists, scientists, and filmmakers, Nathan’s music strives to highlight the stories, contemporary and ancient, which reflect and question our aspirations for a better world.
Those Who Favor Fire is a 20-minute piece in two movements for choir, chamber orchestra, and electronics. The piece examines recent wildfires and glacial retreat as a product of human greed and uses samples recorded in Iceland to create an immersive space. This project involved six weeks of solo travel in Iceland—with funding from the Russell Bostert Memorial Fellowship—where I recorded glacial soundscapes and filmed interviews with local composers for a documentary about the intersection of music and environmentalism.
GREEN, GREEN (EP)
TRACK LIST
The Death of a Tropical Plant
Green, green
Rising early in the rain at Lake Dunmore
Highway 40
Marine Cloud Brightening
The ocean is perhaps nature’s greatest musical instrument—it’s certainly inspired musicians for many hundreds of years—but it isn’t an instrument most people have had the opportunity to play. TSO aims to give anyone that chance.
This project is part of an NSF-funded multi-year research project led by Rónadh Cox (Williams College Geosciences) on boulder beaches, wave physics, and coastal geomorphology. The musical component is a means to communicate the research to the public, and includes this sample library, as well as compositions from several composers. We hope to give listeners, and users of this library, a visceral sense of how massive storm waves can be, and how forcefully they interact with the coastline.
SONGS AND IMPROVISATION
Green, green is an original composition for voice and guitar inspired by the lyricism and concepts of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants (2013) and contemplating my own changing relationship with the natural world and the idea of ‘wilderness.’
The chorus addresses nature itself, reflecting:
Green, green
I’m falling out of your graces, green
Can’t stay afloat in your branches green
I’ve forgotten how to climb and I think I’ve lost you for a while
This arrangement of Moses Sumney’s Polly (2020) features vocals, guitar, and electronics performed by myself and string arrangement which draws on traditional Hollywood string writing to emphasize the song’s timelessly potent lyrics.
DRAMATIC PROJECTS
The Greek Myths series was commissioned by the Traveling Players Ensemble (Tysons, VA) for their summer productions of Persephone (2020), Atalanta (2021), Heracles (2022), Eros and Psyche (2023), Orpheus and Eurydice (2024), and Arachne (2025)
THE BRIDGE
The Golden Gate Bridge is constantly under construction for upgrades and maintenance, most of which go unnoticed by me and the other San Franciscans. But a recent upgrade to the guard rails, meant to minimize air-drag, had an unexpectedly musical side effect.
When the wind pouring through the narrow bay inlet rises to about 30 miles per hour, the whole two-mile bridge resonates with an eerie call so loud it can be heard throughout the whole city and as far as Berkley. The guard rails’ engineers had inadvertently created the largest instrument in the world.
The bridge is also home to a number of fog horns—the essential sound of a childhood spent mostly in the fog. The reliable toll of the fog horn woke me up almost every morning for the first 19 years of my life. It’s a sound every San Franciscan knows.
The Bridge is a library of instruments from sounds around the bay. It includes the singing of the Golden Gate Bridge, the fog horn, a small exhibit at the end of a jetty in the Marina harbor called the Wave Organ, and other San Francisco sounds.