Ian Yan Interview by Jen Bush
Ian Yan loves living a life filled with music. He is a versatile composer, pianist and keyboardist specializing in jazz and improvised music. This talented artist and recent Columbia University graduate works primarily in musical theatre. He also works as a freelance composer for film, TV, video games, dance and podcasts. It was a thrill to chat with him about all the exciting projects he’s working on.
Mr. Yan uses the medium of music to tell stories. “I consider myself first and foremost a musical storyteller, and more specifically a composer, writer, and theater musician.”
Speaking of storytelling, Mr. Yan takes us on an in-depth journey of his musical inspirations and experiences. “My love for music came not from my piano lessons but primarily through watching movies with my dad — a few film scores deeply impacted me as a child and I remember wanting to instill the same emotion in others that those scores did for me. Watching the ending to the movie Cinema Paradiso with Ennio Morricone’s beautiful score is absolutely a core memory.”
“In terms of what inspired me to truly pursue being a musicians a career, that came a lot later in college when I auditioned on a whim to be the Assistant Music Director for a school production of Lerner and Loewe’s Camelot. I had never really been involved in any musical theater before, since it’s so much bigger in the States that it was back home. I got the role, and after that I was asked to be the Music Director of the following semester’s production of Pippin. I really relished that role — I loved working with the actors, not only teaching them what was on the page but bringing out different interpretations of the songs, and also working with them to bring out the emotional beats in the best way. I enjoyed even more working with and conducting the pit orchestra that I assembled for that production”.
“After this, a lot of the same creative team members including me were chosen for that year’s production of the Columbia Varsity Show. The Varsity Show is an entirely student-written and run musical that has a very long history at Columbia, with such notable alumni as Rodgers and Hammerstein, I.A.L Diamond, and more recently, Tom Kitt, Jenny Slate, Greta Gerwig, and Kate McKinnon. As the composer for the 126th Annual Varsity Show, I had to learn on the fly how to write music specifically for musical theater with no prior experience. It was a very intense experience but very rewarding, until the COVID-19 pandemic forced everyone home in March 2020, two months out from the date of our scheduled performance. It would be the first year that the Varsity Show had not been performed in May since the Vietnam War protests in the 1980s.”
ARTIUM: OMNI 