Composer, Performer, Educator
About
Eric Ye is a composer, arranger, and songwriter for concert, game, film, and musical theatre based in San Francisco. He earned his Bachelor of Music in Composition at San Francisco State University and is currently pursuing a Master of Music in Composition at the Bob Cole Conservatory at CSU Long Beach. Equally at ease with diverse styles across a wide range of mediums, his influences include Bach, Ravel, Joni Mitchell, Mariah Carey, Joe Hisaishi, Masashi Hamauzu, Thomas Newman, Stephen Schwartz, Disney songs, and the soundtracks of Sailor Moon, Touhou, and Riverdance. His films have been featured in numerous screenings at SF State and local theaters, and he recently composed for the sci-fi cat strategy game Cat Strats.
A multi-instrumentalist, his primary instruments are piano and voice. As a keyboardist, he studied classical piano performance at SF State and has performed in jazz, pop, chamber, and vocal ensembles. He has accompanied as an organist at Saints Peter and Paul Church and sung in the Schola Cantorum of St. Dominic's Church of San Francisco. Vocally, he is steeped in pop music in English, Japanese, Mandarin, and Cantonese and musical theatre. Recently, he performed as the lead character Auguste Rodin in the stage reading production of An Artist's Love and Success by Bay Area composer Tan Sang.
As an educator, Eric's expertise is in game composition, using Japanese VGM literature as a basis. He is an instructor at the Southeast Asian Academy Online for video game music analysis and composition and is offering the second run of the Video Game Music Bootcamp in Summer 2023. Over the summer of 2022, he taught the bootcamp to students across the United States via Zoom, covering video game music literature and craft of game composition. He has given guest lectured at Berklee College of Music and presented his work on game composition pedagogy at GameSoundCon and MAGWest. A longtime lecturer at SFSU's Experimental College, he previously taught Writing Japanese Video Game Music, covering over 150 tunes from the hits of video game music canon over a semester, as well as The Art of Pop Song and Productivity 101. His upcoming course The Music of Touhou, taught via Zoom, is a 10-week course comprehensively covering ZUN's oeuvre, from his PC games to classic titles such as Embodiment of Scarlet Devil, Perfect Cherry Blossom, and Imperishable Night, all the way to Undefined Fantastic Object. Eric also maintains a private teaching studio, offering lessons in piano, composition, and music theory.
At SF State, he served as the director of the RGB Arts Festival, an annual student-run inter-departmental festival consisting of three concerts: Dance Fest, Film Fest, and Song Fest. He organized collaborations between students from different artistic disciplines and departments to create and perform new works. Currently, Eric is a board member of Rapture Musical Theatre Company, a community musical theatre non-profit for local theatre artists and productions in the Bay Area.