Interview: Reena Esmail, composer
At last week's Texas Music Educators Association convention and clinic, composer Reena Esmail was present to share a new band arrangement of one of her popular pieces, "Tuttarana." Being both a fan and classical radio host, I was pleased that she had a few minutes to sit down with me for a short interview about her work! This interview was conducted on Feb. 13, 2026.
Nathan Cone: I've enjoyed listening to your music for quite some time now, so I'm glad to meet you here in person! Here you are in Texas, in San Antonio, at the Texas Music Educators Association convention. So what brings you here?
Reena Esmail: I'm here actually because so many groups are performing my music--and it's been a few years--that people have performed my music at this convention, and I've never been before! It's my first time, and it's been amazing to just come and watch these students who are so talented, band, choir, orchestra, string orchestra, to hear all of them actually engage with my music, some of them for the first time.
And what do you feel about the whole vibe of the event itself here, and all this musical chaos?
I love it. I mean, it's huge, and it's so overwhelming. But it's also just amazing to see how seriously people take music and how much they love being here. And you can tell that people are here meeting people who they haven't seen in years. I myself have seen people I haven't seen in years that I wasn't expecting to see here. So it feels like just a very joyful coming together, and it's really cool to be a part of it.
Tell me about the piece that's going to be performed by the 6A band.
So the piece is called “Tuttarana,” and it started as a piece for treble choir, believe it or not. And it was a piece where, you know, a lot of music that's written for treble choir is just very, you know, pretty and, you know, light and stuff... and that's, that's not all of it nowadays, but when I was writing this piece, the conductor who I wrote it for was like, "Hey, I want something that's not just pretty and about flowers and trees. I want the exact opposite of that." And so “Tuttarana” was the exact opposite of it. So it's a really kind of a fast piece. It comes in very hot. It has Indian classical syllables. The choral version starts like [vocalizes]... and so you can imagine a band playing that, it's even louder, it's more raucous! It's really a wild piece.
Do you do your arrangements then, for moving it from the choral to the band? And what was that like?
It’s interesting because when I started out, if you had asked me when I was like, 18, what I was going to be as a composer, I would have told you 100% I would be a chamber music composer. So that's like my training. Then I started writing more for orchestra, and all my schooling taught me how to do that. Then I graduated from school, started writing for choir, and got, like, very popular in the choral world. And then I started getting popular in the band world just a couple years ago! So for me, I've done a combination of original work for band and then transcriptions of my other work, so I can kind of understand what the animal of the band is, how it all works and fits together, how the different levels work, you know? It's interesting, because band has something in common with choir and that you're pushing air through instruments, but it's just a little bit different because you're using that air in different ways. And so it has a lot in common, for sure, with choir. And so sometimes those choral pieces translate over very well, but then there's a lot of additional challenges, like, there's so many instruments that I really have not written for before these last few years, like even saxophones and, you know, euphonium and things that I just didn't really have a venue to write for before now.
You mentioned that your music has gotten picked up in the past couple of years with conferences like this, and one of the things that I find so delightful at listening to the recordings and the performances that come out of TMEA is that the repertoire that they're performing has gotten younger and newer and more diverse. And so I think it's really, I mean, are you kind of seeing that as a benefit? I mean, that they're really hungry for new stuff?
I guess I wouldn't have known what [the convention] was before… I feel like I've just been the beneficiary of seeing this influx in this kind of repertoire change. But I think also, on the other hand, the Indian population is growing in Texas. There's a lot of people who have moved here and they want their kids to do well in Western classical music. They also want their kids to do well in Indian classical music. I'm kind of from a previous generation where there was none of that either, you know? And so we were just taught to assimilate and become, you know, doctors and engineers and all that. And I mean, still, there's nothing wrong with being a doctor or an engineer, but I think the idea that doing music is a really serious pursuit at whatever level you do it at is just becoming more prevalent in the Indian community, and that writing music that actually addresses that and allows young South Asian people to be able to express their own identity is really cool.
Do you get a lot of people coming to you for commissions? And what do they ask for?
I get so many offers for commissions. Actually, I probably can only take about 10% of the offers that come my way. And I work at all levels, right? I wrote a massive Concerto for Gil and Orli Shaham that's going up at the Kennedy Center in a couple of weeks. I'm writing for Philadelphia and San Francisco's symphonies, you know, I'm doing all of that, but then I'm also working in the educational world, and I think I try to take commissions where I can learn something. So I think, especially for the band world, I'm still learning a lot. I'm not trained to write band music, and it's really fun to have those challenges. I love writing music that's very simple for students. I love writing music that's very, very complex for professionals, and I love just kind of finding that continuum.
And how is it being a composer in the world of social media?
Ooh, it's interesting, because I guess one of the great things is that I'm able to find my audience more than I would have otherwise. Because, look, everyone has a song that is like that song picks you up off the ground when you're down, or, you know, whatever, the song when you're so joyful, it helps you feel that joy. And I think that we weren't able to tell the composer that that was our song before, whereas so many people have found me online and reached out to me via DM and said, you know, "Your music has meant so much to me," and it's amazing as a composer to actually feel that you're writing music that's making a difference in people's lives. And you know, it's tough. You're alone a lot with just your own thoughts and the piano, and you're hoping that things make sense. And then when someone tells you that your music has profoundly affected them... it really matters.
Lastly, you're here in Texas, in San Antonio, what have you gotten to eat and what have you enjoyed?
I just got here yesterday, so I definitely haven't eaten much yet, but I have walked along the River Walk, and that is so beautiful. Oh my goodness, it's such a live city. I was walking last night back to my hotel, and there's just like, all these bands playing and people playing outdoors, and it's far south enough that the temperature is really nice at this time of year. So I've been enjoying it. It's such a fun town.
