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Our Music

In 1910, in the village of Faleniu, in the west of Tutuila Island, American Samoa, my great-grandfather, Tauivi Moe was born. He grew up in an incredibly musical family and was a gifted guitarist and ukulele player. Together with his two brothers and nephew, he joined Madame Riviere's Hawaiians, a Hawai'i-based group that traveled the world performing the music and dances of Polynesia.

(Tauivi Moe is standing on the right, holding his guitar.)

Madame Claude Riviere, who acted as both agent and manager, was a professor of French at the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa. She had a keen interest in Polynesian music. In 1927, she opened her home to tourists, inviting local musicians to perform, including the Moe brothers. Her show blended Tahitian, Samoan, and Hawaiian music with island dances and broader Polynesian culture. It is considered the first regular Polynesian revue in Honolulu.

The troupe performed across Europe and Asia, entertaining international figures including Winston Churchill and Mahatma Gandhi. In the 1930s, in Kolkata, then known as Calcutta, in the Indian state of West Bengal, my great-grandfather Tauivi met my great-grandmother, Marjorie. What he brought with him overseas was his musical heritage. What he came back with was a half-Indian, half-Samoan family. This kind of exchange, where one culture meets another and produces something entirely new, is what I'd like to shine a spotlight on. And it is, I'd argue, classical music's defining legacy.

My story begins against that musical and cultural backdrop. My name is Solomon Reynolds, and I am an Indian-Samoan American performer. It’s nice to meet you.

I was introduced to classical music like many young Americans through weekly piano lessons. And I still vividly remember the first time music caught me, hooking me for life. For a family talent show in the early 2000s, I performed Beethoven's “Für Elise” on my aunt's beat-up upright piano. And despite my clumsy ten-year-old fingers, I felt the music inside my body. The music started to move as I played, and my whole body followed.

From piano, I switched to the cello. My high school orchestra won the Texas All-State competition, and the school district gave each pubescent teenager in the band $100 and little supervision to spend a week in San Antonio, performing and consuming live music, all while eating Mexican food on the waterfront.

On a whim, a friend suggested we go to the All-State Mixed Choir performance held in the grand ballroom at one of the hotels in the area. Up until this point, I understood music through harmony, timbre, and orchestral texture. I had never considered classical music with words before. From my public school musical experience, Beethoven, Brahms, and Tchaikovsky were fairly adequate at expressing emotions. But after listening to the choir sing “Cloudburst” by Eric Whitacre, my lungs burned. All at once, music became the most immediate and intelligible it had ever been. At that moment, I was convinced that I needed music in my life and that I needed to sing.

From the cello, I switched to vocal performance. In college, I was a member of the BYU Singers (a group which, coincidentally, has a long and storied relationship with Eric Whitacre). The choir was invited to sing at the campus radio station, which also housed Utah’s only classical music radio station. After the recording session, I asked for a job.

My path to musical devotion is just one of the countless stories among Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. However and wherever we started from, we all arrive at the same place: good music.

In the wondrous month of May, when all the buds burst into bloom (a covert Schumann reference), we take time to reflect and celebrate the important role that Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have played in our shared national history. And while I happen to comprise all four letters of the acronym, AAPI is an umbrella that encompasses an impossibly large number of languages, geographies, cultures, and musics—China and India alone make up roughly one third of the world population. Any attempt to adequately biographize the myriad cultural nuances crammed into four letters will invariably fall short. So bear with me.

Mozart is sometimes considered the great synthesizer, unifying various styles like Italianate melodic line and Germanic counterpoint into one cohesive and balanced whole. Composers are doing the same today: Tan Dun and Bright Sheng between Eastern and Western traditions, Reena Esmail between Hindustani and Western classical music, and many others.

According to Mari Yoshihara, a scholar at the University of Hawaii and the University of Tokyo, Western classical music took root in East Asia and was sent back to the West. It came as part of a modernization project but evolved well past that into something Asians have made entirely their own.

The exchange between East and West extends beyond composers and their compositions. Asian and Asian American musicians are overrepresented in classical music relative to their share of the U.S. population: while Asians make up about 6 percent of Americans, 11 percent of orchestral musicians are Asian or Asian American, and 10 percent of the announced American opera roles in the 2026-2027 season are going to Asian singers. (Native Hawaiians and Pacific Islanders make up 0.7 percent of orchestral musicians, against 0.5 percent of the general U.S. population.)

That such representation has been achieved in so short a time is remarkable when you consider how recently classical music was an almost exclusively European art form. The musicians keeping this art alive are increasingly Asian, shifting a sense of European ownership to a more global stewardship. Due to globalization and the East-West cultural exchange, music born in Italy, Austria, Germany, France, Russia, and England now proliferates in Japan, South Korea, China, and the United States. Musicologist Jim Samson writes that Chopin “now belongs to, and is an integral part of, East Asian cultures.” He notes that competition successes, especially in the International Chopin Competition, have become a matter of national pride. In Japan in particular, piano competitions can sometimes invoke the spirit of the Olympics.

When we celebrate AAPI Heritage Month, we celebrate multiculturalism and the synergistic byproducts of cultural exchange. And it’s precisely at that marketplace of sound where classical music was born and continues to thrive. Classical music transcends lineages, creeds, nationalities, and genetics. And most importantly, because classical music is shared internationally, it belongs to me and it belongs to you. It’s our music.

Hosts Community Solomon Reynolds

Written by:

Solomon Reynolds

Published on 04.22.2026

Our Music

Our Music

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