In 1991, Brian Raphael Nabors was born in Birmingham, Alabama, to a mother who was a keyboard player and a father who was a visual artist. First tackling keyboard instruments, Nabors started writing music for chorus, Gospel choir, and jazz/R&B ensembles as a teenager. By age 16, he knew composing was his destiny. He inherited an interest in drawing and painting from his father and has synesthesia, a condition in which hearing music prompts him to see colors. Perhaps not surprisingly, Nabors’s compositions have strong visual connections, especially to nature, science, art, history, and his personal experiences as a Black man. Spirituality is also central to his music.   

Along with numerous upcoming commissions, Nabors’s works have been performed worldwide by significant ensembles such as the Boston, Atlanta, Nashville, Cincinnati, Detroit, Fort Worth, San Diego, Indianapolis, and Munich symphonies, as well as the ROCO Chamber Orchestra, American Youth Symphony, Rochester Philharmonic, and Chineke! Orchestra. Nabors was a 2020 Fulbright Scholar and was previously a New Music USA Amplifying Voices consortium composer, Composer Fellow for the American Composers Orchestra’s Earshot program with the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Rapido Competition Grand Prize winner, and Composer-in-Residence for Castle of Our Skins.   

The Alabama Symphony Orchestra has embarked upon a year-long exploration of Nabors’s music. Earlier in the season, the symphony performed Letters from Birmingham, Nabors’s homage to his hometown and birthplace, and the world premiere of his Hammond Organ Concerto, completed in 2019. Nabors’s work for orchestra, Pulse, was first performed by the Nashville Symphony Orchestra under the direction of Giancarlo Guerrero on September 9, 2019, in Nashville. As Nabors writes of the work,  

My conception of Pulse began as a long contemplation of daily life as we know it, combined with thoughts of life in nature. The universe seems to have this natural rhythm to it. It is as if every living and moving thing we are aware and unaware of is being held together by a mysterious, resolute force. Pulse is an episodic rhapsody that explores several phases and colorful variants of rhythm all held together by an unwavering pulse. Each episode is meant to symbolize a different scenario of life for the listener, be it a buzzing modern metropolis, a deep wilderness abundant with animalia, or the scenic endless abyss of the ocean. All of these worlds and their philosophical meanings are then brought together in a contemplative theme of "unification" in the strings that symbolizes our deep connection as living beings to everything within, over, under, and around us.