Nathan, who joined the Brown faculty in 2015, said he’s found techniques to work around roadblocks, like listening to his composition in a new space, with others, or while lying down or walking around. “If I invite someone in to listen with me, I listen completely differently than when I listen alone,” he said.

Nathan thinks of his method of composing as a dialogue between what he wants on a conscious level and what the piece wants on a subconscious one.

For instance, after immersing himself in Dickinson’s world by experiencing the sense of her house and standing in the room where she wrote her poetry, Nathan wrote a song cycle based on Dickinson’s Civil War-time correspondence with Thomas Wentworth Higginson. He used their letters to “tell a story through music, about Dickinson’s struggles as a woman poet and Higginson’s struggles for the abolition of slavery.” The 45-minute piece had a series of premiere performances in 2019, culminating in going “home” to near the Dickinson Museum in Amherst.

Robert Kirzinger, associate director of program publications for the Boston Symphony Orchestra, said he is “continually impressed with Eric’s ability to unlock the personalities of the instruments and ensembles he’s writing for,” expressing a wide range of emotions in his work, from humor to grief. 

Nathan said it took him time to let go of the idea of the “genius composer,” whose ideas flow seamlessly from head to page all at once. Instead, he said, “I’m experimenting, I’m failing, I’m learning and meeting these musical elements anew each time I write.” 

Nathan is known in the music world for his adventurous spirit.

"As Above, So Below," commissioned by the New York Philharmonic in 2014, is a duet for a solo trombonist that Nathan describes as “a dialogue between two sides of the same instrument.” The performer physically removes one of the trombone’s tuning slides, to “project the sound forwards out of the trombone’s bell, or backwards from the opened tuning slide.” The result is two distinct characters that can be put into conversation with each other, despite the voices coming from just one performer. 

Nathan’s "Missing Words" series pays homage to Ben Schott’s book "Schottenfreude," which is a collection of German words created for the modern world. Each piece is based off a word, which Nathan uses as a lens to find new sounds.

The critical response to Nathan’s latest concerto was positive; Boston Globe critic Zoe Madonna wrote, “I’d happily have heard it over again as soon as it ended.”

John Harbison, a Pulitzer- and MacArthur Fellowship–winning composer and professor of music composition at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, said he believes Nathan will be “an important American composer for many years to come.” He also praised Nathan’s teaching for inspiring students to make a mark in the “fascinating and competitive world of new concert music.”