Band Director

MR FRANCIS TAN

Band Director

Francis Huan Chun Tan is Music Director and Resident Conductor of Anglo-Chinese School (independent) Bands. His tenure with the bands has seen it clinch the Champion Band in Division 2A of the 2022 Singapore International Band Festival. His other major portfolio centres around his role as Resident Conductor of the National University of Singapore Centre for the Arts where he is also the Principal Tutor of the Wind Symphony.

Francis Tan’s all-encompassing mission as a conductor is to inject classical music into the community’s cultural DNA in varying capacities. To this end, he leads community orchestras and wind bands to employ innovative ways of audience engagement. He played a key role in the founding of the National University of Singapore Alumni Orchestra – an orchestra devoted to empowering classical music's emergent audiences with different ways to explore classical music in depth. As Band Director of West Winds a leading Singapore community band established since 1993, he has assumed the dual role of conductor-presenter in numerous concerts since 2012, reaching out to diverse audiences young and old.

His interest in leadership and conducting has also led him to conduct in-depth research on how conductors can be effective and achieve efficiency by facilitating collaboration in large ensembles both in the rehearsal and performance arenas. Consequently in 2019, he was invited to present at the International Conducting Studies Conference presented by the Oxford Conducting Institute, United Kingdom and University of Sydney, Australia.

Francis Tan also frequently speaks at youth leadership workshops and is keen to empower young musicians in advocating for the arts to the community. His involvement in co-creating the Wind Bands Association of Singapore (WBAS) Youth Arts Leaders Conference (formally known as WBAS Student Leadership Workshops), which is in its twelfth run, is testament to his music advocacy work.