Premiered by the Portland Youth Philharmonic, May 14th, 2025

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Program Notes

 

We live inside time. It carries us—like wind carries pollen—through moments we've lived, and moments that shaped us before we arrived. There is the time we remember: birthdays, farewells, the smell of summer rain on pavement, the echo of a voice in a hallway. But then there is the time before us: time that we did not witness, yet which carved the ground we walk on. The forging of stars. The rise and collapse of civilizations. The first song ever sung by a human throat.

The farther back we look, the dimmer the past becomes—until it disappears into silence or becomes something abstract: the faint whisper of cosmic background radiation, the afterglow of the Big Bang, still murmuring at the edge of the observable universe. And yet, even in our personal lives, our past events settle beneath layers of springs and winters. A memory can rest there quietly for decades, like embers beneath ash.

Music, too, lives in time. It does not hang on walls or stand still. It flows. Both pitch and rhythm, its fundamental elements, are functions of time. A single note only gains meaning from what came before and what is yet to come. In this way, music is like memory: nonlinear, fragile, full of echoes.

Lights Away is a reflection on time passed—both in the universe and in a single human life. At the heart of the piece is a melody I wrote when I was sixteen. It was a cold, quiet night. I was home alone, and I had been asked to look after a few baby chicks—a favor for a friend's child. But the chicks were sick. One by one, they began to die, and there was nothing I could do except listen to their soft, uneven chirps as they slipped away. In the stillness of that moment, I sat at the piano and wrote a simple melody. That melody, now played by the santur at the opening of the final movement, has waited 32 winters to find its place in this piece.

In the past two years, my path brought me to study 18th-century counterpoint under Professor Derek Remeš, whose insights into historical composition techniques of the great masters have transformed my approach to composition. It was during this time of artistic recalibration that I attended a Portland Youth Philharmonic performance of my earlier piece, Amoroso. After that concert, PYP’s Musical Director, David Hattner, invited me to compose a new work for strings and Persian instruments. And so Lights Away was born—not as a sudden idea, but as a culmination.

The work unfolds in seven movements. The Persian instruments—kamancheh, santur, tombak—play alone in movements I, III, and V, while the Western strings take the stage in movements II, IV, and VI. The two fugues—movement II in the major mode and movement IV in the minor—are each a reflection of my recent studies with Remeš and a tribute to Bach. In the surrounding movements, the Persian instruments introduce the fugue subjects in their own interpretive, improvisatory way. These gestures are later reimagined by the strings in formal counterpoint—mirroring, in a way, the evolution of my own musical identity.

This separation between ensembles arises partly from the practical challenges of tuning, but more deeply from the cultural divergence in musical practice: Persian musicians flourish in the freedom of improvisation, while Western performers are anchored in precision and structure. Mixing the two can be like combining oil and water. Rather than forcing cohesion, I chose to let each group—Persian and Western—take turns, each shining within its own element. Yet both groups finally come together in the opening of the final movement—when the santur plays that childhood melody. That final convergence becomes a quiet point of arrival: a reconciliation, an old melody returning from the ashes, carrying new weight.

Lights Away looks back on a path shaped by countless moments—some recent, others distant, their traces growing fainter with time. The farther back an event lies, the dimmer its light appears, yet together they form the backdrop of everything that led to this piece. Every experience, whether sharp in focus or barely remembered, becomes part of a larger constellation: dim but enduring, still shaping the sky. This music is my attempt to trace those lights—through seasons of learning and forgetting, silence and sound, absence and return.

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