• 2 Flutes (2 doubles Piccolo), Oboe, English Horn, 2 Bb Clarinets, 2 Bassoons
• 4 F Horns, 3 C Trumpets, 3 Trombones (3=Bass Trombone), Tuba
• Timpani (doubles Crotales D4, B4, C5) + 3 Percussion
  • Percussion 1: Glockenspiel, Tam-tam
  • Percussion 2: Vibraphone 1 (not shared) Bass Drum, Triangle, Crotales (G4, A4)
  • Percussion 3: Vibraphone 2 (not shared), Suspended Cymbal, Crotales (F#4, D5, E5, F5, A5)

Orbital is part of a sequence of works that began with Sanctuary (2020), a piece I wrote for soprano saxophone and piano during the isolation of the COVID-19 pandemic. In those months, I returned to the simple, diatonic progressions that had brought me comfort as a child. Later that summer, when my father was hospitalized and intubated, unable to speak to me, I played Sanctuary and other pieces at his bedside. This became the last way I could communicate with him before he passed away. My father was my biggest fan, the person who believed in my talent when I wanted to quit music altogether, so his loss left me with a pain deeper than anything I had ever known. In the immediate aftermath, I poured my energy into honoring him by finally completing my PhD and writing Vital Sines, where I found genuine healing. But grief is rarely linear. It returned like the longest, coldest winter, as I struggled to accept that he would never again celebrate my successes with me—or ever hear another note I wrote. That realization left me silent at the piano for many months, and I felt my creativity sinking deeper and deeper, weighed down by the pain.

Out of that silence, Deciduous eventually emerged for wind ensemble. Built from the musical DNA of Sanctuary, it uses the image of a tree shedding and regrowing its leaves to reflect the cycles of grief and healing. Orbital continues this thread but widens the lens: if Deciduous traces the seasonal renewal of a single tree, Orbital looks outward to the very motion that brings those seasons about—the Earth’s orbit around the sun. By reimagining this material on the larger scale of the symphony orchestra, the music expands in scope and resonance, transforming familiar gestures into something broader, more ambitious, and, ultimately, more powerful.

Echoes lie at the heart of these works. Orbital is an echo of Deciduous, which is itself an echo of Sanctuary—each return altered by time, growth, and forward motion. Grief, too, has revealed itself to me as cyclical: not something endured once and left behind, but something that is continually relived, re-experienced, and reshaped. I had never before understood pain in this way. Yet by circling back through this musical material—some of the last notes I ever played for my father—I felt lighter. In the same way that music comforted me as a child, it was now healing me as I wrote, pulling me from silence each time I felt the grief echoing back at me. It is natural, then, that my music has absorbed this impulse: written-out delays and canons have become a hallmark of my work, and here they are omnipresent, embodying both the literal and metaphorical cycles at the work’s core. At its heart, Orbital is music of cycles—of seasons and planets, of memory and return. It is both a reflection of my own journey through the last several years and a testament to how music can carry us through our struggles and triumphs.