• 2 Flutes, 2 Oboes, 2 Bb Clarinets, 2 Bassoons
• 4 F Horns, 3 C Trumpets, 3 Trombones (3=Bass Trombone), Tuba
• Timpani + 3 Percussion
  • Percussion 1: Glockenspiel, Tam-tam
  • Percussion 2: Vibraphone, Suspended Cymbal
  • Percussion 3: Bass Drum, Triangle
• Piano soloist
• Strings

My piano concerto Stargazer is the latest chapter in a series of works that trace their roots back to Sanctuary (2020), a piece I wrote for soprano saxophone and piano during the COVID-19 pandemic. Amid the isolation, I sought comfort in this music by returning to the simple chord progressions that had brought me solace as a child. As the pandemic continued into the summer of 2021, my father fell very ill and was intubated in the hospital. Unable to speak to him, I played pieces of mine instead—Sanctuary among them—in what became one of the last ways I could communicate with him before he passed away. The grief from his death was the deepest pain I ever experienced, and I haven’t been the same since.

In the wake of his death, I honored him by writing a piece called Vital Sines, a celebration of his belief in my creativity and musical dreams. Composing that work was one of the most meaningful achievements of my life, and it brought me genuine healing at the time. But grief is rarely linear, and it soon returned like the coldest, longest winter. It left me unable to write. For many months, I sat lost as the piano until, finally, my wind ensemble piece Deciduous emerged from the musical DNA and emotional themes of Sanctuary—a continuity of musical material that would echo and transform across my orchestral works Orbital and, here, Stargazer. Each new piece felt like sunlight returning after a cold winter, stirring something long dormant in me back to life.

During my lowest summer, I stood on a secluded farm in New Hampshire, looking up at a sky filled with more stars than I had seen in years. Living in Las Vegas, I rarely see the night sky so vividly, and that evening I saw my first shooting star. In that moment I was reminded that though a star may die, its light may still reach us long after, carrying with it a trace of what once was. This idea is mirrored in the phenomenon of “light echoes,” in which the fading gasps of a dying star ripple across galaxies, sometimes centuries after the star itself has gone dark. I think of the people we love in much the same way: their presence and their love continue to resonate quietly within us long after they’re gone. That New Hampshire night sky became the seed of Stargazer.

If Deciduous traces the changing seasons of a single tree on Earth as a metaphor for the cyclical nature of healing, Orbital widens that lens to the planet’s orbit around the sun—the motion that gives rise to the seasons themselves. Stargazer, born from that night of stargazing, continues this expansion even further—past the planets to the galaxy’s stars—exploring echoes of echoes, musical ideas refracted across time and transformed into something larger.

Stargazer is, in many ways, an echo of several echoes: Sanctuary gave rise to Deciduous, which resonated outward into Orbital and Stargazer. The concerto’s final stretch even has some roots in the ending of Vital Sines—another reverberation in a body of work shaped by cycles of grief, memory, and renewal. As with much of my work, these echoes are made audible: the piano soloist and orchestral parts are written to mimic electronic delay, and nearly the entire work is constructed from canons, as if the music itself is chasing its own reflection.

Stargazer was commissioned by the California Symphony as the culminating work of my Young American Composer Residency, and was written for Sarah Cahill. The piece underwent an exhaustive rewrite in 2025, becoming not just a continuation of a musical lineage, but also a reflection on persistence and transformation—of finding ways to let go of grief, one step at a time.