Program Notes

Ever since I was young, I have held a deep fascination with outer space. As with most children, my interests changed as I gained new experiences, but I always found myself returning to my admiration of the stars. By the age of three, I had already memorized the names of all the planets, and was reading space encyclopedias from cover to cover.

As I grew older, my interest in space found a new home in the sci-fi genre. I distinctly remember watching the first Star Wars film with my dad, alongside 2001: A Space Odyssey, Apollo 13, Alien, Interstellar, and many others. And since my early teenage years, I planned to apply to study aerospace engineering in college and work for NASA or SpaceX.

While my career plans changed when I found my calling in music, the wonder I experience while I look to the skies has never faltered. Many of my early works took inspiration from space music and sci-fi film scores—further reinforced by my composition mentor, Austin Ali, who has dedicated a considerable part of his own repertory to telling stories about space. In 2021, I completed a full-length piece for orchestra called Skyward Ascension—which told the ambitious journey of the Saturn V rocket’s first manned flight.

Over two years later, I felt that it was time to write a piece about space again, to pay tribute to my early musical influences and tell a new story even more ambitious than the last. Westward, Pointed Up is humanity’s mad dash for the stars—the dawn of the 21st century’s growing industry of private space travel. The work is an imaginative glimpse into our not-so-distant future: the explosion of Earth’s bravest men and women to pioneer, colonize, and explore the far reaches of our solar system. This whimsical and heroic piece is the culmination of every space epic and sci-fi western ever made. It explores adventures of our new and untouched final frontier: the danger, wonder, conflict, beauty, and most of all… the creation of a new interstellar “wild west”.