It’s that time of year in GNTYO where we are all preparing for our big end-of-year side-by-side with the McKinney Philharmonic Orchestra. What’s super unique is that all three of our groups get to perform with them, so it makes for an invaluable experience for our youth (and a long concert!).

While I’m busy preparing music with the Symphony orchestra, Philharmonic is preparing one of my new pieces: Sunseeker! With the premiere coming up in a little under two months, I thought I’d talk about it a little.

Sunseeker came about from a programming perspective. Nikit and I were chatting one day after his rehearsal and before mine, and he came up with the idea of me writing a piece for Philharmonic that they could perform at the side-by-side. This was a few months after I had just finished my time at Williams High School, so setting out to do what I had originally set out to do seemed like a no-brainer. Time to go compose!

I had originally set out to compose a fanfare for the Philharmonic, and some fanfare elements still remain in the piece. But as the piece continued to grow in size and scope, other elements needed to be added to give it the character it needed.

For a long time the piece didn’t have a title. At the time I was working on another work, Helios, but it was benched briefly to begin work on this piece. The ideas of the sun were already circling my mind, and the solidifying inspiration came from the GNTYO logo.

One day Jason told me what the logo represented and how it bore resemblance to the organization’s original name: the Odysseus Chamber Orchestra. To me however it looked like a person reaching up toward the moon. And a person reaching toward the moon must be searching for what comes after it when the night sky vanishes, making them a sunseeker.

In addition to the original ideas stemming from the GNTYO logo and previous projects, the piece began to grow and morph at the same time I was going through my career transition. After teaching, I set out to find a new path. The reasons for it are many and personal, so they are not fit for this post. Needless to say, finding a new career after not only teaching but teaching music was going to be a soul-searching journey. And while I always get to live through a piece’s journey and contrast it with whatever is going on in my own life, I have never so personally felt a piece’s journey as much as I have truly lived through Sunseeker.

And it was for that reason what was supposed to be a 3-minute fanfare turned into something far more and greater. As a composer one of the elements you have to master is not only how to develop your ideas, but how to contain them within the structural frame set before you. It’s very difficult to balance, especially if your ideas are abundant and naturally give birth to other ideas of the same vein. I think with a little more kneading the piece would have eventually resembled the 3-minute little fanfare Nikit originally asked for, with lots and lots of musical golden nuggets discarded.

But we don’t always to get to be the master of our own lives, or of our own creations. There are times where one must let go of the requirement where everything makes perfect sense. There are times where one needs to let go of the wheel so another can take it for you. As it grew, so did I, and I have to thank Nikit every day for letting the piece be what it needed to be.

So what’s the piece really about? Well, it’s first and foremost an uplifting and celebratory fanfare for GNTYO. But it is also a musical illustration of my journey in fully realizing who I really was and what I wanted the future to hold for myself and for the people I love.

As for its official program note:

“Sunseeker features a dark, cloudy beginning with occasional rays of light, driving forward through the narrative of a great journey seeking the light of a new day. Inspiring melodies are interwoven with unexpected and subtle harmonic changes, and a juggernaut of a finale careens us into a world we know is better and one we are so desperate to see for ourselves.”

If you’re coming to the premiere, I hope you enjoy it.