Parallax (or 33,000 Stolen Sunsets)

This is my second orchestral work, premiered by the Milwaukee Symphony Orchestra in September 2025.

From the program notes:

The title of this work is a double reference, the meaning of one nested into the other. In 2013, I stood incarcerated for 60 days inside of an ICE prison, located in Houston, Texas. The whole array of experiences there was multi-faceted, both in the depth of its misery and the profundity of its meaning. Back then, it was mandated by law that every single day there had to be 33,000 people detained inside of US migrant detention centers nationwide. Of the myriads of experiences that colored my time jailed, one that I have kept thinking about is how, due to a lack of windows in the prison, we never saw the sun set and rise. Of my entire life, and of the lives of those 33,000 people who were there with me in those two months, we are missing sunrises and sunsets that we will never get back. And it struck me how I couldn't think of a more primordial thing to be denied than the right of us as living beings, lucky enough to have sight, to see the sun rise and set. The sun, which has provided us with warmth, energy, and has been an inexorable ingredient in life since time immemorial, was stolen from us.

I had been thinking of this piece for a long time, and over the course of that time I made a connection to the visual phenomena of parallax. This is the name for the visual sensation where the background seems to be moving slower than the foreground - something we observe as we walk, as we run, as we drive, as we 􀀢y. Stellar parallax is used to measure the distance of celestial bodies, much like our sun, against a background of stars. In this way, eventually I settled on this property of parallax - distance - and its parallels within our lives. I thought about the distances that permeate us - physical distance, temporal distance, cultural distance, social distance etc., always from one point to another, distorting our views of ourselves and that other. I thought about how when we have a falling out with someone, and even if they are physically close with us, there is a distance created that is immediate, biting, like a vast and cold ocean. And I also thought about a distance that we can feel to a culture - a closeness, a warmth, something that is infinitesimally close and near. Human misery and joy are so close together, always on the verge of pouring into one another. When I learned I would be leaving the ICE center, while still jailed, I leapt for joy and screamed at the top of my lungs in relief. It's a powerful idea that such things can be literally overlapping like that - joy and misery - and how that's a fact of life. In some ways, that's what this piece is about.

Musically, then, the structure of this piece follows those principles. I set out to create an architectural structure for the orchestration and the combinations of musical matter and instruments that follows a proverbial observer navigating the orchestra from one point to another, observing this musical parallax - of ideas, of music, of form, of shapes - unfold. In this way, the piece yields some uncommon combinations of instruments and ideas. I incorporated some elements from previous versions of the piece, ultimately leading the work towards something a bit psychedelic in nature, a bit unusual yet familiar, exploring this ground of difference and distance. This work is not an articulation of a societal sickness (which I certainly think this system of ICE detention is); instead I offer an intimate look at the gamut of feelings and thoughts that have been persistent within me as time marches on after that period of time in my life. It is an invitation into an array of states of being - a meditation, a prayer, immense frustration, countless tears, endless oppression and immense happiness.