SOLACE (2025)

SOLACE started during the tail end of my time at Yale, when I was trying to make sense of feeling unsteady in about three different dimensions at once — personally, academically, and in a country that seemed to be spiraling into a new kind of chaos every week. Starting as a simple program pairing older and newer classical music, SOLACE grew into something much bigger and more personal, focusing on the isolation and connection happening in the communities around me.

Rather than a concert program or a long form composition, SOLACE is both. The piece grew out of the different artistic circles I had fallen into at Yale—string quartets, pit orchestras, theater productions, choral groups, and working on backstage crews who quietly shape how performances actually happen. I had spent years debating whether I was headed toward composition or violin; SOLACE became a project that let both sides of that pull coexist naturally.

The past few years weren’t simple. There were moments of real community, and also moments of loss and disorientation that didn’t disappear with the end of the pandemic. A lot of people were rebuilding themselves privately and while organizations came back, the shared sense of community took time to rebuild. SOLACE investigates how that can be fast-tracked, within just the evening of a performance.

The music in this project—praised for “exhibiting unusual originality and promise” by Yale’s Department of Music—strives more towards evoking an emotional reaction than towards any primary aesthetic. Structured in four chapters—Isolation, Solitude, Home, and Humanity—SOLACE uses a circular layout, choir, solo violin, electronics, and shifting light to pull the audience into the center of the experience. In designing the project, we wanted to create a performance environment, to let people feel, breathe, and exist together for a moment, leaving behind the pressures of their own lives at the door.

If there’s any hope behind it, it’s that in a future that feels increasingly uncertain—politically, socially, environmentally—we can still build brief moments of care and connection through sound. SOLACE is the jumping-off point for a series of creative immersive work, and another project is coming soon.