“Is the music in your head / Have you followed where it led” - Love Never Dies

“Let your mind start a journey to a strange new world / Leave all thoughts of the world you knew before” - The Phantom of the Opera

“Softly, deftly, music shall surround you / Feel it, hear it closing in around you” - The Phantom of the Opera

“Why do you write like you’re running out of time” - Hamilton

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I’m a student in Silicon Valley, majoring in composition in the pre-college program at San Francisco Conservatory of Music. I’ve been composing my whole life, which is my way of sharing the music in my head. I spent the period between freshman and sophomore year studying in Vienna, Austria, and spend my summers composing at The Walden School. I play saxophone with Stanford Jazz Workshop as well as jazz piano. I have studied classical piano since I was five and violin before then, and sang with the Ragazzi Boys Chorus. In 2024, I was a composer fellow with the Alba Music Festival in Italy, and studied at the Boston University Tanglewood Institute and Interlochen.

Outside of music and school, I love playing with Rubik’s cubes, board games with my family, computer programming and taking my dog for walks in the parks.

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Some Reflections

Music is a powerful tool that can be used to connect people. I worked on my most recent compositions over the course of multiple pandemic lockdowns, in times when people were disconnected from one another. During this time, joy was something hard to come by. Throughout my work on this project, above anything else, I wanted to create joy in people’s lives. The “world premiere” of The Dream Odyssey was during the pandemic shutdown, before an audience of over five hundred people, via Zoom. Zoom is a rather unique platform for music. In a normal audience, the only way to gauge the audience’s reaction is through the applause or comments at the end. But during the Zoom premiere, there was a live chat where anyone could comment at any point within the ten minute duration of the piece. As I saw the comments flooding in live, I realized that I had achieved my goal: I had brought joy and a sense of connection into the lives of several hundred people during the height of our isolation from one another.

Through my music I’ve also been able to connect with musicians in cities around the world, such as Kiev, Taipei, and Moscow. These connections allow me to better understand the unique cultural, political, and pandemic struggles that each of them are undergoing in their lands. I want to continue to write music that can bridge people from all around the world, to make the world more connected and more capable of expressing how we’re feeling through music, and to show us that we’re not alone.