Beyond the Pacific Ocean

Beyond the Pacific Ocean was written for the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players with the support of the ARTZenter Emerging Composer Grant, for a chamber orchestra of single winds and brass, timpani, two percussionists and strings. Its epigraph reads: “We cast our eyes upon a shared horizon, where the embrace of the same endless ocean unites us all.”

The piece weaves rhythms as an ode to the diverse cadences that shape identities. Each persona in the score claims a rhythm of its own — a limping dance in the low brass, a hurried figure in the woodwinds, a slow swell in the strings — and these characters are set moving against one another until they sail like ships, navigating the interplay of identities across a single surface. The orchestra is treated as a liberated dance in nature rather than a hierarchy: the horizon is an open canvas shared by all.

Written in Berkeley in 2023, the year I arrived in California from Europe, the work is also about the ocean I had just crossed in the other direction — the vast unknown beyond the metaphorical Pacific, and the universal threads that bind what lies on either side of it. It was premiered on 5 January 2024 at Herbst Theatre, San Francisco, conducted by Eric Dudley.