Symphony No. 1
Czech National Symphony Orchestra · March 2025
“You cannot heal what you refuse to face.”
This piece is an early attempt at what I now call Rhetorical Quintessentialism—the belief that a work of art achieves its most perfect form when its argument is so precisely realized that the right listener receives it as recognition. It strives for that standard. It doesn’t fully achieve it. But it tries honestly, and the argument it makes is real.
The argument is this: you cannot heal what you refuse to face.
Not the idea of the thing. The specific, named, fully weighted reality of what happened and what it cost. This symphony is my attempt to face four of those things in the only language I have ever trusted to tell the whole truth.
The Movements
It begins in childhood—identity forming, joy intact—and then arrives, inevitably, at trauma. I used bitonality and dense orchestration not to describe the stress of it but to transmit it directly. The listener isn’t meant to understand what PTSD feels like intellectually. They’re meant to feel the weight of it in real time.
I wrote it as a conversation I needed to have with him—about guilt, regret, and the specific loneliness of being the one who stayed. It ends on a major chord because this movement is a celebration of who he was, not a eulogy for how he left. People who die by suicide carried pain that most people never saw. I wasn’t willing to write a movement that reduced him to his death.
The effects of severe trauma made me someone who was very difficult to raise in my teenage years, and she guided me through all of it without giving up. I wrote it in the simplest, most consonant harmonic language I know, because that is what she deserved. The simplicity is the point.
The fourth movement takes the main theme from the first and reharmonizes it—more mature, but not unburdened. Because recovery from trauma is not the erasure of what happened. The stress is still present in the melody. It resolves, returns, resolves again. That is what it actually looks like, and I wasn’t going to falsify it for the sake of a cleaner ending.
The piece closes near where it began—in something that feels, without pretense, like joy. The kind that costs something.
I was eighteen when I wrote this. I hear its limitations clearly now. But the argument it makes is one I still believe completely, and the things it faces are things I needed to face.
For anyone carrying something they haven’t looked at directly yet—this piece is for you.