Galactic Playground: forgotten sketches reborn
June 3, 2023; Yerkes Observatory; Williams Bay, WI; Blackbird Lab Cohort
Yes, second blog post of 2025— I’m keeping the momentum going!
This time the spotlight goes to Galactic Playground!
This Pierrot-ensemble piece isn’t new, but I recently revised it for the upcoming Eyrie Festival with Eighth Blackbird. Working on it again after years brought back many memories and thoughts, so I felt I should share a bit of its story with you.
2023 was an incredibly hectic year. I had about 50 performances, took part in countless festivals, and was finishing my doctoral program, all while handling multiple commissions. The problem was that I didn’t leave myself enough time to compose for those commissions. As a young composer, I said yes to every opportunity that sounded exciting, without much planning.
December 19, 2021; Bangkok, Thailand; Taceti Ensemble; this turned into the first movement of Galactic Playground.
When I wrote this piece for the Blackbird Creative Lab, I didn’t start until just two weeks before the deadline. Over the years I’ve learned that panicking never helps, so I asked myself: how do I finish a seven-minute piece in 14 days? Then it hit me — I didn’t need to write everything from scratch. I had plenty of earlier works that never went beyond their premieres, just waiting for a chance to shine again. I’ve seen big names do that all the time, like Stravinsky, Wagner, and even Beethoven.
For the first movement, Celestial Groove, I chose to reuse a piece I originally composed in 2021 at the Tanglewood Center titled Turbulent Mind (a title I later reused to name my piano concerto). That piece was later programed by Fifth House Ensemble and Taceti, but it never really took off the way I expected. Still, I’ve always loved the material — it’s bright, energetic, and colorful. So I began reworking it as the first movement, this time adding a percussionist, and it eventually grew into a very different piece compared to the original.
November 22, 2022; NYC, NY; HYPERCUBE; this turned into the last movement of Galactic Playground.
The second movement, Battle for the Milky Way (what a nerdy name suggested by ChatGPT), is the only newly written movement in Galactic Playground. It’s a playful miniature built on ascending and descending pentatonic scales, with plenty of fun in manipulating rhythmic patterns. You might be thinking, “Wait, I thought all the movements were recycled?” That’s true. This one was new, but I later ended up reusing its material in another work, Subsonic Pulse, for the Akropolis Quintet, haha!
The last movement came from a piece I composed for HYPERCUBE in 2022, titled Into Metaverse. I didn’t change the name since it already sounded universe-ish. I’m not sure if it’s a “successful” piece. Nobody has programmed it because of its unusual instrumentation, but it did get quite a bit of attention online, with almost 30k views on my “Chinese YouTube” account. So it made perfect sense to include Into Metaverse in this suite. This was the last piece where I used ONLY the [0157] pitch set (I might write more about why that matters in a future blog), so to me it feels like both an ending and a new beginning. The music is aggressive and bold, full of unisons — definitely a strong way to close. And judging by the applause, the audience seemed to agree!
June 3, 2023; Yerkes Observatory; Williams Bay, WI; Blackbird Lab Cohort
So that’s a little behind-the-scenes story. I know those old pieces on their own would probably never be programmed, but after combining them into Galactic Playground I received a lot of positive feedback. Eighth Blackbird even programmed it at a major event last year, which was kind of like a dream come true.Just this September alone, I sold five copies of the score — something that had never happened before. Eighth Blackbird even programmed it at a major event last year, which was kind of like a dream come true. It’s proof to me that more people are connecting with this piece, and I’m proud that it came together almost by accident.
I still remember at the premiere, Viet Cuong told me he really loved the piece, which was so nice to hear since I’ve always felt a connection to his music. What made me even happier was that Joan Tower also loved it, Joan, Tower. She actually sat down with me to talk about the structure and shared all kinds of thoughts. At one point she said, “You really need a slow movement.” And she was absolutely right. The only problem was, I didn’t have any old slow material lying around at the time, otherwise I totally would have thrown it in, haha!