What does stargazing sound like?

To Charlie ’25, it starts with a harp thrumming a dissonant chord. Then a lone flute playing a G sharp, slowly relinquishing its pitch until all you hear is breath. A clarinet layering on top of the flute, taking up a G natural abandoned by the harp. Then, an orchestra’s individual instruments coming in one by one, each contributing to a micropolyphonic sound that gradually increases in complexity. 

Charlie captures such moments in his abstract orchestral composition, “Like A Single Star in the Night Sky.” The piece will have its world premiere in April, when Charlie is honored as one of the winners of the 2022 National Young Composers Challenge. At fourteen years old, he is the youngest of the six composers who will hear their works brought to life by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra, conducted by Christopher Wilkins. 

“The idea for this piece came from my fascination with the mysterious and unknown nature of stars,” Charlie says. “It had fascinated me how a single star—a tiny and trivial white dot surrounded by utter darkness when viewed from Earth—was actually something that was just as giant and majestic as the Earth itself."

An evening spent on a hilltop in New Hampshire staring at the July sky inspired the five-minute composition. (“That was a really nice day with really clear skies.”) Charlie hopes to evoke that wonder-filled sense of stargazing with his music. 

“The piece is essentially a transformation,” he says. “Imagine the start of the piece as a very close-up unit inside the star, perhaps a water molecule. Then we slowly zoom out and we make out colors, then some blurry shapes. As we zoom out more, we start seeing how the star is cohesively put together, how the shapes, the colors, the activity, and motion all work together. We begin to see the full picture of this magnificent and complex star.” Zoom out even further and the details disappear, until “the shapes and motion that once existed are distorted and forgotten, leaving the star to be just one single pixel swallowed by complete darkness.”

Charlie started writing “A Single Star” in August of 2021, knowing he wanted to compose something for a live—not virtual—orchestra and thinking, given the slower pace of summer, that he’d have enough time. A cellist and pianist, Charlie developed the full orchestral piece by “listening to a lot of other orchestral performances,” he says, until he could “understand the instruments and their sound.” The trouble was finding musicians to play it. 

“It's hard to find people that I know who are willing to and can perform the pieces I wrote,” he says, due to the complexity of his music. So he did a little bit of research into composition competitions that would connect him with performers until he found the National Young Composers Challenge. 

“The Challenge is simple,” quips the NYCC website. “First, you write your own composition for a small ensemble (two to six instruments) or full orchestra. Then, a panel of judges chooses the top three orchestral and top three ensemble compositions to be performed and recorded by the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra at the NYCC Composium held at the Dr. Phillips Center for the Performing Arts—Steinmetz Hall in Orlando.”

Though he will not be performing on stage that night in April, Charlie will attend the event in person and have an opportunity to listen and give some feedback to the Orlando Philharmonic Orchestra during dress rehearsal as well.

A contemporary composition, “A Single Star” echoes some of Charlie’s favorite composers, like György Ligeti. “He inspired me a lot,” Charlie says, citing a complex and haunting piece called “Atmospheres” in particular. (“He had every single player of the orchestra play different parts,” Charlie explains. “There's sixty different voices in the orchestra, and that makes a really interesting and unique texture.”) But more traditional classical composers influence Charlie’s work as well. Those familiar with Maurice Ravel might hear strains reminiscent of the “Daphnis et Chloé suite” in “A Single Star.”

Charlie recognizes that his penchant for contemporary classical music (a contradiction in terms!) may not be widely shared, especially amongst other teenagers. “It's not exactly intuitive,” he says. ”A lot of people would say it’s just noise, because most of [the songs] don't have melodies.” It wasn’t that long ago that Charlie felt the same way, he says. But his appreciation for the genre grew with time and repeated listening. “After a while,” he says, “you can understand why it's music. You need a lot of patience.”

Charlie encourages his peers at Commonwealth and elsewhere to garner that exposure to contemporary classical music just as they would “any other type of art, like poetry or visual arts,” he says. It’s work worth doing, not just for the pleasure of listening but for broadening and deepening one’s understanding of the world. “Even if history can never tell us exactly what music means, music can tell us something about history,” Charlie says, quoting Alex Ross, from the book The Rest is Noise. “You can reveal that [understanding] in music.” 

Unsurprisingly, Charlie is a member of Commonwealth’s Orchestra and Chorus as well. (In fact, he leaves for Florida the day after performing in Commonwealth’s annual spring concert on April 8.) He chose Commonwealth because of the school’s academic rigor, small size, community vibe, and reputation for having “really good teachers.” 

“We are learning a lot,” Charlie says. “The workload is definitely a lot, but once it’s done and you reflect back on a Friday, you realize that you really learned a lot of stuff during just one week. And that's a pretty good feeling.”

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