September 25th is an orchestral work in seven continuous sections, written as a personal witness account of a single day that irrevocably altered an entire country’s course.

The score is structured as a dramatic arc: from the slow accumulation of a collective wound, through an eruption of uncontainable force, to the silence of aftermath, and finally, a hard-won, luminous resolution.

Each instrumental voice carries a specific dramatic weight. The flute and oboe speak in the first person — intimate, observational, vulnerable. The strings embody the people: their resolve, their grief, their resilience. The bassoon enters as an opposing force, methodical and insistent, while the brass — raw, heavy, and unrelenting — represents those with the least to lose and the most fury to release.

The work opens in quiet unease. Sparse wind lines and restrained percussion trace the contours of a people carrying too much for too long, lives shaped by the absence of water, light, schooling, dignity. The strings gradually take hold, gathering into a march: purposeful, human, full of a collective grief that has chosen movement over silence.

Then the architecture cracks. The bassoon fractures the march; strings splinter into chaos; brass floods every register. The center of the work is a sustained catastrophe, percussion driving a heartbeat that has lost all control. Nothing is clear. Nothing can be attributed. The world becomes noise.

What follows is the hardest passage to write and to hear: a mourning so still it barely moves. Solo winds trace what once was familiar. The strings carry their grief muted. Low brass breathes in the dark. Beneath all of it, the national anthem resurfaces, transposed into minor, as if heard through smoke.

But grief does not end the work. The brass rises again, differently this time, with the weight of people who have already lost something and are walking back into the street anyway. The final section arrives like light returning: full orchestra, chimes ringing as church bells rang that day, the harmony resolving into something earned, not given.

September 25th does not take a position. It bears witness. It is the story of a day told through sound, with all the fear, the mourning, and the extraordinary, irreducible hope that followed.