'Always Looking Up and Looking Out': This Young LA Composer's Music Is Guided by the Cosmos

When Derrick Skye began the process of composing his piece “Prisms, Cycles, Leaps,” he was watching YouTube videos about Jupiter. He was captivated by the way the planet’s stripes and swirls move at different speeds.

“It’s almost like there’s a river going at one speed, and something is floating over the top of the river at a different rate,” said the Los Angeles-based composer. He wanted to somehow capture this idea in the new piece, so he created a flute solo melody that sounds like it’s detached from the rhythm underneath.

That rhythm is based on a bell pattern from traditional Ewe music; the Ewe people are an ethnic group living in Ghana and Togo. But instead of being played on a bell or a drum, Skye decided that the strings would play the challenging pattern. “That particular rhythm is a little bit tricky to get into the body,” said Skye. “But that’s fine with me: I think we all have to want to go on an adventure.”

Once he had the rhythm and the melody down, Skye used those as a framework to improvise and find the other parts of the piece. “I like to set up parameters, and then discover on top of those,” he said. The basses and cellos perform a rhythm that’s based on a traditional Ewe piece called Adzogbo, which is usually played on a lead drum called atsimevu.

“Prisms, Cycles, Leaps” is a work in three parts. The Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra performed the first part back in 2015, and the second in 2018. The third part premiered in April this year.

“The meaning behind ‘Prisms, Cycles, Leaps’ actually goes back to the meaning of all my work,” Skye explained. “[Which is that] I love struggling to create holistic music … where you can have a total embrace of every style of music equally, and [explore] what kind of music can come out when you value every genre and every approach.”

As a Southern California native, Skye aims to create a musical language that reflects the way the state embraces people. “This place really feels a lot like what I go through when I’m writing my music,” he said. “There are people from all over the world in this state. Everybody’s here, trying to figure out how to work together, grow together, and excel together. There’s frustrations. But somehow, we manage to press on.”

Skye has always been drawn to music, even as a child. “I remember being at church and seeing the drum set,” he said. “I just thought that was super cool, and it felt good when I heard it. So I was like, I wonder how I can make those sounds.”

His other passion was space: Skye has always been fascinated by the cosmos. “For the majority of my younger years, I wanted to be an astronaut.” But this lofty dream went on the back burner, and Skye pursued music: he played the trombone in music class at school. “I practiced really, really hard. I always want to be the best I can be at something when I put my mind to it.”

Skye continued playing the trombone when he went to study at UCLA. He was heading home after practice one night, when he heard West African music drifting from a concert hall. He went inside to check it out, and was hooked. This fascination led him to explore Indian classical music too, and then music from the Balkans. Those three cultures form the building blocks of Skye’s work today.

“I always wanted to hear an orchestra play these types of things, and I just could never hear it. So I started writing it,” Skye said. “The most interesting stuff to me comes out of when things merge together.”

Part of the reason Derrick resonates with so many different musical traditions is because he has a really diverse ancestry: He has Nigerian, Ghanaian, Congolese British, Irish and Indigenous American heritage.

After graduating, Derrick worked as a teaching artist for the LA Philharmonic, and assistant conductor for the Santa Clarita Valley Youth Orchestra — alongside composing his music. He decided to submit “Prisms, Cycles, Leaps” to the LA Chamber Orchestra through a new music program. “I assumed that it was highly likely that I could end up just being a one hit wonder in classical music, and I just refused to go out like that,” he said.

Skye decided to take matters into his own hands. He gathered a group of musician friends together to record a CD of the piece, which is unusual in classical music. He then released it at the same time as the orchestra premiered the piece.

“I was selling the CD there in person. People walked out of the hall and they were like, ‘wow, I wish I could hear that again.’ I was like, ‘Oh, guess what, you can!’”

Word spread, and Skye’s career began to take off. “Prisms, Cycles, Leaps” was played by orchestras in Canada, the UK and the Netherlands. Then new commissions started rolling in.

“I was over the moon,” he said. “I thought, I just might make this work. I might be able to have this highly sought after job in the classical world where someone says, ‘well what do you do?’, and you say, ‘I write orchestra music for concerts.’”

Skye has collaborated with the LA Chamber Orchestra for almost 10 years, and serves as one of its artistic advisors. Executive director Ben Cadwallader said Skye is “one of those artists where if you give him a boundary or a genre, he doesn’t just push outside it, he redefines it.”

“He has this obsession with creating new forms of expression. I don’t know of a composer, I don’t know of an artist, who accomplishes this with more elegance and artistry, and authenticity.”

Part of the way Skye achieves this authenticity is through learning. He considers himself a lifelong student, and regularly takes classes with expert teachers. Skye is aware that there can be questions over who is entitled to make music from different traditions.

“People have this idea of cultural appropriation,” he said. “What I always do is tell the truth. I don’t know absolutely everything there is to know about West African music. But I don’t need to know everything there is to know about West African music for it to be a part of my life.

“[It’s about saying] ‘I was inspired by this legacy of music and these people in that legacy.’ And that has to be enough. Because if that’s not enough, then we’re going to go back to segregation, where only the people from West Africa can play West African music. And I’m not doing that. I don’t think anybody wants that.

“You just need to be honest with where your knowledge ends, and how you’ve incorporated these things in your art. Because ultimately, everybody borrows from everyone, forever.”

Skye doesn’t only draw from different cultures; he blends genres and forms too. In a new piece released last year, called “God of the Gaps,” he brought Persian classical music together with electronic music. His starting point was a sample of tar, a Persian stringed instrument, played by his teacher Pirayeh Pourafar.

Skye is a musician who refuses to conform to convention; it’s an approach he takes to his own identity too. In the summer of 2021, he changed his last name from Spiva — which was the name given to his enslaved ancestors — to Skye. “I just don’t like accepting things for the way they are because that’s the way it is,” he said.
He chose the name Skye as a nod to his love of astronomy. “I felt like that best described the essence of my being, is always looking up and looking out.”

Initially Skye was apprehensive, primarily about his family’s reaction, but they’ve been supportive. “I just felt empowered,” he said. “I got to change my name. And I got to make sure that the state called me what I wanted to be called. And this is the same state with the history of erasing people’s names and culture. I was able to get them [to acknowledge] … ‘this is what I’m going to be called’ and have them say it. And they did that. And I was happy.”

This idea of being recognized and feeling valued is actually what Skye wants his audience to feel. So if you’re sitting in a concert hall listening to a Derrick Skye piece, you might hear something of yourself — no matter where you come from.