I’d say of all my go-to cognitive distortions, catastrophizing provides me the most—and, truthfully, wickedly desirable—comfort. Small thoughts transmute into haunting poltergeists of my own making: uncanny angels, gluttonous and divine, feeding on my thirst for impossible assurances. These bizarre missionaries come cloaked in protection, promising longevity while selling comforting fictions as if they were the divine gospel, preying on my dread of the unknowable. More often than not, I'm a happy, eager consumer. Why wouldn’t I be? They make me feel safe and seen. To them, I am special. And to them, I am exploitable. In their trickery, they are more beast than angel—their jealousy taking root as they feed me proprietary ‘what ifs’ like candy, delivering fleeting, sugared solaces. They demand my attention, supplanting my agency with unquestioning piety. Their ego makes them dangerous, but it also makes them fragile. They are, and yet, so am I—and in that I reclaim what I give away.

In my work, Strange Beasts, I illustrate this effort by combining photography and music in dance and conversation. These titular strange beasts—manifestations of my catastrophic thinking—are the central antagonists. I’ve cast the buildings I encounter on my photo walks—towering, stoic witnesses to my meandering—as their embodiments, each one hauntingly present and domineering in their insecurity. My music, woven in motive and theme, provides the soundtrack to these encounters, creating a dialogue between my inner and outer worlds, externalizing these beasts and reframing their tyranny as something I can observe, dissect, and ultimately reject.

Photography is a cherished hobby because it offers me an escape from obsession. It situates me in the dynamic, constructive chaos of life, inviting observation and demanding presence—antidotes to the preoccupations that fuel my catastrophic thinking. That’s not to say that as I walk around Los Angeles I am free of these beasts—I still flirt with imagined disasters—but I am no longer merely their sustenance. I can be more. Nevertheless, they haunt me. And as I resist, these monsters grow—comically grandiose and domineering, their fragility and desperation laid bare as they starve as I starve them. Though they may loom large, I persevere.

Through this interplay of sound and image, I invite you to reflect on your strange beasts. How can you starve that which haunts you?

--

Commissioned by the Emerging Black Composers Project, an initiative of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and the San Francisco Symphony, and made possible through the support of Laurence and Michèle Corash.

Conducted by Esa-Pekka Salonen, this work was premiered by the San Francisco Symphony on February 21, 2025.

--

Reviews:

"It’s a score of well-balanced contrasts, opening with haunted music, followed by a brass chorale with elephantine rumblings and birdlike winds and woodblocks that swoop charmingly. The clacking of woodblocks becomes a through line, recurring and underlining other instruments during the piece’s roughly 17 minutes. An anxious passage of harmonics flickers at the edge of audibility before coming into focus. The music accelerates in waves of sound and then drops off, closing with a single wavering bass clarinet line."
- Lisa Hirsch, San Francisco Chronicle

"He clearly has command of the instrumentation, which splashes a variety of colors and textures. The music rises and falls in waves. Softer sections sometimes feel like respites and, at other times, as simply eerie. Climaxes, of which there are many, can assault the ears with dissonance, but they always give way to some resolution. It ends on a wispy, evanescent clarinet lick."
- Harvey Steiman, Seen and Heard International

"The premiere of Strange Beasts, a multimedia work by the young Los Angeles composer Xavier Muzik that combined photographs of and orchestral music, introduced a strong and original new voice. . . his music proved to be full of engaging melodies, textures, and harmonic ideas. The theme of the piece, he told Saturday’s audience, was his penchant for catastrophic thinking as a way to deal with anxiety; the title refers to the mental bugaboos with which he keeps larger fears at bay. An ominous leitmotif begins the piece, and recurs thereafter, but usually subterraneously. For the most part, the piece’s 17 minutes are spent in a jaunty stroll through a variety of thematic sections — a suave little waltz, a dynamic final climax, and perhaps most alluringly, a crisp tick-tock from the woodblocks to accompany a dense, sweet-toned weave from the woodwinds. It would take another encounter or two, I think, to be clear how these episodes are meant to fit together; but they proved entirely engaging on first listening."
- Joshua Kosman, On a Pacific Aisle

"I hate to say it but this was one of the worst pieces I’ve ever heard — or rather been subjected to."
- Michael McDonagh, Culture Vulture