Oluwaloba Salami was not supposed to like the violin. He was not supposed to like the orchestra, either.
“I actually said that sounds really boring. I don’t want to do that,” Salami recalled telling his mother when she suggested he sign up for orchestra class at his middle school in Hawaii. She signed him up anyway.
That moment of reluctant surrender set in motion a musical trajectory that recently arrived at a major milestone. The East County Youth Symphony premiered Salami’s “Land of the Free,” a 35-minute two-movement orchestral work composed in honor of the 250th anniversary of the United States.
Salami, 21, a former ECYS violinist in his formative years, dedicated the piece to the organization and its supporters free of charge.
“It’s been a real privilege to write something to give back to ECYS because of how much they’ve done for me as a performer, as a musician and especially as a composer,” he said.
Encouraging young composer
Salami was born in Nigeria and arrived in the U.S. before his first birthday, settling in Chula Vista after his family spent time in New York. His father, a Navy serviceman, later relocated the family to Hawaii for a year. In the Aloha State, an eighth-grade composition assignment piqued Salami’s interest. He wrote something technically unplayable for a beginner, but his teacher saw the instinct behind it and encouraged him to take composition seriously.
Back in San Diego at Otay Ranch High School, he became principal violinist of the string orchestra and joined ECYS. He wrote two pieces for his high school that earned him admission to Lehigh University in Pennsylvania, where he is now a junior studying music composition.
Salami (far right) played the trumpet for the Otay Ranch High School Mustang Corps. (Photo courtesy of Oluwaloba Salami)“Land of the Free” was suggested by the ECYS conductor, who asked Salami to write something for the nation’s semiquincentennial. The score is deliberately sprawling, with many themes rather than a single central motif, to reflect a country Salami knows across sharply different geographies.
“I felt that America is just so diverse in mountain ranges and valleys,” he said. “Living in Pennsylvania felt like a culture shock to me. It didn’t feel like California at all. I thought, ‘Am I still in the United States?’”
Some of that terrain made its way directly into the music. Salami said hiking trips were part of what shaped the piece’s first movement, with the landscapes he encountered along the trail informing its sound.
The work also carries an explicit message to his generation. Salami said he polled peers before writing and found widespread cynicism about the current moment, which he understood and then chose to counter.
“A lot of people in Gen Z are very cynical and very pessimistic, and rightfully so. There’s a lot going on now and it’s all really confusing,” he said. “But my message was rather than being cynical, I encourage people to look forward. Looking to make America a better place, looking towards the future, that’s what I really want to focus on.”
Audiences responded. Younger attendees told him afterward they needed to hear it. Older ones caught familiar quotations woven through the score, such as Dvorak’s “New World Symphony,” Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein and even a trace of Looney Tunes.
Beyond “Land of the Free,” Salami is finishing a fantasy novel, “The Midnight Kingdom,” due for self-publication this summer, and drafting a new symphony he describes as a murder mystery. In August, he leaves for a semester abroad in Vienna, Austria.
“Whether it’s writing music or writing fiction, I just want to keep telling stories,” Salami said.
Salami with friends after a concert at the Lehigh University Philharmonic. (Photo courtesy of Oluwaloba Salami)Salami hopes “Land of the Free” finds its way to orchestras beyond San Diego. But his eyes are on the musicians closest to home.
“I hope to inspire the younger people who were on the stage where I once was,” he said.
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