Classical Composer
About Me
Hello, my name is Joshua Kyan Aalampour. I’m a 23-year-old self-taught classical composer of Chinese and Persian descent. I’m not a classically trained musician and my passion for music began when I was 16 years old in 2017. I originally started out of spite because a piano teacher told me I'd never be able to play after I couldn't sight read at our first lesson. I wanted to prove her wrong, so I began practicing for an average of 6 hours a day using MIDI videos on the internet. However, within about 2 weeks I had accidentally composed something and became obsessed. I no longer cared for proving that teacher wrong because I had made a new lifelong friend - music. My life has completely changed since.
I am also running a personal experiment with my art. I view life as a personal film, and my music serves as its score. Just as movies assign leitmotifs to characters and ideas, evolving them as the story unfolds, I’ve composed personal leitmotifs that represent different aspects of my life. These leitmotifs appear across my works—some recurring frequently, others emerging more subtly—but all are in constant development. My compositions are deeply self-referential and are filled with easter eggs. As I grow, so will these themes, evolving throughout my lifetime until the final note is played. I hope you enjoy my art.
If you’re interested in my personal life, below is a rough biography:
Birth - 8/20/2001
I was born in Morristown, NJ, USA as Joshua KiyAn Aalampour to a Persian
father and Chinese mother. “KiyAn” is Persian for “King” or “Realm”. “Aalampour” was originally “Alampour”, but when my father immigrated to the United States someone slapped on an extra A, forever changing the bloodline. It’s Persian for “descendent of a scholar/polymath” or “descendent of the realm”. I would eventually have two younger brothers Jacob (2005) and Jared (2008).
I'm on the left. My brother Jacob is on the right, and Jared is in the middle.
A New Life in China - 5/11/2011 - 8/2016 (ages 9-15)
When I was 9 years old, I moved from NJ, USA to Shandong, China due to parents’ work. I lived in China from ages 9 - 15 and briefly
attended public school (7th grade) before dropping out in the 8th grade due to language barriers. I learned to speak fluent Mandarin but had trouble reading and writing.
Starting Anew in Texas - 8/20/2016 (age 15)
On my 15th birthday, my brothers and father moved from Shandong, China to Texas, USA. My parents’ business in China failed, so we
moved back to the US in hopes of me starting my high school career there. We moved to Texas because we didn’t have the money to live on our own – a childhood friend was nice enough to let us live in his family’s home for free temporarily (they moved to Texas).
Texas Memories - 11/6/2016 (age 15)
We were eventually kicked out of my friend’s house. I don’t blame them, we were overstaying. My family didn’t have any income at this time
so we were living off of shark loans. We did briefly get our own little apartment though. It was tiny but I absolutely loved it. I created so many wonderful memories there. We had an air mattress that we used to share. But my brothers and I loved to wrestle as if we were WWE stars. One time I did an “attitude adjustment” to my brother Jacob and the mattress popped. We couldn’t afford a new one so we got duct tape instead, but that didn’t stop it from deflating, so we just slept on the floor. Another memory I have is for Christmas, my family saved up to buy this video game called “Overwatch”. It was a collective gift for all of us and I was so grateful. I had brought my Xbox which I had owned for many years with me from China to Texas, and we were lucky enough to get a nice deal on a small tv and plastic chair. My brothers and I would take turns sitting on the chair and playing overwatch (I’m a Tracer main). The chair, TV, and popped air mattress were pretty much the only pieces of furniture we had, but it was so much fun and memorable.
A New Financial Low - 1/27/2017 (age 15)
We hadn’t been paying rent so naturally we were getting evicted.
My brothers and I were pulled out of school and we began living in my Dad’s car. Like the apartment, the car also wasn’t being paid for, so we knew that this wasn’t a sustainable option. This was the lowest point my family had ever been financially. I tried to see the bright side of things, but I remember feeling unsafe back then. I didn’t like being forced to use the bathroom in random places and sleeping in the car. It felt very crammed with everybody in it and someone like a police officer or a random person would always knock on the window in the middle of the night and wake us up.
I slept in the back, while my brothers slept in the front.
Back to China - 2/17/2017 (age 15)
My family was able to get more shark loans to get us plane tickets to fly back to China. My father wasn’t able to get a job in the states, but he had an English teaching position lined up in China, so it was a solution to our financial problems. We also had my mother’s family in China who was able to help us with renting an apartment.
The Pretext for my Art - 10/2017 (age 16)
Ever since we left Texas, I became very lonely and bitter about my family’s situation. I didn’t like moving so frequently and actually missed
attending high school. I was a straight-A student, and right when I felt that things were starting to get a little more stable, we left the country. I didn’t attend the remainder of the 9th grade, nor start the 10th grade in China because the language barrier was just too much. I tried teaching myself as much as I could in physics, chemistry, math, biology, and literature, but it felt hard not having any sort of teacher or someone who could guide me through the topics. I started to fall into my first real depression. Even though our financial situation had improved since February, I wasn’t very happy. I wanted to have friends and go to school like everyone else.
However, around this time I also began to fall in love with video games - namely “Assassin’s Creed: Unity”. The game takes place in
Napoleonic France, and offers an open-world layout of Versailles and Paris. I was hooked. I didn’t fully understand it at the time, but that game served as an escape from reality for me. The 18th-century Parisian buildings paired with rainy weather brought a very effective and unique type of solace to me. When I played it, I felt disassociated from all of the familial abuse and financial issues that pervaded life. From that day forward, I craved the perfect escape from reality.
A Composer is Born - 10/10/2017 (age 16)
In China, it’s relatively common for young kids and teenagers to be able to play instruments. My parents knew this and knew my lack of
musical ability as a 16-year-old, so they encouraged me to attend a trial piano lesson in hopes that I too would be able to play an instrument.
On October 10, 2017, I attended this trial lesson. It took place in a storage unit of a commercial parking garage. I was not interested in the piano or classical music at this point and was simply just trying to appease my parents. I walked into the storage unit and there was an old upright piano on the left side, and small stools on the right side. The other students and some of their parents were also there. Because it was such a small place, a student would have their lesson, and the rest would sit and watch right behind them until it was their turn. I was the oldest student there by a large margin. The other kids couldn’t have been older than 9. While I didn’t anything about classical music and piano at the time, I did know of one piece – Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. I thought the 3rd movement was really cool, but I knew that I obviously would not be able to play that, so I suggested to the teacher beforehand that I wanted to learn the 1st movement.
As it was my turn to have a lesson with her, she pulled out the sheet music for the 1st movement and asked me to play it. I explained to her
that I didn’t know how to read sheet music and that I was a complete beginner. Either she wasn’t having a good day or she was just naturally a tough teacher (probably a combination of the two), because she then started to scold me for not knowing how to read sheet music. I felt very embarrassed. I was the oldest student there, and felt like the dumbest one too. She ended her rant by telling me that I’d never be able to play the piano and demanded I leave since I was a waste of her time. I was quiet then, but I was so upset inside. I felt like a loser. While this was certainly the tipping point, the underlying pain was rooted in the turbulent past my family and I had faced.
I marched back home and wanted to prove her wrong. I wasn’t in school and so I had all the free time in the world. I began teaching
myself the piano through videos on Youku (Chinese YouTube) and YouTube out of spite. I averaged 6 hours of practice a day. She made a very big deal about not being able to read sheet music, so I used MIDI videos to learn how to play pieces. I was noticing improvement and was able to play some simple pieces pretty quickly. But then somewhere around the 2-week mark, everything changed. I had accidentally composed something. It was a short theme in D minor. I had no knowledge of music theory or harmony, but I knew that I liked what I heard.
I became obsessed and fell in love. I ended up composing piece after piece and realized that, like video games, composing served as an
escape for me. One of my very first compositions “Reverie” was what 18th-century Versailles sounded to me (like in AC Unity). Every time I played it, I forgot about where I was at the moment and transported directly to 18th-century France. I felt like I had finally found what I was seeking – the perfect escape from reality. I very quickly stopped caring about wanting to prove that teacher wrong, and began composing and self-studying piano as much as I could.
My old keyboard.
I composed many works during this initial period, with the most popular one being the original drafts of “Return to Versailles”. A lot of these
earlier pieces are unpublished in their entirety, but they are referenced in my later works quite a bit. I didn’t fully realize it at the time, but I had made a new lifelong friend. A friend that would never leave me – music. The discovery of this made all the years of loneliness and despair feel worth it.
The Obsession Grows - 10/2017 - 3/2018 (age 16)
I used to have a 60-key keyboard that we got for about 100 RMB (roughly $16 USD). I loved that thing, but it was cheaply made. My very early compositions were limited in their range because I didn’t have access to all 88 notes. I dreamed early on of being able to play a real acoustic piano, and that dream came true when my youngest brother Jared started going to the local middle school for soccer practice on the weekends. I would send him to the soccer field just like a guardian would then pretend I needed to go to the bathroom. From there I would sneak into the piano room through the windows. The windows were so tiny and so high up close to the ceiling. I almost fell a couple of times but it was worth it. The pianos were always severely out of tune and had a couple of dead keys here and there, but I completely lost myself in those moments. Being able to play freely on an acoustic piano was such a beautiful luxury I was infinitely grateful for. During this period, I composed the first (but now outdated) version of the “Chaotique Sonata”, several piano bagatelles, nocturnes, a rhapsody for solo piano, and more.
16-year-old me in the piano room I had snuck into.
Living in a Motel - 3/28/2018 - 5/2018 (age 16)
My parents’ English teaching gig ended up failing, so they decided it was time to finally go back to NJ and potentially start over again there. It had been 7 years since I had last stepped foot in NJ. Even though I was born there, I felt like a foreigner. I didn’t remember much from when I was last there (I was 9 years old). I had this bizarre identity crisis where I didn’t feel like I could call anywhere home. When I was living in China, I was always referred to as a foreigner, and now NJ felt the same. We didn’t have enough money for an apartment at first, so we lived in a motel for a little over a month. I wasn’t able to bring my keyboard with me from China, so I would compose pieces on a piano app on my phone, and screen record it so that I wouldn’t forget the melodies. It wasn’t the most ideal, but I was grateful nonetheless to still have some way of composing.
