The Dearborn Symphony will conclude its 63rd season on May 9 with the premiere of a piece from a local musician.

The season finale is entitled “Fantasia Favorites” and will feature iconic musical masterpieces brought to life from Disney’s animated film “Fantasia,” including “Night on Bald Mountain,” “The Firebird Suite” and “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.” These timeless classics by Modest Mussorgsky, Igor Stravinsky and Paul Dukas, respectively, are sure to enchant, inspire and entertain audiences of all ages.

Also on the program will be the premiere of a newly commissioned piece by Dearborn musician and composer Anthony Joseph Lai entitled “In Other News.” It is an orchestral piece inspired by the current humanitarian crisis in the Middle East.

Lai, who is a music professor at Henry Ford College, recently completed this very personal composition.

“It started as a piece of absolute music, in that it wasn’t meant to have any kind of meaning at all,” Lai said. “But what was on my mind as I was trying to get this done was that it was the Dearborn Symphony performing it. I’m from Dearborn. This is a Dearborn piece. And what Dearborn was going through and continues to go through is something that wasn’t really being talked about in the news. And the humanitarian crisis in Gaza is a very touchy subject to try and tiptoe around.”

The subject hits home for the multi-faceted composer. His wife and family are Lebanese and events that have transpired in the battles between Israel and Palestine resonate on a number of levels.

“I’ve seen what’s going on in the Middle East affecting my family firsthand,” Lai said. “My wife’s family’s hometown was bombed last year. They know people that have been affected directly from the violence over there. And so my piece gets its title from the fact that you tend to have to get your news from news outlets overseas to get the full picture of what’s happening over there. We get a very small sample on our cable news and it’s sometimes skewed or downplayed.”

As a college professor, Lai also has heard countless stories from his students discussing crises in their own homes where the whereabouts of loved ones overseas are in question.

“If you go outside the Dearborn bubble, it’s not a big news story,” Lai said. “But it’s a huge story in Dearborn, so that’s where the title comes from.”

The composition “In Other News” is a five-minute piece that musically mirrors and reflects the current situation and emotions attached to this Middle East crisis. The juxtaposition of happy, almost Hollywood picturesque imagery, quickly shifting to ominous and dark passages starkly mimics the changing of channels from one news report to the next.

“It changes quite rapidly for a relatively short work,” Lai said. “And that’s for programmatic reasons. It’s really meant to juxtapose the happy and the sad. It takes you to a happy place and then chills you out of it when you turn on the news.”

Lai, who was initially inspired by The Beatles and is influenced by composers like Gustav Holtz, Debussy and Shostakovich, felt some reluctance that such a potentially controversial work would be accepted for this particular, otherwise lighthearted program. But, ultimately, he was emboldened and reassured by the Dearborn Symphony’s welcoming reception.

“I’m so proud for this to be my hometown symphony because it’s very risky to agree to a piece on Gaza,” Lai said. “I even had to shape the program notes to make sure it wasn’t inflammatory, but still remained truthful. I wanted this to be a piece that makes people wanna talk, without polarizing the conversation. I wanted to start a conversation and the Dearborn Symphony saw value in that as well.”