| Flyer Program Notes | |||
| Opening Section | Score |  |
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Completed just in time for the centenary of powered flight in 2003, some of the sketches were actually made at Kitty Hawk, NC, where the Wright Brothers first flew the plane they called Flyer, an astounding feat of vision and engineering. The piece sets out to simulate sensations of flying for the first time – weightlessness, wonder, danger, ecstasy…in other words, sensations of launching oneself into parts unknown – how suitable for the 21st century!
The first powered flight is both a deeply American phenomenon and with deeply global consequences – without end in space and time.
There are 3 short movements: 1st is Flight/Plunge to the Sea, the ecstasy of flight and the agony of the fall. Since aviation always begins with birds, we hear the eternal sound of them at the outset. After a few attempts at launch, Icarus finally rises; at the height of his ascent to the sky, we hear the breaking up of Icarus’s wings: a figure in the piano in which one hand plays through a series of notes some of which are already held down by the other hand, producing thuds or just spaces, giving a strangely skewed rhythmic pulse. Icarus falls into the sea – they say that it happened somewhere in the Aegean Sea, near what is now the island of Ikaros.
I’ve had to develop some new ways of hearing/writing to express these new images and sensations.
Series of images:
Opening – you hear the plane going up; the air is hitting it, lifting it
- theme – physical beauty of flight - outward
- theme – spirituality of flight – inward
- middle section: barnstorming
- earlier themes return deeper
- ending – the orchestra spins the solo out into space: a piece of wing cloth from this 1st Wright powered flyer is on board the NASA time capsule that has gone well beyond our solar system, and continues today to points beyond. So the piece is for all of us whose lives have launched into parts unknown.
Many of the figures played by the ensemble may suggest the wind in all its unpredictability, with the cello solo piloting through it, countering it, reading it, riding it. In the score, an entire section of these figures appears as designs rather than as traditional notation.
And as you hear, some passages leave behind the physical act of flying and enter into the pure, spiritual experience of flight.