| Icarus Program Notes | |||
| Flight/Plunge to the Sea | Score |  |
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| Eulogy | Score | |
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| Flight/Lunge to the Sky | Score | |
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Icarus was commissioned by the New Pacific Trio, Bay Area, California.
The piece follows the course of the mythical story: the father Daedalus creates wings from feathers and wax for himself and his son Icarus to escape imprisonment. According to the legend, the father and son fly off, and though Daedalus cautions his son not to fly too close to the sun, melting the wax, Icarus recklessly ascends, and falls into the sea. In this musical version, the sea not only swallows Icarus but revives him, and he ascends again, this time fully-formed, harmonizing youthful and mature qualities of desire, hope, physicality, caution, impetuosity, innocence.
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.
The 2nd movement, Eulogy, is a short song of praise for Icarus, for his act both brave and foolish, a typically human mixture, and often with difficult consequences. But then without reaching we don’t expand.
The 3rd movement is Lunge to the Sky: after Icarus’s revival in the sea, he ascends once again, and this time his strength is spiritual as well as physical. The figure of the broken wings returns, but now it’s part of the joyous flight of Icarus. In the end, after a struggle to stay aloft, he reaches new heights, and in the final moments, he joins the birds as an eternal denizen of the sky.
The piece combines traditional and modern musical language to reflect the timeless and the new - a range stretching from modes and conventional notation to modern figures that ask the players to improvise here and there. Line and motion advance seamlessly, with continually changing instrumental colors and figures.