Program Note:

These settings for treble chorus and string quartet are inspired by the words (her recorded radio transmissions, public domain utterances, and fragmentary poetry) of Amelia Earhart, the aviatrix lost in her airplane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on July 2nd, 1937.  At 8:45 that final morning, Earhart reported over the radio, "We are running north and south." Nothing further was heard from her. The mystery and poetry of early death or disappearance throws into sharp relief the things said by that person in life. I arranged Earhart's words into a sequence intended to create a similar effect: as listeners, we join her in her plane for the first song, retreat into her past (perhaps as she did as she came to terms with her predicament) for the next three movements, and then return with her to her present for the penultimate vignette, closing with one of her more poetic musings.  Flight Music was composed at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and in New York City, during August 2005. Some of the musical ideas explored in the piece are further developed in the opera Amelia, in which Earhart appears in a more abstract fashion as “The Flier,” and on which I was simultaneously working.

Resource:

There is an excellent article about the work by Jay Aiken in The Choral Journal, official publication of the American Choral Directors Association that can be accessed here.

Selected Review:

“Daron Hagen balances aching dissonance and soothing consonance so delicately in his new Flight Music that its harmonies reach beyond the ears and cause the skin to tingle. These choral settings of quotations by aviatrix Amelia Earhart advance from chord to chord not so much in functional patterns of tension and release as through a spectrum of rich and subtly shifting color. Flight Music premiered Sunday at Present Music's Thanksgiving concert. The group's resident string quartet played the inaugural, along with Sharon Hansen's Milwaukee Choral Artists. The 17 women of this superb choir fine-tuned Hagen's sky-high columns of sound. They set the overtones aglow and lighted up the Cathedral of St. John the Evangelist with purely musical electricity. The women sang and Hansen conducted this difficult work with utter technical command and great sympathy for its ecstatic beauty, its meditative calm and its subtly propulsive rhythm. Earhart's texts are lumpy on the page - she can be something of a flowery aesthete on the beauty of flight - but Hagen's music ennobles them. He even makes the deadpan communication of aviation sound poetic. Such a phrase as "We will repeat this message on six-two-one-zero kilocycles" becomes at once a meditative litany and an engine of rhythm. — Tom Strini, The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 11/20/05