daron aric hagen

1. We Are Running North and South
2. Courage
3. Choice
4. Paper Tigers
5. Wait
6. Why Flyers Fly

I have long had an intense recurring dream: in it I am flying through the air unaided, looking down at the world and feeling ecstatic. I have always associated flying with creativity, with freedom, with exploration, with life, and with spirits (good and ill). As a teenager, I modeled for a statue my mother sculpted of Icarus, with whom I have always identified.

When Kevin Stalheim and Present Music commissioned a new piece from me in 1995, I was developing an opera about personal reinvention and American society called Vera of Las Vegas. Consequently, the piece Present Music premiered became the core musical material for the entire opera, which debuted several years later. Since 2003, I have been developing an opera about flight — bound for premiere by the Seattle Opera in 2009 — called Amelia. I have chosen a similar compositional strategy to the one that worked so well ten years ago in this new work for Present Music, with the result that Flight Music is an exploration of the ideas that will become Amelia over the next few years. Amelia Earhart — lost in her airplane somewhere over the Pacific Ocean on July 2nd, 1937 and running low on fuel — is a major character in that opera, and the reason that Flight Music exists. 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 have arranged Earhart's words for Flight Music into a song cycle that creates a similar effect: as listeners, we join Earhart 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 songs, and then return with her to her present for the penultimate song, closing with one of her more poetic comments about flight. Flight Music was composed at Yaddo in Saratoga Springs, New York, and in New York City, during August of 2005.