Flight Music
for treble chorus and string quartet (2005)
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Cathedral of Saint John, Milwaukee, WI
Milwaukee Choral Artists / Present Music / Sharon Hansen
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.Earhart's words glow in performance
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. The glowing beauty of Hagen's new work contrasted sharply with...
The final destination of Daron Hagen's "Flight Music," to be premiered Sunday by Present Music and the Milwaukee Choral Artists, is the Seattle Opera. "Flight Music" won't land there until 2009, and it is sure to take a new form along the way .
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Daron Hagen's "Flight Music" is the foundation of an opera in tribute to Amelia Earhart, shown with her navigator, Fred Noonan. |
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It all sounds a little like one of those Einsteinian space-time conundrums. We'll hear music from an opera that doesn't exist yet.
Hagen, a Waukesha native, tried to explain. Aptly enough, he called while stranded in transit on his way home to New York from a residency in Vermont. He was at a car rental agency, picking up a temporary replacement for his wounded Subaru.
"I am so platonically in love with Amelia Earhart," he exclaimed, by way of explaining that his fourth and unwritten grand opera is about the pioneer female aviator. Earhart and navigator Fred Noonan were lost in 1937, when they disappeared off Howland Island, near the Equator in the North Pacific. They were on the Australia-Hawaii leg of an around-the-world flight.
Including Earhart, a total of four Amelias will populate the opera (the working title, naturally, is "Amelia").
The others are the widow of a U.S. Navy flier lost at sea during the Vietnam War; her daughter, the central character, who will be pregnant with a daughter named you-know-what when future opera-goers meet her in 2009. The central Amelia's husband, of course, is an airplane designer in Seattle, not coincidentally the birthplace of Boeing Aircraft.
"It's all very Pinteresque," Hagen said.
Icarus and Daedalus, characters from the Greek myth of flight and tragic hubris, hover like guardian angels over the various Amelias. In the course of the opera, Amelia No. 3 will meet both Earhart and her deceased Navy-pilot father.
"It sounds far-flung," Hagen said, "but it's really straightforward. It's just that we see everything this woman (the pregnant Amelia) imagines. It's not surreal at all."
But we're getting ahead of ourselves. The opera, again, is at this point nothing more than a storyboard put together by Stephen Wadsworth, the scenarist and director, with input from the composer.
Wadsworth, with Francesca Zambello, was co-artistic director of Milwaukee's Skylight Opera Theatre in the late 1980s.
He's gone on to an important career as a director and librettist and has had particular success at the Seattle Opera, where he has directed Wagner's "Ring" cycle. Wadsworth also directed Hagen's "Shining Brow" for the Madison Opera.
Wadsworth's involvement was crucial to the Seattle Opera's involvement in "Amelia."
"This was three years in negotiation," Hagen said. "We just now signed the contracts. This is my big break. Workshops could happen as soon as next fall. There will be a long development period, and I'm very happy about that."
Poet Gardner McFall, an old friend of the composer, will write the libretto. McFall's father was, in fact, a Navy pilot lost at sea during the Vietnam war. "The Pilot's Daughter" is the title of one of her books of poems. (See shop.1asecure.com/prod.cfm?Stid=3887&ProdID=193142 for a sample from this volume.)
"The opera will be, sort of, the story of Gardner's life," Hagen said. He and the poet spent much of the summer at the Yaddo artists' colony discussing the piece. But not a word of the libretto was available to Hagen for the Present Music commission.
"Flight Music" is five songs for treble chorus and string quartet. Lacking lyrics from McFall, whose words will Sharon Hansen's Milwaukee Choral Artists sing?
Amelia Earhart's.
In the first and fourth songs, Hagen set words recorded during radio transmissions on Earhart's last flight.
Texts for the second, third and fifth come from print and radio interviews with the aviator, who could be poetic when speaking about the beauty of flight.
"She's such an important feminist figure, and there are scads of quotations," Hagen said.
Back in 1995, Present Music commissioned "Everything Must Go!" from Hagen while he was conceiving another opera, which became "Vera of Las Vegas." "Everything Must Go!" became the core material for "Vera."
It's too early to tell, but "Flight Music" might have a similar relationship to "Amelia."
"The piece will probably end up, in some shape or form, in the music that Amelia Earhart sings," Hagen said.
Then again, it's a long, slow flight to Seattle.