Flight out of Mind. 2012. 30′
For Chamber Orchestra
Dedicated to Sound Icon; Jeffrey Means, conductor
Instrumentation:
Flute/piccolo, oboe, clarinet/bass clarinet, alto / baritone saxophone,
bassoon/contra bassoon, French horn, trumpet, trombone, tuba, harp,
piano/celeste, cimbalom, 2 percussionists, strings.
As the title might suggest, Flight out of Mind is a study of, or meditation on,
flight, both in an aphoristic sense and in a psychological one. All three
movements are made from musical gestures that evoke sensations of flight.
Beneath this clear connection, the idea of flight as an instinctual, magical
escape from what we fear is at the heart of the work.
“We do not flee in order to take shelter; we flee for lack of power to annihilate
ourselves in the state of fainting. Flight is a fainting which is enacted; it is a
magical behavior which consists of denying the dangerous object with our whole
body… It is a way of forgetting it, of denying it… Thus, the true meaning of fear is
apparent; it is a consciousness which, through magical behavior, aims at denying
an object of the external world, and which will go so far as to annihilate itself in
order to annihilate the object with it.”
–Jean-Paul Sartre
John Aylward 