A Consequence of Flight

Instrumentation: 2,2,2,2 - 2,2,1,1, 2 perc, hp, str

Duration: 5’

Year Composed: 2014

Premiere: May 22, 2015 • American Symphony Orchestra with Leon Botstein conducting

Program Note

As news of the world is made more and more readily accessible, it becomes increasingly difficult to create the fictions that ordinarily help us cope with difficult realities. This trend in the history of media is closely paralleled in our personal histories - As we grow older, we may lose that agency over our perceptions of the world. And while shedding this naïveté is looked upon as an indication of maturity, it often coincides with a feeling of nostalgia for that unique feeling of comfort bred from invention.

A Consequence of Flight came out of revisiting my 8-year-old self on September 11, 2001. Like so many people my age, memories from that day – the confusion of it all – remains one of the clearest memories from that part of my life. I came home early from school and turned on the television, seeing for the first time images of those scarred towers. During the attack, my father was working at 1 Liberty Plaza, across the street from the World Trade Center. It was his recounting of that day that gave those images on television any depth for me. Throughout his story however, he never mentioned the jumpers that I knew he had seen. It was exactly the omission of this detail that made it stand out to me. That terrified me and I became obsessed with this detail that had so intensely infected my father’s constitution. To this day, as I try to remember the towers, I see them as a rapidly ascending backdrop to a limp body, seemingly held in limbo in the center of the television screen. With this feeling of second-hand fear inherited from my father, I began inventing.