Instrumentation: 3(III=picc).3(III=corA).2.2 - 4.2.3.(III=brbn).1 - timp.perc - harp - strings

This piece takes its title from the first line of the poem "Failing and Flying" by Jack Gilbert. He is referring to the ancient Greek myth of Daedalus and Icarus, an inventive father and son who bravely escape from their imprisonment in a tower by first collecting the disposed feathers of seabirds, fashioning wings out of them, and flying away. The story is often treated as a morality tale--”listen to your elders”, “don’t get cocky” like the young man, Icarus, who, in such an understandable state of elation, ascended too close to the sun and thus causing the makeshift wings to melt leading to his Mediterranean death. Yet, what Jack Gilbert reminds us is how, regardless of one’s failure, the sheer transcendental experience of mortal flight remains glorious and spectacular. Icarus’s fall was not into a legacy of disdain and oblivion but, in truth, he had “come to the end of his triumph.”

This piece was the first of a series I composed during the Covid-19 quarantine conditions of 2020, to serve as potential contemporary preludes for each of Ludwig van Beethoven’s nine symphonies--his two hundred and fiftieth anniversary was this year!--though they can all stand on their own on any program. The connection, in this case, is with his celebrated fifth symphony in C minor--the “Fate” symphony, as it is commonly known. I’ll let the listener find their own connections.