M a r t i n X S. X G o t f r i t XXXXXXXX[works]
F l i g h t s
Flights, commissioned by the CBC as a response to the events of Sept. 11th, was broadcast one year later on 9/11/02. The image that began the composition process was of those thousands of people descending the Trade Centre towers on that clear fall morning. I imagined the sounds of that dreadful rush roaring in the stairwells. I thought too of the passengers in the plane/missiles on their early morning journeys — the familiar sounds and reassuring rituals of the cabin, then the unthinkable transformations. Thus the title plays with the ambiguity of the English word “flights”: referring to both fleeing and flying, and to the synonym for the word staircase.
All of the sounds that comprise Flights are from two sources. The first is a stairwell in an office tower in downtown Vancouver. The second is the interior of a commercial flight over the Arabian Sea. This source, mainly in Arabic, includes the conversation of passengers and the usual announcements from the flight deck.
In addition to processing both dynamic and temporal components, both the stairwell and the cabin samples are also processed through highly resonant filters. The samples are slowly transfigured into more traditional musical sounds. In this way the cabin becomes an organ note (A above middle C) and the steps are remade into a marimba-like timbre that plays arpeggios in several modes. This transformation from iconic sample to musical tone is meant to represent the spiritual or ethereal aspects of the story. The piece begins with the "A" and the filtering process is presented in reverse so that the tone becomes the cabin noise from which it was originally formed. At the end of the work the footfalls are metamorphosed into a repeating figure of tones and steps in an elegy for those lost that day.