• Skip to primary navigation
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Andrew Ford

Composer, Writer & Broadcaster

  • Home
  • News
    • General news
    • Events
    • Audio & Video
    • The Music Show
  • About
    • Biography
    • High-resolution photos
  • Compositions
    • Stage
      • Opera
      • Children’s opera
      • Music theatre
    • Orchestral
      • Symphony orchestra
      • Orchestra with voice
      • Orchestra with solo instrument
      • Chamber orchestra
      • String Orchestra
      • Wind and brass
    • Chamber music
      • Strings
      • Winds
      • Brass
      • Percussion
      • Mixed instrumentation
    • Instrumental (solo and duo)
      • Piano
      • Strings
      • Wind
      • Brass
      • Percussion
    • Vocal
      • Voice and instrument
      • Voice and ensemble
      • Orchestra with voice
    • Choral
    • Radiophonic
    • Music for children
    • Arrangements
  • Writings
    • The Song Remains the Same
    • The Memory of Music
    • Earth Dances
    • Try Whistling This
    • The Sound of Pictures
    • Talking to Kinky and Karlheinz
    • In Defence of Classical Music
    • Speaking in Tongues: the Songs of Van Morrison
    • Undue Noise
    • Illegal Harmonies: music in the modern age
    • Composer to Composer
  • Performances
  • Contact
  • Show Search
Hide Search
Home / Compositions / Like Icarus ascending

Like Icarus ascending (1984)

12 minutes
solo violin

First performance by Dene Olding (violin), Sir John Clancy Auditorium, University of New South Wales, Sydney, 28 October 1984

Buy Score (AMC) Listen on SoundCloud Purchase on CD

Program note

A number of my pieces have multi-referential, extra-musical dimensions to them. Like Icarus ascending is one of these. The title itself comes from a Joni Mitchell song ‘Amelia’ addressed to Amelia Earhardt, the long distance pilot who disappeared in 1928 off the north-east coast of Australia. Since Like Icarus asecending is scored for solo violin, there is also a punning reference in the title to Vaughan Williams’s The Lark Ascending (and, perhaps, another to T.S. Eliot’s ‘dove descending’ from ‘Little Gidding’). The Icarus myth itself, clearly, is another source of reference, and particularly the large number of works of art it has inspired. Of these, Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus and Auden’s marvellous poem about that painting (‘Musée des Beaux Arts’) are the most important. The idea that life continues as normal, even though the boy is plunging to his death in the painting’s background, is especially striking.

For all this, the music describes no fall; in my piece, Icarus continues his ascent, drifting off into the stratosphere, becoming invisible and inaudible. But has he avoided disaster? If, to us, he seems to be gliding effortlessly, it could just be that we are too far away to realise he has lost control and will not be returning (‘Ground Control to Major Tom . . .’).

This web of allusions, of course, is merely a catalyst for the process of composition – a structure of ideas from which the music ‘takes off’. Icarus, after all, is merely a piece for solo violin. I hope it can function on that level alone.

Like Icarus ascending was first performed at the University of New South Wales by Dene Olding in October 1984.

Reviews

The solo violin traces the soaring arc of Icarus's progress until it is lost in the heights of rarefied silence, perhaps at the point where the aviator has disappeared from mortal sight.

Roger Covell, Sydney Morning Herald

Instrumentations: Instrumental (solo and duo), Instrumental - strings

Primary Sidebar

Latest News

Katie Yap - performing under a freeway bridge in a black and white video screenshot.

Katie Yap plays In My Solitude for solo viola

30 May, 2022

Sidney Myer Performing Arts Award to Andrew Ford

9 June, 2021

The Music Show turns 30

22 February, 2021

Follow Andrew

Newsletter

Get Andrew's quarterly newsletter sent to your inbox.

Subscribe

© 2023 Andrew Ford · Privacy & Copyright ·  Twitter ·  SoundCloud
Website built by Elated