Heart of Air (2019)
4mins
soprano and xylophone
soprano and piano (arr.)
Premiered 9 September 2019 by panSonus inThe University of Queensland's Nickson Room, Brisbane
For Amber Evans and Jon Clancy
Since their (and I emphasise the pronoun) disappearance in 1937, the mystery of Amelia Earhart and Fred Noonan has lent itself to innumerable conspiracy theories. Heart of Air is my own spin on a more prominent hypothesis: that Earhart was a government agent who intended to stage a diplomatic incident by landing on the Japanese-controlled Marshall Islands. Such, supposedly, would have afforded America a credible casus belli to retake the island chain.
Whether Earhart and Noonan were or weren’t as Heart of Air depicts them is irrelevant – almost. I toy with the idea of presenting a more or less revered icon in a different light. Why is it that we come to respect the goliaths of history? Is it because they did great things, because they were great? Or is it because they were merely perceived as doing great things? Were they always great? Perhaps they were never actually great in the first place. The questions are aplenty, I feel, and, as enlightened constructs of the Western caldron, we should draw immense satisfaction from interpretation.
But let us not excuse the immense hypocrisy that has crept into our society. Some people are apparently more deserving of criticism than others, while some are too holy to be considered even slightly heretical. In our twenty-first century of equality, one does pause.
