To Be Airborne

To Be Airborne

Virgin America has the most amazing airline music selection I’ve yet encountered.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

Sorry for not posting anything here last week. For the first time in quite a while I was on vacation (in Northern California) and had no access to the internet during most of that time. But of course, no FJO vacation is ultimately completely a vacation.

I spent the first three days of my week off attending concerts at the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music where I heard new works by several composers with whom I have had extensive NewMusicBox conversations—John Corigliano, Michael Daugherty, Jennifer Higdon, and Christopher Rouse—as well as Mason Bates, Dorothy Chang, Eric Lindsay, David Sanford, and British composer Stephen McNeff, in programs conducted by yet another NewMusicBox cover alumna, Marin Alsop. Then it was on to three days in San Francisco (with a brief day trip to Berkeley) which were essentially spent buying up LPs and CDs at Amoeba Records, eating at amazing restaurants, and seeing places I still had not visited even though it was my 9th trip there—a highlight was the Legion of Honor whose current exhibition of women impressionist painters is a real mind-opener.

But strangely enough the most memorable part of the trip was flying there and back on Virgin America, my first-time ever on this year-old airline. Besides the strangely welcoming mood lighting, the most comfortable coach class seats I’d ever sat on, and their super clever system of having passengers order food etc. on personal screens (rather than the old-fashioned way of attendants traipsing through aisles or being summoned to take requests), Virgin had the most amazing airline music selection I’ve yet encountered. The selections were set up less like radio stations and more like, I can’t believe I’m using this word in a positive context, an iPod. There were specific Terry Riley, Steve Reich, Ornette Coleman, and Sun Ra set lists, as well as an excerpt from Stockhausen’s Stimmung featured. Mind you, if I had my druthers, there also would have been some Cage, Feldman, Ives, Dolphy, perhaps Mildred Couper, and some Carter for his centenary this year, but I feel like an ingrate to complain. And, truth be told, much of that music doesn’t completely work thousands of miles in the air (too quiet much of the time; sudden changes in the music felt like turbulence which is never a good feeling, etc). In fact, in my dial surfing, the music I wound up listening to the longest was by James Brown; “Get Up” sounds really fantastic up there! What music do you think works best for air travel? What do you listen to while flying?