High Flight (2007) for Chorus w/ Band or Orchestra by ItsOnlyBob

Oh, I have slipped the surly bonds of earth
And danced the skies on laughter-silvered wings.
Sunward I've climbed, and joined the tumbling mirth
Of sun-split clouds, and done a hundred things
You have not dreamed of . . . wheeled and soared and swung
High in the sunlit silence. Hov'ring there,
I've chased the shouting wind along, and flung
My eager craft through footless halls of air.

Up, up, the long, delirious burning blue
I've topped the windswept heights with easy grace
Where never lark, nor even eagle flew.
And while with silent, lifting mind I've trod
The high untrespassed sanctity of space,
Put out my hand, and touched the face of God.

I have always loved the sonnet "High Flight" by John Gillespie Magee Jr., a young American pilot who forsook a scholarship to Yale in order to join the Royal Canadian Air Force in the fall of 1940, a little over a year before the United States entered World War II.

Magee’s poem was inspired by the sight of the earth 33,000 feet below him as he piloted his Spitfire Mk I while based at RAF Llandow in Wales during the summer of 1941. "High Flight" celebrates not only the joy of flying, but the wondrous thrill of seeing Creation from a whole new point of view.

Magee included the poem in a letter he wrote to his parents. Sadly, he was killed during a training flight in England just a few months later, on Dec. 11, 1941. He was 19 years old.

Magee’s beautiful sonnet has inspired many different musical settings. In creating this one, I wanted to describe, in sonic terms, that same grand, dizzying sense of joy and wonder that Pilot Officer John Magee expressed so eloquently in verse.

"High Flight" was premiered by the US Air Force Symphony Orchestra and Singing Sergeants in September 2007 as part of a PBS broadcast, "The United States Air Force 60th anniversary: A Musical Celebration."

This transcription for the Concert Band and Singing Sergeants, conducted by Col. Larry Lang, was recorded and released in 2013 on the Band's CD "Air Force Blue."