On today’s date in 2001, the Present Music ensemble premiered a new piece of music entitled “Flight Box” at the grand opening celebrations for a new art museum in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. The building was designed by Santiago Calatrava, and its roof looks a little like the wings of a large, graceful bird in flight—at least that’s the impression that composer Kamran Ince got viewing the new structure on several visits to Milwaukee.

Kamran Ince was born in Montana in 1960 to American and Turkish parents and lived in Turkey between 1966 and 1980. Not surprisingly, elements of traditional Turkish music crop up in his original works, including “Flight Box,” which was composed while Ince flew between America and Europe some seven times while working on the new piece.

Ince says he completed “Flight Box” early in 2001,  and many months before the September 11th terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, D.C. Its October premiere, coming just one month after those traumatic events, added some sinister overtones to the work’s title, but Ince insists it was based on his own, far happier memories of flying, or, as he put it, “it’s the diary of a flight that safely reaches its destination.”

Kamran Ince (b. 1960) — Flight Box (Present Music Ensemble; Kevin Stalheim, cond.) Present Music 6509