Baumgartner's Jump Inspires New Orchestral Work

Felix Baumgartner

Baumgartner's Jump Inspires New Orchestral Work

Composer Ed Bennett’s music drew interest from an unusual source this week. Hearing that his recent work for the RTÉ National Symphony Orchestra — titled Freefalling — was inspired by Felix Baumgartner’s 39km dive to earth last October, the drinks company who sponsored Baumgartner got in touch with the composer to interview him for their website.

Listen back to Ed Bennett’s Freefalling here at 4.50.

Freefalling, which lasts roughly the same length as Baumgartner’s dive, seems to mimic the suspense of the ascent to the stratosphere in the helium balloon before pausing and beginning an exhilarating descent into the smoothest of landings,’ writes Aaron Rogan, ‘but the composer himself says that the piece is concerned more with the feeling than the mechanics of the dive.’

‘[The dive] resonated with me as an alternative form of a journey, where he fell towards earth,’ Bennett is quoted as saying. ‘I was able to use that as an analogy for the music which is very fast paced and has lots of falling sounds in it, and hopefully is an exciting kind of sound world…. I like to leave it open to interpretation but it’s not a literal thing, it’s more a kind of feeling I’m trying to invoke: an imagined kind of feeling. What Felix might have felt we can only imagine, that’s something no one else can really know.’

Published on 3 October 2013

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