Air Power, suite from the film score for orchestra

• Date: 1957
• Composer: Norman Dello Joio
• Period: Modern (1910-1949)

Review

Norman Dello Joio adapted his symphonic suite Air Power from a score he wrote for a CBS documentary history of aviation. Having beaten out such luminaries as George Antheil and Paul Creston to get the job, Dello Joio was entrusted with scoring all 22 episodes of the series. He worked on the episodes in all their various stages of production and, unusually for scores of this size, did all the orchestration himself. Dello Joio tried to establish some continuity between the episodes by use of shared themes, even thinking of the various episodes as acts of an opera. However, he realized the essential function of the score, saying, "My job is clear: set an emotional point of view with the music. Build the sense of charge and mass. But don't get away from the visual images." Eugene Ormandy requested that Dello Joio fashion a suite from the score after the initial broadcast of the series in 1957.

The suite contains an introduction and three movements. The first, "Frolics of the Early Days," depicts aviation in its daredevil infancy, with rollicking, high-spirited themes. The second, "Mission in the Sky," describes a World War II air mission over Germany, while the third movement, "War Scenes," provides impressions of the effect of the war on various people. The primacy which Dello Joio accorded the visual image means that parts of the symphonic suite provokes speculation as to what one should be seeing while certain music is playing, rather than interest in the music itself. Nevertheless, Air Power is far from an ordinary, disposable score. The introduction contains a theme which recurs at strategic moments throughout the suite; each time, this theme produces the same soaring optimism and joy as it does in the introduction, and the repetitions tie together the various stages of aviation.

Dello Joio's orchestration, too, does much for the score; the way in which he habitually contrasts the "airy" winds and brass with whirring or trembling strings, seeming to suggest flight itself, is particularly instructive. Finally, Dello Joio simply provides a profusion of good tunes throughout this score, from the stereotypical but lovely music of the "Japanese Prayer for Victory" to the calm, lonely snatch of flute melody over trembling strings in "Safe Return." Air Power can take its place among the finest television scores ever produced. ~ Andrew Lindemann Malone, Rovi

Albums with Complete Performances of the Work

Title	Date
Dello Joio: Symphonic Suite/Gould: Holocaust Suite	1993
Norman Dello Joio: Air Power for orchestra; John Vincent: Symphony in D	1997

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