There’s Music in the Air—The Airplane in Song

Enthusiasm for flight was also expressed musically. The romance of flying and the appeal of the dashing, daring aviator were natural themes for popular song. Like other artists, musical composers found the aerial age rich inspiration for their creativity. In addition to the entertaining tunes, the sheet music of the period was visually striking.

Credits

The Bella C. Landauer Aviation Sheet Music Collection

The music presented here is drawn from the Bella C. Landauer Collection, housed in the National Air and Space Museum branch of the Smithsonian Institution Libraries. Beginning in the early 1920s, Landauer spent nearly four decades building one of the world’s great collections of commercial advertising art and printed matter. Among Landauer’s most avid collecting interests was aviation sheet music. About 1,200 pieces, dating from the first balloon flights in the 1780s to the early jet age in the 1950s, in more than 20 languages, constitute this peerless collection, acquired by the Smithsonian in 1968.

The selections offered in There’s Music in the Air were specially recorded for The Wright Brothers & the Invention of the Aerial Age at the Levine School of Music in Washington, D.C., in 2003.

Performances by Fleta Hylton, soprano; Byron Jones, tenor; Christopher Flint, bass; and Jon Kalbfleisch, piano.