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Flights of Passage is a work for solo piano inspired by verses of Walt Whitman.  The four poems that are addressed in the music, and which provide a programmatic basis for the piece, were suggested by pianist James Dick, for whom this composition was written.  Claude Baker notes that apart from offering certain moods and sensual qualities that might be reflected in music, the first two poems entail artful structures formed by reiterated images and other qualities.  The recurrences of these poetic motifs suggested a comparable musical structure, one that parallels Whitman's cyclical presentation of ideas through a cyclical recurrence of musical events.  The third section of the piece, "The Dalliance of Eagles," forms an introduction to the final movement and can, the composer states be heard as an integral part of it.  In this third movement, Whitman's description of two eagles locked in amorous embrace to form "a living, fierce, gyrating wheel" is vividly portrayed in what Baker admits is the most obvious example of "tone-painting" among the four movements.

The last of the four movements uses quotations from four compositions in a kind of musical collage.  These compositions are Charles Ives's The Unanswered Question, Olivier Messiaen's Vingt regards sur l'enfant Jesus, George Rochberg's Music for the Magic Theater, and Reis Glorios by the troubadour Guiraut de Bornelh.  Each of the quotations, Baker observes, has a literary connection with Whitman's poem "The Mystic Trumpeter."  For example, Whitman's evocation of an unseen, celestial trumpeter recalls the trumpet that repeatedly sounds "the perennial question of existence" in Ives's The Unanswered Question.  Similarly, Whitman's vision, midway through the poem, of a feudal world populated by ladies and cavaliers, barons, troubadours, and knights naturally calls forth a song by Guiraut de Bornelh.  "The text of this song," Claude Baker notes, "is actually a prayer beseeching God to guide the poet's companion safely home--a beautiful metaphor for Whitman's life and work."

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