Ecstatic Living Room

I remember with perfect clarity that crystal clear morning of September 11, 2001 and the explosion I heard from my New York City apartment window that I thought was just another outrageous New York City sound….until a neighbor climbed down the fire escape and banged on my window to come out and have a look.

What I saw from then on is perfectly etched in my memory from a strange mix of real-time viewing off our fire escape and what was being broadcast live on television.   I watched the first tower go down with my own eyes, the second one on television.    It was the most horrific day for the city of New York in history and a tragedy that was felt profoundly around the world.

As a music lover, I always turn to music for inspiration about life events of every form and magnitude.   I believe that music can wash away the petty dramas of life so that we can get a better glimpse and understanding of the grand drama.

The evocation of human emotion through music plays an enormous part of this experience.  Personally, I have found the music of Gustav Mahler and Dmitri Shostakovich to be incredibly accurate in the depiction of emotions.  So much so that I often feel that I am actually feeling the emotions they felt when they were composing the music.   I also find that the great American composer John Adams follows in this line.  The more I listen to his large-scale works (such as Harmonielehre, Doctor Atomic—both the opera and the symphony, etc.), the more I am amazed by his ability to convey feelings of very complex emotion.

And so this morning, thinking about 9/11, I chose to revisit the work that Adams was commissioned by the New York Philharmonic to write to commemorate the one-year anniversary of 9/11:   On the Transmigration of Souls.

I will not even attempt to describe this work, a grand mix of orchestral, choral and taped sound and voice, but will admit that after listening to it I feel much more at ease with my emotional memory of the tragedy.

With  mournful trumpet solos, Adams makes reference to Charles Ives’s iconic work The Unanswered Question.   There are many unanswered questions in regard to the 9/11 tragedy.  But while listening to On the Transmigration of Souls, I felt the one that Adams asks in this work is:  how in a world so suffused with love, could something like this happen at all?