John Adams Commemorates 9/11
His composition 'On the Transmigration of Souls' for the New York Ph
With the summer slew of film dramatizations of 9/11, it's nice to know that the classical music field has had something to say about current events, too.
This summer has seen a number of dramatizations commemorating the events of 9/11. Oliver Stone's World Trade Center deals with the New York rescue teams in the aftermath of the plane crashes while Paul Greengrass's United 93 follows the story of the hijacked flight that was retaken by passengers and crashed into a Pennsylvania field away from national targets.
But while the film industry seems to be doing an excellent job of remembering the event, what about our own field of classical music? How did contemporary composers react to 9/11? Enter John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic and written the year following the collapse of the World Trade Center towers.
Performed fittingly by the New York Philharmonic in conjunction with the New York Choral Artists and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, the piece runs 25 minutes and weaves together fragments of pre-recorded depictions of the rubble, descriptions of the victims, and the feelings of survivors for their lost loved ones.
The piece derives its name from the Platonic belief, similar to reincarnation, that souls are recycled into new bodies, and the layered sound bites certainly create feelings of overlap and interaction. John Adams definitely pays homage to his predecessors in twentieth-century composition: the trumpet solo evokes the anxious, searching melody of the same instrument in Charles Ives' Unanswered Question.
Also, John Adams' overlap of pre-recorded readings of the victims' names with the live choral text is a move somewhat reminiscent of Benjamin Britten's juxtaposition of Wilfred Owen's poetry with the Latin Mass in War Requiem. The dissonance of the choral sections set against the expansive, slowly changing foundation in the string section reflects the anxiety produced by the tragedy and the search for meaning that ensued.
Sometimes it is easy to support the supposition that classical music no longer relates to current events and issues, but John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls demonstrates that classical music still has a lot to say.
