September 5, 2006
Published on Tuesdays
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Mickey Butts
By Jeff Dunn With the fifth anniversary of 9/11 approaching, Americans will be inundated with reminders, as if they needed to be reminded, of that terrible day. Along with the speeches, the moments of silence, and all the other rituals of remembrance will be music. With its power to stir the heart and soul, music will be an inextricable part of commemorations around the world. But precisely which music makes the best memorial? After all, 9/11 is a day that evokes a multitude of incompatible thoughts, memories, and emotions, many of which are frightening, mournful, and angry. To locate the range of expression possible, we only have to take at face value the words of America's president on the last anniversary: We remember the images of fire and terror at the Pentagon, in Pennsylvania, and in the heart of New York City. We remember the ruthlessness of those who murdered the innocent and took joy in their suffering. We remember the courage of the police and firefighters and rescue personnel who rushed into burning buildings to save lives, knowing they might never emerge. And we remember the victims — moms and dads, sons and daughters, brothers and sisters, husbands and wives — and the loved ones they left behind. ... And in the days and weeks that followed, America answered history's call to bring justice to our enemies and to ensure the survival and success of liberty.Whether any one concert can, or should, encompass all these conflicting thoughts is a matter of debate. Still, over the next week, the Bay Area's classical music world will attempt a variety of responses. Performances will be offered by the Pacific Collegium and Pacific Boychoir, the San Francisco City Chorus, and the Kronos Quartet, among others. Their repertoire choices will test which of the many memories and deeds mentioned by President Bush are suited to consecrate with a memorial performance. What follows is an attempt to outline the many choices available, and the implications of those choices, as we memorialize 9/11 in music. Let's start with the images of "fire and terror." Few works in the repertory depict fire. Probably the most famous is the Magic Fire music from Wagner's Die Walküre. But this music is too grand, with no terror. Jon Leif's blow-one-away depiction of the eruption of an Icelandic volcano, Hekla, might be an expensive candidate (the score calls for, among other things, huge chains to be bashed against rocks). For terror, there are a number of good candidates. One of the best would be the second movement of Shostakovich's "1905" symphony, which depicts the panic as the Czar's troops charged and fired upon the crowd, or the second movement of his Symphony No. 10, supposedly a depiction of Stalin. Perhaps a fitting combination of fire and terror might be realized by a performance of Penderecki's Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. But Penderecki's work, terrifying as it is, might confuse listeners by raising possibly inappropriate Ground Zero parallels if it were played as a memorial for 9/11. The depiction of fire and terror would seem like a natural for Hollywood composers. After all, the standard script is supposed to have a fireball at the 23-minute mark. John Williams' music for The Towering Inferno has many ingredients to match this item on the list, not the least of which is its title. But is it too glitzy? And aren't new sounds needed — the two jet crashes, and the sounds so chillingly captured in the Naudet brothers' documentary of jumpers hitting the pavement? However, as Ed Johnson-Ott remarks in his review of Oliver Stone's recent release, World Trade Center: The trailers are full of artfully framed images and stirring music, but here's the thing: It's been nearly five years since Sept. 11 and I remember everything from that day quite clearly, thank you. I don't need — I don't want — anyone to take those vivid images burned into my head and attempt to feed them back to me with a big-name lead actor, ace cinematography, and orchestral cues to guide my emotions.The same could be said of music and composers. Yet the firemen, policeman, and other rescue workers are also worthy of musical tribute. Their courage might be captured by the noble expressions of Elgar, say the "Nimrod" movement from the Enigma Variations, or even better, the minor-key Coronation March, Op. 65. However, Elgar was British. Some would argue that something more American is needed, say the Sousa In Memoriam march of 1881. But Sousa of the quick-step is more appropriate for living heroes, rather than the ranks of the fallen at Ground Zero. For those who perished, Barber's Adagio for Strings has been played many times. This work has become the dirge for our age, performed on occasions from the deaths of Presidents Franklin Roosevelt and Kennedy to the funeral of Princess Di. Although overly familiar, it has the advantage of wordlessness, a state that frees some listeners to be with their private thoughts. Others, however, may want more specificity, in the form of a text offering meaning, comfort, and hope. And for some, the voicing of grief is essential, and song therefore must play a part. At the end of the president's observations is a forceful declaration: "history's call to bring justice to our enemies." Would courtroom music suffice here, or should we have music of vengeance? I know of no decent work in the former category. For the latter, the number is legion: Prokofiev's "Battle on the Ice" from Alexander Nevsky, "... Vittoria! Vittoria!" from Puccini's Tosca, a Don Carlo revenge aria from Verdi's Force of Destiny, Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever, Pino Dinaggio's School in Flames and Bucket of Blood cuts from the film Carrie, and so on. For those fringe Web sites that demand that nuclear weapons be dropped on the capitals of "Axis of Evil" nations, perhaps Karl Amadeus Hartmann's Gesangsszene would serve. Its text concludes with: And the sun is scorching. ... And the thunder of the inexorable will come forth from the throat of the swallow. And from the incision in the bark of the cedar tree will flow the tears that mark the end of the world. Can all these thoughts — should all these sentiments — coexist in the same program? At the other extreme, is music itself an affront, with a moment of silence being more appropriate instead? For those seeking to address all the elements of Bush's observations, the classic Latin Requiem Mass has it all: for the vivid and vengeful, the fire and terror of the "Dies Irae" (Day of Wrath); for the mourners and solace-seekers, the "Angus Dei ... dona eis requiem" (Lamb of God ... grant them rest). Yet associating the Day of Wrath with 9/11 is problematic. Should a Day of Judgment be taken as the scenario for the proper conclusion of the War on Terror by the mighty forces of the U.S.? Or should 9/11 itself be taken as the Dies Irae of the jihadists, and a Day of Judgment on our it-can't-happen-here complacencies? Despite this ambiguity, the Mozart and Verdi requiems, with their Dies Irae movements, have been some of the most commonly performed. The most remarkable set of performances was the round-the-world "Rolling Requiem" of the Mozart, performed by more than 190 choirs in 21 time zones on Sept. 11, 2002, at the anniversary time of the first plane's impact on 9/11. On 9/11 this year, the San Francisco City Chorus and 150 singers will perform the Mozart again, in one place, at a free concert at the First Congregational Church in Berkeley. More circumspect approaches, perhaps abjuring the propriety of a Dies Irae, have chosen requiems more devoted to solace. A favorite has been Brahms' German Requiem, where no terror is depicted, where the Dies Irae function is replaced by a setting of "For all flesh is as grass, and all the glory of man as the flower of grass" from Peter 1:24. The Duruflé Requiem, to be performed by the Pacific Collegium and Pacific Boychoir in a memorial benefit concert on Sept. 9-10, is in this more restrained mold, as are other favorites, the Fauré and Rutter requiems. Pacific Collegium Artistic Director Christopher Kula has decided to pair the Duruflé Requiem with the 1946 Gerald Finzi anthem for chorus and orchestra Lo, the Full, Final Sacrifice, a setting of texts from two St. Thomas Aquinas' hymns, rendered into metric English verse by the 17th century poet Richard Crashaw. "This will be, for me, the most poignant moment of reflection at these concerts on the anniversary of the World Trade Center tragedy, as Finzi leads us from stark, awed contemplation at the beginning of the piece to a final Amen that sounds like the unfolding of new worlds, a new heaven," says Kula. Among modern requiems, Richard Danielpour, who was reviewing proofs of the score of his American Requiem with his publisher when the second tower was struck, was the first to dedicate a newly composed requiem to the victims. Christopher Rouse, who at the time was in the middle of composing a requiem inspired by Berlioz, decided not to tie his work to the disaster, but only to insert a moment of silence to mark the point in the score when he learned of the attack. After years of delay, due in part to the difficulties of performance, this requiem will receive its premiere by the L.A. Master Chorale next March. Danielpour's requiem was released on CD in 2002. So far, probably the best-regarded response by a living composer has been John Adams' On the Transmigration of Souls, winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Music for 2002. This work concentrates solely on memories of the victims. Furthermore, it deftly finesses the issue of whether words should interfere with private interpretations of the music itself by avoiding complete sentences. Instead, fragments of missing-persons postings and a quiet recitation of 78 names is enmeshed in a mostly subdued, superbly balanced orchestral web. The propriety of Adams' approach, as opposed to the standard full-bore requiems, lies in the fact that we don't have, after only five years, the proper perspective necessary to fully comprehend the meaning of the disaster and set it in the larger context. Take, for example, one of the greatest works of modern times, Britten's War Requiem. Commissioned for the 1961 dedication of the new Coventry Cathedral — next to the ruins of the cathedral bombed in World War II — it is commonly mistaken as solely a commemoration of that war. But all the Wilfred Owen poetry within that work refers to World War I, the folly and profoundly devastating effects of which were only just beginning to be realized decades later. Nor have these effects ceased even today. Perhaps 2101 is the proper year for the comprehensive 9/11 requiem to be written. And what then will be the nationality of the composer who writes it? The international aspects of 9/11 are to be addressed with the Kronos Quartet's memorial concert this coming Sept. 11 in Herbst Theatre. Violinist and Artistic Director David Harrington describes the concert concept this way: It became clear to me that what would feel most right ... was to try to give our listeners a sense of many musical perspectives, almost like a mosaic or tapestry of humanity, and that there should be some music that's awesomely beautiful, some music that's incredibly angry, and music perhaps from places that we don't commonly get to hear in concert halls in the United States. ... It occurred to me that maybe what we could do is almost create an imaginary city.To do this, Harrington has crafted his own transmigration, a progressive "musical meditation" of 11 works from 10 countries. The concert begins with glosses on the muezzin's call to prayer, then moves through Iraqi and Indian music to a climatic Armenia by the German industrial band Einstürzende Neubauten ("Collapsing New Buildings") and a shattering remix of prerecorded "1001 Kronos Quartets" in the work Spectre, by Canadian "plunderphonist" John Oswald. Following a centerpiece of sorts, Michael Gordon's frightening manipulations of children's voices describing the disaster (The Sad Park), the concert concludes with a pair of conciliatory works by Terry Riley (an excerpt from Sun Rings) and Osvaldo Golijov and Gustavo Santaolalla (Darkness 9/11), culminating in Kronos-accompanied Nordic choruses with the Piedmont Choirs Concert Choir. We have many imaginary cities: the New York that once existed; the countless cities today that reflect past acts of bloodshed and compassion; and the future cities that we all have a responsibility to build as the community of mankind. We have yet to witness the full consequences of 9/11, that indelible mark on the calendar. To which "history's call" — heard by the President, ourselves, and the rest of the world in so many different ways — will we rise? In the meantime, music, that blessing, or call to arms, will be with us to calm, and stir, our souls.
(Jeff Dunn is a freelance critic with a B.A. in music and a Ph.D. in geologic education. A composer of piano and vocal music, he is a member of NACUSA and president of Composers Inc.)
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