"Missing: Manuel DeMota."
"Remember me. Please don't ever forget me."
"It was a beautiful day."
"I'll miss you, my brother."
"He used to call me every day. I'm just waiting."
Commissioned to write a piece to honor the heroes, victims and survivors of
the September 11th attacks, American composer John Adams turned to simple,
heartfelt messages like these, found on the ubiquitous posters that blanketed
the streets of Lower Manhattan in the weeks following the attacks. These
intimate expressions of loss and grief, along with a pre-recorded recitation of
names of some of the victims, and everyday sounds of the city ranging from sirens
to footsteps to distant laughter, are heard throughout On the Transmigration
of Souls, the composer's 24-minute work scored for chorus, orchestra and electronic sound. Lorin
Maazel, the Philharmonic's newly installed music director, will
lead the New York Philharmonic in four performances of the work,
featuring the New York Choral Artists and the Brooklyn Youth Chorus, beginning with
the premiere on 19 September.
Zarin Mehta, the Philharmonic's executive
director, and Maazel had long planned to commission a new work for the conductor's
first week as music director, but — compelled by the
opportunity to create a commemorative work — substantially revised what
they had in mind after September 11th. Both Maazel and Mehta believed that Adams
was "absolutely the right choice," Mehta said this week. They were, he said,
confident that he would "deal with the subject matter in the most correct
manner."
Adams, who is usually booked years in advance, quickly accepted the offer and rearranged his schedule so that he could write the piece in just six months. "If you are an experienced composer, you should not have to shy away from considering the profoundly intense," he said recently. He also felt that composing the work would help him to address his own questions and uncertainties regarding the terrorist attacks. "I was probably no different from most Americans in not knowing how to cope with the enormous complexities suddenly thrust upon us," he said.
As the nation marks the first anniversary of September 11th, all who witnessed the devastation in New York, Washington, D.C. and Pennsylvania — not to mention those around the country and the world who watched the events unfold — are still struggling to process and accept what happened. It remains a daunting task for an artist to find the clarity, equanimity and detachment needed to express the wealth of violent and profound emotions provoked by the attacks; it must have been even more difficult when Adams began to compose just a few months after the destruction.
For Adams, however, the immediacy of the tragedy did not make the piece overly difficult to write in musical terms. He did not attempt to present a historical perspective or to depict the now-familiar story of the attacks themselves; he wrote about the grief that followed. "It was a question of finding a way to express my feelings," he said simply.
Despite the fact that Transmigration commemorates tragic events, Adams did not conceive it as a requiem, which would suggest conventions not reflected in his piece. Instead, he describes the work as a "memory space, a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions." He found his muse in the spiritual gravitas of timeless, majestic French and Italian cathedrals, and he sought to express through music a state of serenity and a sense of the otherworldly. When you are in a space such as the Chartres Cathedral in France, he said, "You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot ...You feel very much alone with your thoughts and you find them focused in a most extraordinary and spiritual way."
The word "transmigration" in the work's title, Adams said, allows for many types of journeys; it can refer not only to the movement or transition from one state of being to another, "but also the change that takes place within the souls that stay behind, of those who suffer pain and loss and then themselves come away from that experience transformed."
Adams' major challenge was "to set incredibly plain-spoken language — the sort of stuff that normally no composer would be attracted to because it's so banal." Initially, the composer, a great lover of poetry, considered setting texts by writers with New York connections — poets such as Hart Crane and Frank O'Hara and Walt Whitman — but found "any uses of the lofty eloquence of poetry to be utterly wrong for this." Instead, he discovered the opposite: that the piece called for intensely felt but "almost homely speech," reflecting the way people use language when they are deeply affected by loss.
In addition to drawing from missing-persons signs, Adams also used fragments from the New York Times' series entitled "Portraits of Grief," which published short, vivid "glimpses" of thousands of the victims; reading the vignettes became a daily ritual of remembrance for many New Yorkers. Adams made use of such lines as "She had a voice like an angel, and she shared it with everyone, in good times or bad" and "I loved him from the start. I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is." The children's chorus sings the eerily beautiful phrase "I see water and buildings," which was spoken, on a cell phone, by a flight attendant on American Airlines Flight 11 as the plane approached Lower Manhattan.
One image that remains with Adams is the "virtual blizzard of white paper [from
the World Trade Center] slowly drifting down to earth.The thought of so many
lives lost in an instant — thousands — and also the thought
of all these documents and memos and letters, faxes, spreadsheets and God
knows what, all human record of one kind of another — all of this suggested
a kind of density of texture that I wanted to capture in the music, but
in an almost freeze-frame slow motion." That texture is reflected in his piece,
the structure of which he describes as "very, very dense" and "very Ivesian."
The score for Transmigration, with its complex overlay of recorded voices and sounds, orchestra, chorus, a quarter-tone piano and an ensemble of violins tuned a quarter-tone above concert pitch, demonstrates the composer's flair for intricate orchestration, evident in many of his large-scale works. He integrates a chorus of voices into the complex instrumentation, layering expressive fragments on top of one another. And all of the unconventional details of the score must be refined in only one and a half full rehearsals, which is all that the Philharmonic's opening-week schedule allows.
In addition to the effects currently notated in the score, Adams and sound designer Mark Grey are creating what the composer describes as a "tuned resonant space" that subtly "gives a very warm, otherworldly, cathedral-like effect to the live sound." Adams explained that the live music — captured by microphones placed over the chorus — and the recorded sounds are processed through a sophisticated computer program that is programmed to detect shifting harmonies and adjust its parameters accordingly. The transformed sound is then heard through more than 50 tiny speakers (donated in part by Meyer Sound), which are mounted on stands behind the audience throughout the hall.
Adams says he has no idea what to expect when Transmigration premieres on 19 September, and indeed, the piece — one man's artistic response to a communal tragedy — may have an impossible set of expectations to fill. The Philharmonic audiences will include family members of fallen servicemen and other victims of the attacks, not to mention thousands of people who each experienced the shocking events in his or her own individual, very personal way.
But, as Justin Davidson pointed out in an andante essay prior to the announcement of the Adams commission, "The fact is that the cultural meaning of that terrible hour on that beautiful morning has not yet hardened and will not for some time to come. The composer has no responsibility, of course, to speak for a consensus — only to funnel what wells up from inside into a form that others can understand."
Marian Fontana, whose husband David, a firefighter with the elite Squad One, died on September 11th and whose name is heard in Transmigration, will attend one of the performances of the piece. A writer and former bassoonist who now represents the 9-11 Widows' and Victims' Family Association, Fontana was one of a group of widows who met with Adams last spring. "As a creative person, it makes sense to me that so many people would respond to the events of 9-11 by composing, choreographing, painting, so on," she said. "The challenge, I think, is to say something that has not been said ... and music, it seems, has a much broader vocabulary than other arts in that way."
Adams takes his responsibility seriously. "I now realize that this piece is my way of expressing my admiration and appreciation to
New York," he said. "It's a very awesome undertaking, knowing how deeply New
Yorkers feel about this whole event and what happened to them. No composer would
dare to take this thing lightly."
Adams has not shied away from weighty subjects in the past. Harmonium (1980–81), his first full-scale orchestral and choral work, includes musings about love and death by Emily Dickinson and John Donne, while The Wound-Dresser (1988) is a setting of Whitman's moving words about his experiences as a Civil War nurse. And there was, of course, The Death of Klinghoffer, Adams' opera about the assassination of an American Jew by Palestinian hijackers, a work which generated controversy not only when it was first staged in 1991, but also last fall, when concert performances of Klinghoffer excerpts were abruptly canceled in the wake of September 11th. Adams' next opera will be about the Cold War and Robert Oppenheimer, who helped to create the atomic bomb.
The composer's hope is that On the Transmigration of Souls, though inextricably tied to September 11th, will endure — like Britten's War Requiem, a memorial of grief that has transcended time and place. "I think the piece will always be connected with this particular event, but I think that if a work of art has a real depth to it and a sense of permanence, that it won't be difficult for others to feel that it's not only site-specific but also universal."
Whether or not the piece remains in the repertoire in the long run, it will be heard again in the near future. According to Mehta, the technical demands of Transmigration, as well as the large forces required, make it difficult for the Philharmonic to take it on tour, but he said that he and his colleagues are, "in the back of our minds, planning to program it again" — probably in two years. And performances have already been scheduled by the BBC Symphony Orchestra (to be conducted by Adams on 27 July 2003) and the Netherlands Radio Philharmonic (to be led by Edo de Waart on 7 September 2003).
A year ago, as ensembles worldwide programmed Beethoven symphonies to express solidarity with the United States, Adams lamented in an interview that the American repertoire seemed to be lacking a grand choral work that could be performed at such times. "Everyone was suffering and we were also feeling very much bonded to our national identity, because we were under attack," he said at the time. "It was too bad that Beethoven's Ninth was the only piece to describe that sense."
This week, On the Transmigration of Souls will precede that same Beethoven staple on the New York Philharmonic program. Even before Adams was tapped to write the piece, Mehta had planned to partner the commission with the Ninth Symphony. Now the double-bill seems all the more appropriate. "We felt like a memorial piece followed by the grandeur and joy and message of Schiller was absolutely the right thing," Mehta said. And so New York audiences will hear Beethoven's triumphant statement of brotherhood just after encountering Adams' quieter, more meditative statement about love, grief and loss.
The 19 September concert will be
streamed on WQXR.com and heard in New York on 96.3FM WQXR-FM. Separately, National
Public Radio's SymphonyCast will broadcast the 21 September performance,
which will also be heard on New York City's WNYC, 93.9FM. John Adams
will be interviewed by music critic Alex Ross at the New Yorker Festival
on 28 September.
Some of John Adams' comments about On The Transmigration of Souls were
drawn from an interview given jointly to andante and the New York
Philharmonic and can be found on Philharmonic's Web
site.
