Cleansing the Wound

I grew up at 9:03 AM on September 11th 2001. In the split second between the second plane entering the TV screen and its impact with the south tower of the World Trade Center, time stopped and the unison gasp of thirty eigth-graders and their bewildered English teacher made the walls bend inward. Something for us had fundamentally transformed. In an instant, our entire understanding of the world and its workings flew into frenzied disarray as it did for so many others that morning.

And this is the point at which John Adams starts his sonic cenotaph: the simmering silence of the city, the subtlety with which the choir enters in its chain of parallel fifths--it's as if they've been singing the entire time, and we just now realize it. Recorded voices invoke the memories of those who have gone "missing… missing… missing… John Florio… Christina Flannery…" With each name their individual memories take shape and resolve out of darkness into light. A cloud of souls gathers, a whole communion, and in the space the piece creates we are drawn into relationship with these victims in a way that transcends reason. Where there were once nameless numbers, they now have names, and suddenly they become real people their memories crystallized and transformed into sound.

Darkness-into-light moves the piece like waves breaking on a perilous shore. As soon as a musical gesture has entered--a swelling dominant seventh chord, a falling violin line, the shimmer of bells and piccolos falling like papers from the burning tower--it evaporates into the atmosphere, as if adjuring, transforming, and dismissing these painful memories into purity and brightness. But the music itself stings. This piece creates peace but it is not peaceful itself; it is hot water and salt to cleanse our wounds, to lift the impurities from our memories of 9/11 and allow our hearts to heal themselves as time passes.

The choir continues:

"We all miss you. We all love you."

"He was the apple of my father's eye."

"I wanted to dig him out… I know just where he is."

And so on the litany continues. But then there is a huge transformation--the children begin to shout "I know just where he is," the texture intensifies and coalesces into a spiraling rush of string figures and waterfall brass, the choir resumes and we are blasted by the affirmation of "light! life!" A transmigration has happened, and the darkness of denial becomes the light of acceptance and the assurance of perpetuating the memories of those whose names have filled our mind with light. Life continues. The music, though, doesn't change afterward: we are confronted with the realization that we, we ourselves, have been transformed. And as the puttering of the orchestra gives way to the noise of the city, the noise of the city gives way to the noise of Lexington, to the simmering silence of our daily existence. But the scintillating memories of those loved and lost don't fade.

Not much remains to be said about the events of 9/11; at this point ten years since, where the smoking skyline of Manhattan begins to fade imperceptibly over the horizon of our collective memory, we can begin to look objectively at what happened. The actions of certain men left an indelible mark on our society, and many people are dead because of it. To be sure, the wounds will always be with us. Adams' music pulls off our old bloodied bandages, cleanses our wounds, and rebinds them. The healing, however, is all our own.