Living Under the Shadow of the Ninth

No single American composer has composed a piece that contributes a grand public statement of shared hope. This may seem to be an audacious statement. However, if you examine the repertoire performed in memorial concerts during the weeks following September 11, 2001, it seems to be the prevailing viewpoint of every event organizer and concert presenter. Performances mostly defaulted to Beethoven’s universal cry for brotherhood (9^th Symphony) with a few notable performances of Brahms’ humanistic consolation for the grief-ridden (Ein Deutsches Requiem). With a canon of American orchestral music spanning over one hundred years, not one large American work was programmed. We had Ive’s Unanswered Question, Copland’s Quiet City, and Barber’s Adagio, but these did not contribute on the grand scale necessary to fill a program.

The New York Philharmonic, itself programming Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem in the days following 9/11, expressed the desire to commemorate 9/11 on opening night of the 2002-2003 concert season. Lorin Maazel would be conducting his first official concert as Music Director. Maestro Maazel had programmed Beethoven’s ninth and Stravinsky’s Symphony of Psalms. New York Philharmonic management decided to scrap Stravinsky and commission the American composer, John Adams, to write a work of memorial for the victims of 9/11.

Adams wrestled with the nature of the commission. He writes in his book, Hallellujah Junction, “Composing any kind of music to amplify these tortured emotions could only be an exercise in the worst possible taste.” He also was bothered by the manner in which the media and politicians had distorted the event. A certain uneasiness was constantly nagging him. “Were we truly shocked and grieved by the loss of life? Or were we more disturbed by the temerity, the outright flamboyance of the attacks.” Finally, he decided to write the piece “in large part because I felt that a serious artist ought to be able to rise to the occasion and fulfill a need for a public statement that went beyond the usual self-centered, auteur concerns of his own personal individualism.”

The resulting work, On the Transmigration of Souls, rises to the occasion admirably. Derived from various sources including personal accounts, victim’s names, and anecdotes, the text drives the work. Adams displays his virtuosity as a composer in the manner in which he treats the text. He effectively underscores the text's poignancy with carefully scored music. The recorded soundtrack is as integral to the work as any instrument or singer. Adams attributes the density of the material to his intimate knowledge of the music of Charles Ives, specifically Three Places in New England and the Fourth Symphony. Adams even calls Ives the “guardian angel” of the piece and Adam’s trumpet lines conjure images of Ives’s Unanswered Question. At times the chorus sings on neutral syllables while other times the chorus sings fragments of text. Nonesuch’s recording of the work provides the most ideal listening experience. The sound is engineered so that the listener is able to hear every corner of Adam’s sonic landscape with clarity. Lorin Maazel delivers an authoritative performance with the New York Philharmonic, New York Choral Artists, and Brooklyn Youth Chorus. Joseph Flummerfelt’s preparation of the chorus and Dianne Berkun’s preparation of the children’s chorus deserve special mention.

We discovered, in those weeks after September 11, 2001, that when Americans needed a public artistic statement of hope, our popular music and our classical music could not console. Adams wonders, “Was this simply a fault of history? Were the kind of Enlightenment ideals of Beethoven or the yearning spiritual quests of Mahler simply relics of the past, no longer possible in our more ironic and painfully self-conscious contemporary climate? Were listeners forced to go back to an earlier era to find expression for such idealized emotions as are expressed in Beethoven? Or was Beethoven simply a greater artist who spoke in a language of the sublime that no American composer could hope to rise to?” Given the severe void in American orchestral music appropriate for such occasions, this is a most welcome addition. However, in its first performance, it was paired with Beethoven. In many subsequent performances, Beethoven’s 9^th has been a frequent companion piece. Will Adams’s On the Transmigration of Souls be the work that we turn to when another tragedy strikes or will it be forced to continue to live under Beethoven’s shadow?