On the Transmigration of Souls and the State of Modern Music

My mother was a flight attendant for United from October 2000 to September 11, 2001. The fear that came over me--a sophomore in high school--when a United Airlines flight hit the second tower was surreal and remains vivid to this day. After nine hours of attempted contact, my mother was found safe in Chicago, far from the tumultuous scene that continued to unfold in New York.

Stories like mine have been appearing everywhere in tribute to the tenth anniversary of that day. Newspapers, national and local news, blogs, Facebook, and professional athletics have gone to extreme lengths in an attempt to summarize the feelings of a nation. Every American was attacked that day, which is what made the New York Philharmonic’s “in memoriam” commission so critical. In it, John Adams was presented the chance to prove the relevance of “Classical” music to a modern, national audience. Clearly recognizing that opportunity, Adams sought painstakingly vivid imagery utilizing missing-persons posters, phone calls from the planes, and names of victims to create the work’s text, which he layers in both barren and frighteningly thick textures via multiple choirs and a pre-recorded track. This texture evolves beautifully at times, allowing haunting glimpses of “please call” or “my brother” amongst a cacophony of sounds. Modern approaches (i.e. prerecorded material, quarter-tone ensembles, and tone clusters) need not dissuade the modern listener from experiencing the Adams’s “Memory Space” (the term he coined to describe the works genre). Opening with street noises and a child’s voice repeating “Missing,” Adams composition reminds one of the feeling of September 11: a sort of lost-ness as the world stood watching and waiting, helpless. Ultimately, there is the climax expected of the work, frighteningly intense, with growingly overpowering texts: “I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is,” leading to cries of “Love! Light!,” which builds to an unbearable level before returning us to the street sounds of that day.

In his composition, Adams utilizes references to the work of Charles Ives, and it is here that I believe Adams loses touch with the potential of his work. The quoted trumpet solo from Ives’s The Unanswered Question has understandable allure for this particular “Memory Space,” as it aurally poses the questions we all asked that day: Why? Why do bad things happen to good people? Why are we here and they are not? However, this reference also adds a layer of “insider knowledge” to the work that causes it to lose focus as representative of the experience of every American. No longer is the work for a national audience, but rather for the musical insiders already involved in the 20th century repertoire.

David Schiff’s article “Memory Spaces” from the New York Philharmonic’s album insert opens with a curious statement: “It is an oddity of our culture that more people own David McCullough’s book John Adams than any CD of music by the most prominent composer today, also named John Adams.” Schiff views this disproportionate allotment of artistic value as an oddity, but I feel that it is a consequence of composers composing for themselves. This is a harsh thing to write about Adams, who in the 1980s began composing the most important “audience-friendly” music in a generation, but the insider language utilized in On the Transmigration of Souls stands between advocates of modern composition and the audience they are so desperately trying to reach.

So, is Adams’s work a failure? No, not at all. It remains an important example of the possibility of modern composition, and a poignant reminder of the events that enfolded that horrible morning. Adams poetically weaves together a heart-wrenching, emotional work that is to be admired and commended. The issue is that, for most Americans, it is in a foreign language, understood by a small portion of the millions affected that day, and will be rejected or ignored by most of them.