On the transmigration of souls

I sit down on my couch, stay some time in silence, free my mind, and then start to listen to John Adams’ “On the transmigration of souls”. And from the very first few seconds I feel how hard it is to experience this music abstracting it from its historical background, from its contingent motivation and all the immediate correlations to an event, which still feels incredibly close, vividly present to all of us.

How can someone approach this listening and not immediately associate clear images with it, and colors, faces, sounds, very personal sensations on a day of ten years ago, emotions, stuck in our soul, suddenly reemerging - mixed with all the new feelings that this experience of recollection, of reemerging of past things is arousing within us?

Maybe someone should not try to prescind from those images and feelings, those specific associations, that recollection: after all, this piece was commissioned and written in occasion of the first anniversary of 9/11 - so maybe it has to be firmly associated with those historical events. And in an interview to the Dutch television given in 2002, the composer himself explains the way his music unfolds, and points out those specific associations, at times in fact indicating some descriptive qualities of the musical events, of the orchestral and vocal texture and colors - and “descriptive” stands here for actually evoking with sounds a physical, concrete image, like the debris falling down from the towers after the explosions.

So the listening can guide us through a very intimate journey, a transmigration of our own soul to a moment in the past, which really only exists in another dimension, to a place elsewhere, maybe a spiritual place, but at times populated by those vivid, specific images and sensations: the ones each of us possesses and recollects - and the ones that Adams offers us from his own experience - or his own recollection of that day - through specific sounds or musical gestures: recorded voices from the street, pregnant words from a newspapers article, names, declarations of love, desperate cries of relatives still hoping that the loved ones survived under the rubble… “The windows on the world”, just the name of a restaurant… a beautiful morning of September… “I see water, I see buildings”, the last words of a stewardess… and a long musical intensification, agitato passages with strings and brass menacingly waving and suddenly interrupted, an orchestral crescendo, to reach the point of maximum tension, a “harmonic crisis” becoming unbearable, in Adams’ own words, before a sudden cut… the explosion? More like the bursting of a bubble, exploding into silent, slow falling of debris - rarefied orchestral texture, gleaming of celesta, like reflections of pieces of metals floating against the blue sky in the sun of the morning, on the background the filigree of tenuous violin threads… And the overall feeling is of a world suspended, silent, distant, to be quietly contemplated. “It was a beautiful day”. The immense human tragedy that 9/11 was harshly clashes with its “poetic” quality, which, very soon after the events, I remember, started to be evoked by many, artists and not, crudely criticized. I guess the poetry is very much related to the absolutely surreal connotation that what happened on that day takes in our perception of distant spectators, making that distance even bigger: it was surreal, we could not believe to our eyes, we could not come to terms with the idea: “this is happening, here and now”. Unless we were directly touched by those events as a person, to most of us everything appeared suspended, silent, unreal, like a rarefied orchestral texture, a shimmering of celesta and fragile violins, a tenuous vocal humming floating in the vacuum…

In this sense, “On the transmigration of souls” becomes a journey of our soul to our own, inner 9/11. It is truly an evocative piece, in the deepest sense.

But I believe it is so even in a broader meaning than the one just exposed.

Once again, in the own words of the author: “The link to a particular historical event - in this case to 9/11 - is there if you want to contemplate it”. I would add that the links are not simple allusions, are concrete, absolute, inescapable in a way. But, says John Adams, this is not necessarily a piece about 9/11, it is not a “requiem” or a “memorial”; it could instead be described as a “memory space. It's a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions”.

Of course, its suspended poetic qualities, the peculiar nature of the evocation goes in that direction. But also the materials which are most concretely creating specific references to the historical events are used in a way that allows to transcend the events themselves. One example: we cannot think of anything more concrete and real than the very voices from the street recorded on tape and reproduced. This is the way the piece opens, in theory objective like a documentary report; but the way those voices are used goes beyond neutral observation of happenings: the repetition is the simplest though most pregnant way to draw those voices away from their historical existence, and suspend them, dematerialize them. Repetition fixes everything in a still moment, which by definition is atemporal, out of historical time, immobile and ideally eternal. Then, when the chorus comes in, we don’t hear words, but just a neutral vocalize, once more the concreteness of the human voice is dematerialized, it expresses not a structured thought or a specific message, but speaks an inner sound that is primordial, comes from infinite distance and stays forever with us as human beings. The names of the people killed: they are unique, real, there is nothing more individual, specific, historical than that. But all of us have names, having names is what we have in common beyond individuality, and I feel that in the piece the names are there to commemorate those people as much as to stand for all humanity.

Again in John Adams’ words: “ I hope that the piece will summon human experience that goes beyond this particular event”. To go back to my initial question, in the end I believe that we can and we should listen to this music besides and beyond its association with historical events. I believe so because truly there are no words that can express such human suffering, there is nothing that can speak for the people involved in that tragedy, there is no way to truly share, deeply understand what those people have experienced for us distant spectators. Once I read a quote - I don’t remember by whom anymore - that said approximately that human suffering is not cumulative, that the suffering of one single individual cannot be compared with the one of thousands of people - in other words, pain is a personal, intimate experience, not “quantifiable” and that cannot be really modified by sharing. If we cannot truly share, we can make an effort to feel closer, we can hope to help, alleviate, but what we have left inside is empathy, identification and similar feelings. I think the most important thing that comes to us from 9/11, from history in general is memory, is finding a dimension where we can think - or maybe suspend thinking, is a very basic, simple and unstructured awareness of our nature and our common destiny, is the tension to a place beyond here and now, beyond daily life and human miseries, where we could get closer to our essence of fragments of a whole, closer to what is just being.

“On the transmigration of souls” can also be, and I think it should be a piece about this.