Review - On the Transmigration of Souls

Street sounds. Cars slowly driving by. Two teenage guys walking and laughing with each other. I hardly know the piece has started until the voice of a young boy says, “Missing”. Very Curious. This repeats until another voice enters, a man - “John Florio” pause “Christina Flannery”. The list goes on covered by a halo of sound from a wordless choir. An atmosphere is being created. A place of memory is forming. This is how the piece began.

When John Adams was commissioned in 2002 to write a piece commemorating the attacks on the twin towers on September 11^th, he called it “On the Transmigration of Souls”. I found these words evocative. He doesn’t call it “Requiem for 9/11” or “Memorial to the Victims of Terrorism” but uses a title more sublime – otherworldly even. In his own words, Adams says:

I want to avoid words like "requiem" or "memorial" when describing this piece because they too easily suggest conventions that this piece doesn’t share. If pressed, I’d probably call the piece a "memory space". It’s a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions. The link to a particular historical event–in this case to 9/11–is there if you want to contemplate it.

The choir gradually begins to form words, phrases – “Remember”, “Remember me. Please don’t forget me”, “Jeff was my uncle” “The sister says, ‘He was the apple of my father’s eye’”, “The father says, ‘I am so full of grief. My heart is completely shattered’”. The choir sings these tender, intimate words in tone clusters, creating an atmosphere of soft tension, like telling someone a painful memory, so painful you can only whisper it. A turning point comes when the choir sings a testimony of a woman who lost her husband: “I loved him from the start… I wanted to dig him out. I know just where he is.” These bone-chilling words ignite an intense frustration that builds like something is about to explode. The choir beings to almost shout like this desperate woman who wanted to dig her husband out of the debris. A collection of crazed, spasmatic sounds begins to build in the orchestra – dissonances in the brass, fierce scales in the strings, anvil sounds in the percussion, the choir renters now shouting at the top of their lungs, “Light! Light!” The frustration is released. We then find ourselves floating through outer space. Harmonics in the upper strings and bizarre percussion sounds create this weightless, disorienting place. We almost feel we are a piece of the debris, falling through the air.

These are just a few of the incredibly vivid ways that Adams brings his listeners to experience the events of 9/11 and to contemplate them. But he does far more than that. He brings us into a reality that transcends the events of 9/11. In this piece we inhabit a world of transition, not just from the “living to the dead, but the change that takes place within the souls of those left behind” (Adams, 2002). I found this piece extraordinarily moving and touching. It encompasses such a wide range of emotions: the quite tragedy of loss, the sweet memories of those now gone, the anger and helplessness, but also peace in the midst of everything. The otherworldly quality of his music made me feel almost as if I were looking behind the physical veneer of this tragic event. A veil was removed and I was watching the souls of the dead leaving this world, experiencing the spiritual churning of those left on this earth. In this piece, we witness The Transmigration of Souls.