How John Adams Composed for 9/11

Before John Adams composed a single note for his commissioned commemoration of 9/11, he took a month to map a strategy and gather words and images of people close to the events of that day. His thinking for this one-of-a-kind assignment could be a good model for any artist with a public responsibility.

His plans worked.  When Robert Spano conducted On the Transmigration of Souls for the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra and Chorus in 2007, I was there with a group of teens and teachers in the balcony startled when sounds of New York streets surrounded us. A distant siren cued a boy's recorded utterance, "missing," looped to make a pulse over which the orchestra played extended chords. Soon other recorded voices spoke some of the names of the victims, then sentences about lost loved ones, such as

He was extremely good-looking...
She had a voice like an angel...
His mother says "He used to call me every day."

On his website Earbox.com, Adams says that, for occasions like these, "words fail." He chose, instead of poetry or rhetoric, these "humblest expressions" of feeling without adornment or drama. Adams writes that we

know how to keep our emotions in check, and we know how to mask them with humor or irony. Music [can] unlock those controls and bring us face to face with our raw, uncensored and unattenuated feeling.

Even now the memory of hearing a hundred voices in harmony singing those phrases in a conversational rhythm breaks my heart.

When the text came down to irreducible words "I loved him," "light,""day," and "sky," the music brought catharsis with turbulent strings and keening voices before subsiding into sounds that convey what Adams intended, "gravitas and serenity," through chimes, whispered voices, and eerie celesta. When sounds of New York returned, we, too, had "transmigrated," not from state of body to state of soul, but from sorrow of remembrance to ordinary time and life going on.

On the twentieth anniversary of 9/11 last month, a critic placed Adams's work above the "musical ambulance chasing" of other composers' 9/11 pieces.

Adams tells how he prepared for the composition in his memoir (Hallelujah Junction: Composing an American Life. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). He foresaw that any composer who might seek to amplify the "tortured emotions" and "iconography" of that days' events would produce something in poor taste, an embarrassment. (I heard an egregious example in the same concert hall, the only time I was ever embarrassed for Robert Spano.) Adams was also uneasy about how our grief on that day was mixed with indignation at "the temerity, the outright flamboyance of the attacks" (263). He resolved to "make a public statement that went beyond the usual self-centered auteur concerns" without getting into the political debate over the meaning of the event.

Instead, he wanted to create "a memory space." He writes "I decided that the only way to approach this theme was to make it about the most intimate experiences of the people involved" (265). He took his text from notices for missing people papered around the city soon after 9/11 and from short memorials printed in the New York Times over the months that followed. He recorded the sounds of the city himself. He took inspiration from silent amateur video footage of "millions of pieces of what looked almost like confetti [that] drifted gently amid the clouds of dust and smoke," paper from all those offices (266).

Form followed content as Adams conceived his piece with Charles Ives in mind. Adams had recently conducted the maverick composer's work, appreciating how his compositions are like landscape paintings with foreground, middle ground, and background all visible at the same time (227).

In my mind, Ives was the first composer to approach the orchestral setting as if it were a giant mixing board. Objects, be they fragments or tunes, atmospheric effects, or enormous blocks of sound, appear on the listener's radar as if the composer were moving faders in a grand mix. This is a radically different way of treating musical materials from the traditional rhetorical procedures of European art music, where the discourse is far more linear and logically spun out.

Also, he adds, Ives "kept the vernacular roots of the art alive within the context of formal experimentation," unlike other twentieth-century composers who were "super-refining" their ideas and "following self-imposed protocols that robbed the experience of its cultural connectivity" (228). Hence Transmigration's layers of action: taped sounds, orchestral music, text spoken and sung. Adams also quotes from Ives's piece The Unanswered Question, its elongated chords in the strings and its probing trumpet call (266).

Early performances in New York and London had Adams thinking his piece was "a dud," but the performance that I heard in Atlanta and another in Cincinnati encouraged him. There were better balances of the digital sounds to the live ones. "The pure American quality of [the choruses'] enunciation and their perfectly balanced sonorities lifted the matter-of-fact plainness of the words to a transcendental level" (267).

I remember hearing the piece's premiere in a radio broadcast from New York. Already very familiar with Adams's work, I was disappointed because I thought that Adams had only put together the most obvious things using some tools of his post-minimalist style, taking us on a predictable, inevitable emotional journey; he hadn't really composed anything. Now I see, that's the beauty of his achievement. 

[See a curated list of many more articles about Adams on my page The Minimalist Zone. One of the best is Slow Motion Emotion about the piece "Christian Zeal and Activity."]