When Alan Gilbert , the music director of the New York Philharmonic, asked John Corigliano to write a piece of music commemorating the tenth anniversary of the September 11 attacks, the composer hesitated. “I frankly had no idea what to do,” admits Corigliano. “I did know what not to do, and that was to write a piece of abstract orchestral music.”
Corigliano explains his composing conundrum in a program note to the piece he eventually wrote, One Sweet Morning:
If I wrote a work that had meditative sections, but also dramatic and extroverted sections, then I would fall into a terrible trap. So many in the audience of this piece will have images of the frightful day itself — jetliners crashing into the World Trade Center, people jumping to their deaths from the top of the buildings, and the final collapse of the towers themselves — burned into their retinas. How can one hear music of any dramatic surges without imagining these events accompanying the music — or vice versa? Inevitably, the piece would become a tone poem of that unimaginable day — something I never intended and did not want. Yet how could I instruct the audience to ignore their own memories?
Corigliano’s anxiety has been shared by other prominent American composers commissioned to write music about September 11. Grappling with the underlying question — What does it mean to commemorate this horrific catastrophe in music? — these composers are especially conscious of striking the right balance between the topical and the transcendent, the tragic and the hopeful, the historical event and its musical meaning. The results of many of their musical labors will be presented this September in concert halls, churches and opera houses across the country. Corigliano’s One Sweet Morning, a work for voice and orchestra, premieres on September 30 in New York City, with mezzo-soprano Stephanie Blythe as the soloist. “This has become a less specific piece in many ways,” says Corigliano. “This is a piece about the tragedy of war.”
To escape his “terrible trap” of description, the composer’s solution was to use poems that would “refute and complement” the images of September 11. He chose four poems from different eras and countries that allowed him to place that September day into the bigger picture of war and its consequences. “I worked very hard to get the right texts to reflect the sense,” he says.
The poems’ emotional arc begins with the tranquility of Czeslaw Milosz’s “A Song on the End of the World,” which conjures images of rural life ignorant of impending doom. This is followed by an excerpt from Homer’s Iliad that chronicles a brutal massacre and a poem by Li Po, the eighth-century Chinese poet, that describes a woman watching warriors “swarm like armies of ants” before revealing that her husband and sons are in the thick of the slaughter. And finally, Corigliano uses a poem by E.Y. “Yip” Harburg, the American lyricist with a political and social conscience who penned the lyrics to the songs in The Wizard of Oz and Finian’s Rainbow. Harburg’s “One Sweet Morning” ends the cycle with a vision of a world without war, a humanist dream of peace.
In January 2002, when the New York Philharmonic commissioned John Adams to write a piece for the first anniversary of September 11, the country was still reeling from the attacks. The resulting work, On the Transmigration of Souls, aimed at serenity and gravitas, but was still very much rooted in the historical moment. Adams used recordings of the reading of the names of the deceased as well as taped sounds of the city — traffic noises, walking, distant laughing and shouting. He drew his text from the missing-persons signs that appeared all over downtown, simple and heartbreaking notes such as “Please come home, Louie. We miss you and we love you.” Adams’ piece was elegiac, but how could it escape the awful gravitational pull of Ground Zero, which still hummed with violence and grief on the first anniversary?
Corigliano, who was at his home on the Upper West Side of Manhattan on September
11, says he too was asked to write a first anniversary piece but felt the moment was
too early, too raw, for him to meditate on the event. The passage of time has made it possible for him to respond. “I think there’s a great difference now, after ten years,” he says. “We can look back on it as part of a bigger picture.”
One ambitious “big picture” work that will emerge this September is a new opera commissioned by San Francisco Opera, Heart of a Soldier, receiving its world premiere on September 10. Based on the nonfiction book by James B. Stewart, the opera tells the dramatic story of Rick Rescorla, a British-born soldier who fought in Vietnam before settling in New York as the head of security for Morgan Stanley, which was based in the World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, he led nearly three thousand people out of the burning south tower to safety, only to lose his own life during one last sweep of the doomed building.
