Four Centuries of Great Music September 11, 2021 Commemoration of 9/11

Today is the 20^th anniversary of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the world trade center.  Today on Four Centuries of Great Music we are commemorating the 20^th Anniversary of these terrorist attacks and those who died in these attacks.  There are several works that were written specifically to commemorate this event and those who died and we will be playing some of those today on Four Centuries of Great Music.  By definition these will all be works from the 21^st century. 

We are opening today’s show with John Corigliano’s One Sweet Morning, for Mezzo-Soprano and Orchestra.  Right after 9/11 Corigliano was asked to compose a commemorative piece to be played around the time of the first anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attack.  And he declined the offer saying the emotions were too fresh. But when asked again for the 10^th anniversary, he agreed. Corigliano described the challenge of composing a 9/11 commemoration in the score program notes, writing:  ...if I wrote a work that had meditative sections, but also dramatic and extroverted sections, then I would fall into a terrible trap. 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?    I needed to write a piece with words. I needed other images both to refute and complement the all-too-vivid ones we'd bring with us into the concert hall.   I needed a cycle of songs that would embed 9/11 into that larger story. So I chose four poems (one of them part of an epic poem) from different ages and countries.”

One Sweet Morning is in four movements:   The first movement is set to the poem "A Song on the End of the World" by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. The second movement is set to a portion of Homer's Iliad detailing a massacre led by the Greek prince Patroclus. The third movement is set to the poem "War South of the Great Wall" by the 8th-century poet Li Po. The fourth and final movement is set to the eponymous anti-war poem "One Sweet Morning" by the American lyricist and poet E. Y. "Yip" Harburg.

Ned Rorem:  Aftermath          

Aftermath is a song cycle by Ned Rorem for medium voice, violin, cello, and piano. The work was commissioned by the Ravinia Festival, Highland Park, Illinois.  This work was written in the wake of communal and personal tragedy – 9/11 and the loss of his partner of 31 years James Holmes.  About this work Ned Rorem wrote: “In the wake of the September 11th shock, I asked what a thousand other composers must have asked: what is the point of music now? But it soon grew clear that music was the only point. Indeed, the future will judge us, as it always judges the past, by our art more than by our armies—by construction more than by destruction. The art, no matter its theme or language, by definition reflects the time: a waltz in a moment of tragedy, or a dirge during prosperity, may come into focus only a century later.

My need though, as I pondered this instantly and forever changed world—with the Twin Towers in ruins and the Middle East in sorrow—was to reflect the immediate through the choice of texts to be used for this project for Ravinia. A week earlier I might have opted for a whole different slant.

As a Quaker I was raised to believe that there is no alternative to peace. Perhaps it’s wrong, perhaps right, but I am not ashamed of this belief. This piece is about pacifism, but it is not that restricted."   With the song cycles wide range of texts, it is a much larger meditation on love and loss.

This work holds a place of pride with Rorem who has stated "If I was to be remembered only by one piece, it would be this piece, out of the several thousand works that I've written.

Ned Rorem's Aftermath is a song cycle of 10 songs: The Drum (text by John Scott of Amwell); Tygers of Wrath (text by William Blake, John Marston, A.E. Housman, Mathew Arnold); The Fury of the Aerial Bombardment (text by Richard Eberhart); The Park (text by John Hollander); Sonnet LXIV (text by William Shakespeare);  On His Seventy-Fifth Birthday (text by Walter Savage Landor);  Grief (text by Elizabeth Barrett Browning);  Remorse for Any Death (text by Jorge Luis Borges);  Losses (text by Randall Jarrell); and Then (text by Muriel Rukeyser)           

Robert Moran: Trinity Requiem

To mark the tenth anniversary of 11 September 2001, the Trinity Church Wall Street (Ground Zero) commissioned Philadelphia-based composer Robert Moran to compose a requiem for the Trinity youth choir. The Trinity Requiem is a moving work scored for harps, cellos, and organ, and the youth chorus is joined by only a few adult members of the Trinity Choir.

The “Introit” begins the piece with two long chords that appear as a summons or calling forth to witness the tragic events of our time. The youth chorus then begins with the Kyrie. The offertory in the middle of the Requiem consists of a beautiful, yet somewhat melancholy, interlude that allows space for reflection. On the recording, a siren is heard passing the church at the beginning of the offertory. This was not planned, of course, and Mr. Moran explains in the liner notes that they decided that the “alarm” was worth preserving as a reminder that the World Trade Center had been just behind Trinity Church ten years ago. The simplicity of the “In Paradisium” section, which closes the piece, while tinged with melancholy, also leaves one with a sense of serenity and peace.

Sections of the requiem are: Introit, Kyrie, Psalm 23, "The Lord Is My Shepherd", Offertory, Sanctus,      Agnus Dei, Pie Jesu, and In paradisum               

Joan Tower: In Memory                       

The Tokyo String Quartet commissioned this string quartet composition in 2001. Tower began writing “In Memory” as a tribute to a friend, Margaret Shafer, but it soon enlarged into something greater after the 9/11 attacks occurred.  Joan Tower wrote about this transformation  “9/11 hit about a month later and the intensity of the piece got higher. It veers between pain and love and anger.”  When listening to the piece we find an overarching effect of the emotion and trauma that 9/11 might have caused victims of the event, both those who died and those left behind, and the different phases in emotion that survivors might have experienced. Additionally the build up of instruments adds to the effect of what actually happened in the real time occurrence of the event.

Julia Wolfe:  Compassion                  

Composer Julia Wolfe lives in Lower Manhattan, just blocks from where the Twin Towers once stood.  She and her family watched 9/11 unfold around them, and dealt with the aftermath. She has won recognition for writing big, ambitious pieces that look back at American history. But she wrote one of her most stark, concise works as a response to the terrorist attacks on Sept. 11, 2001. She called it “Compassion.”