I’ve listened to John Adam’s twenty-five minute composition, it was requested by the New York Philharmonic as the opening work of its 2002-3 season and to commemorate the lives of those killed on the September 11, 2001, On The Transmigration Of Souls maybe four times today. National Public radio had dubbed it the recording of the decade and I was frankly surprised I was unaware of it. I was AWARE of John Adams, his Nixon In China was something of a cause celebre around town and The Killing Of Klinghoffer, the true story of the murder of an elderly Jewish man by Palestinian terrorists on a pleasure cruise.
I remember both Nixon’s trip and Klinghoffer’s murder well but I haven’t heard the operas they inspired in Adams. Or On the Transmigration of Soulsover and above the 30 seconds I heard on Itunes before buying it.
Has there been any 9-11 songs, compositions, any form of memento mori at all? I can’t think of many though some songs took on the weight of the attack for us. Ryan Adams “New York, New York” for instance. In the song Adams leaves the city and the love of his life, “Hell I still love you, love New York” and it is an equation we all make from time to time. The music video, filmed in the shadow of the World Trade Center on September 10th, had the entire weight of the debris on the songs shoulders and to this day it seems like an ultimate expression of loss and love.
Dylan’s Love And Theft was released about a week after 9-11 and, like so many things Dylany, it is easy to project your concerns on it and so I did. Song after song, even the cheerful ones, even the “Summer Days” and “Po’ Boys” seemed about the destruction of the World Trade Center and the loss of nearly 3000 New Yorkers. I saw Dylan at MSG on his first post 9-11 performance here. All he said about it was “I wrote most of these songs here, so nobody has to ask me how I feel about New York”.
There is Springsteen’s The Rising where for all of Bruce’s considerable abilities to unite the common people he can’t get a handle on his subject matter. He can’t get us out of the falling building and into heaven -the songs just weren’t there.
None of this is On Transmigration Of The Soul. Transmigration is chamber music plus adult and children chorus and found noises that creates an atmosphere of supreme loss. Adam’s said “My desire in writing this piece is to achieve in musical terms the same sort of feeling one gets upon entering one of those old, majestic cathedrals in France or Italy. When you walk into the Chartres Cathedral, for example, you experience an immediate sense of something otherworldly. You feel you are in the presence of many souls, generations upon generations of them, and you sense their collected energy as if they were all congregated or clustered in that one spot.” And that’s one thing but the subdued murmur until the sound explodes suggests transitional souls, transitional moments, it isn’t until the violence peaks that it gors from transition to transmigration.
Adam’s would go on to say that when he called the piece a “transmigration of the soul’ he didn’t mean only from living to post-living but also the changes that occur to the people who didn’t die -the changes in the souls of those who are left behind. But there is another kind of transmigrating going on… from the horror of death thru the sounds of the living in remembrance and in communion with those that have passed violently and suddenly. Around eighteen minutes in the piece is simply horrifying, the decible level erupts(it is a quiet work for the most part) and I don’t know if the adult chorus are saying words but they are singing together in a loud pitch. It lasts no more than 90 seconds but once you hear it you know what you’ve heard. You have heard the last moments of those souls. I am not suggesting any type of narrative at work here -Adams goes out of his way to say this is a composition that you can use to contemplate 9-11 but telling a story would be banal.
These are the sounds you are hearing: SATB chorus (minimum of 90); children’s choir; piccolo, 3 flutes (3=picc), 3 oboes, 2 clarinets in Bb, bass clarinet in Bb, contrabass clarinet in Bb, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns in F, 4 trumpets in C, 3 trombones, 2 tubas, timpani, 4 percussion (perc. 1: glockenspiel; perc. 2: crotales, high triangle; perc. 3: chimes, 2 high triangles; perc 4: 2 high triangles, suspended cymbal, brake drums); piano; celesta; quarter-tone piano; 2 harps, strings. Prerecorded multi-channel soundtrack (computer sound files operated from a central mixing board located inside the auditorium).
The words are a collage of found sounds and sung sounds taken from Ground Zero. Adam’s Again: “One is the simple reading of names, like a litany. I found friends and family members with different vocal timbres and asked each to read from the long list of victims. Then I made a sort of mantra-like composition out of the tape-recorded reading of these names, starting with the voice of a nine year-old boy and ending with that of two middle aged women, both mothers themselves. I mixed this with taped sounds of the city–traffic, people walking, distant voices of laughter or shouting, trucks, cars, sirens, steel doors shutting, brakes squealing–all the familiar sounds of the big city which are so common that we usually never notice them.While a recording of the reading of names and the city noises quietly surrounds the audience, the onstage chorus sings texts that I took from missing-persons signs that had been posted by the families of the victims in the area around Ground Zero.”
Similar to my thoughts about Regina Spektor’s “Ink Stains”, I don’t LIKE On The Transmigration Of Souls and I find it difficult to listen to. As a work of art, as an artistic statement, it takes you where you might not want to go, into the steel and into the heat, and it feels distraught. It reminds me a little of Gershwin’s An American In Paris with the latter compositions found sounds, the teeming big city, but it is the negative Gershwin, like a nightmare the city turns against the listener. The children sound elegiac, the adults scared, the collage of sounds whispers of loss and fear and love. It is very strong stuff.
Is it the album of the decade though?
It seems to me many musicians have failed to deal with 9-11. It is vastly more succesful than Springsteen’s The Rising the only other comparable work. By foregoing plot, by remaining in a moment (the first tower was hit at 846am, the second at 903am -that’s 17 minutes, the composition is 25 minutes in length, this is in real time) it seems true in ways The Rising doesn’t seem true. In my review of my album of the decade I’m Wide Awake, It’s Morning I mentioned the shadow of the World Trade Center across the album. The first song on the Morning, “At The Bottom Of Everything” is about a plane crash. If 9-11 is the single most important event of the 00s, than an album about it should be the most important album, shouldn’t it?
But is 9-11 the most important event? Eighteen months ago I would have said it undou
btedly was but perhaps the economic collapse has even further reaching effects (and both are downtown New York phenomenas, go figure) .
Let’s put it this way, if NPR are wrong they’re not wrong by much. Good choice.
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