September 11, 2011. The Temple of Dendur, The Sackler Wing, Metropolitan Museum of Art. 3:30 P.M. The Wordless Music Orchestra will be performing the world premiere of Maxim Moston’s orchestration of William Basinski’s “Disintegration Loops, dlp 1.1” in 45 minutes. Throngs of people have come out to watch the event. Only I’m not one of them. On account of a twisted knee, I am instead by my desk at home, laptop at hand, patiently reading up about Basinski’s piece before NPR Music’s and WQXR/Q2’s live audio broadcast begins.
Three other pieces are also being performed by a string quartet from the orchestra: Osvaldo Golijov’s “Tenebrae,” Ingram Marshall’s “Fog Tropes II,” and Alfred Schnittke’s “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled with Grief.” As Thomas P. Campbell, director of the Met, introduces the event, I am filled with a strange amalgam of apprehension and anticipation. I don’t know much about music, but I think that a lot of it is about how it makes one feel. And on a day like this, I’m not sure if I’m really ready to go through that – to arrest all my other senses, and for the first time, just hear September 11th. No visual stimulation, no tactile sensation. Nothing other than those sonic waves of sadness and despair, of hope and glory.
[image courtesy of nytimes.com]
The first piece played is Golijov’s “Tenebrae.” I sit stoic and unmoved when the strings start to sing their story. But as the piece progresses, I am suddenly infused with a powerful sense of what I think the music is trying to convey: a combination of destruction and hope, a synthesis of the present and the future. The glistening sound seems to oscillate, bearing its distinct message that there is something greater than the “here and now,” something that transcends time and place.
By the time the second piece, Marshall’s “Fog Tropes,” commences, I am profoundly moved. The blaring of the foghorn in the beginning is distinct and melancholy. I note to myself that it sounds almost like a deep wail – like what I would imagine the collective laments of a devastated nation sounds like. At one point, the music rises to a thunderous and frightening crescendo. There are foreign voices and strange sounds that I do not recognize. Those give way to the faint and soothing sound of what might be the squawking of seagulls. The rest of the piece becomes this ebb and flow of fear and calmness, war and peace. My sense of security wanes, but it is restored with the piece’s triumphant conclusion.
Schnittke’s piece, “Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled with Grief,” is profoundly elegiac. It’s like the orchestration of a heart destroyed, as if tears are traveling with the sound waves. The piece fills me with a frantic anticipation – for something extraordinary to poke through, for life to be renewed, for joy and animation. The void is not filled. The piece just ends, dying down in a faint, sad hum.
Basinski’s piece is last. Before the orchestra begins, there is a brief intermission, where the hosts of NPR Music and WQXR/Q2 interview the conductor of the orchestra, Ryan McAdams, and Basinski, who tells the background story behind “Disintegration Loops.” Around the time of 9/11, he had pulled out his twenty-year-old tape loops to archive and digitize. As he played them, they began to disintegrate. “I was recording the life and death of each melody,” says Basinski. Days later, he found himself on the rooftop of his friend’s apartment. It was the morning of September 11. He watched the towers fall while the disintegrating tape loops played. As the last bits of daylight were fading, Basinski recorded the rising smoke from the towers. “Disintegration Loops” became the soundtrack to the harrowing footage.
The piece begins on a vaguely martial note, with a sound that could be the pounding of war drums. With the music’s context in mind, listening to it becomes a strangely cathartic and redemptive experience. There is a keen sense of hope that surfaces with each beat. I recall Alexander Pope’s oft repeated “hope springs eternal in the human breast.” The piece is repetitious, and I wonder how it can possibly end. The repeating belies its inevitable, eventual mortality – kind of like life while one is living it. The music starts to unravel. It’s a slow wind-down, and in that way it almost feels like the piece is protesting against its end. Like the towers did. Like New York City always will. Like humanity always has. And with that, the evening concludes.
A recording of the performance is available here. The performance can also be downloaded for a limited time only.
The article mentions that most art directors thought it in poor taste to feature an image of the actual attack, opting instead to convey more subtle messages of reflection and continuity. I was taken by the sensitivity and thought put into the covers, and was particularly pleased with the way Jeremy Peters, the author of the article, presented the matter overall. There was, however, one thing that didn’t quite sit well with me, namely the mercenary undertones in some of the editors’ comments. I understand that much of the “real world” is business, but why must even this be turned into a detached commercial endeavor? I found it ironic that in an article about editors attempting to be as tasteful and tactful as possible, some, with their unfortunate statements, succeeding in being quite the opposite. Click 