Given the auspicious date, for once we have a timely post. In which minimalist musical commemorations of 9/11 are
considered, before expanding into film and documentary and winding up
as a partly political broadcast
”Remember me. Please don’t
ever forget me.”
After attending the Kronos Quartet's ‘Awakening: A Musical Meditation on the Anniversary of 9/11’, I started to wonder what similar
responses there might have been.
As it turns out, there’s a fair few
things which are next along on the shelf, with the ever-busy Kronos
folk seemingly at the centre of it all. (Though ‘Awakening’
was not a standalone composition but a programme put together from
already-recorded works, I'll call it a ‘piece’ here for
convenience. I also use the American term 'progressive' for anyone
with a liberal/leftist political perspective, even if in the UK it
more suggests indulging in musical meanderings about Topographic
Oceans while wearing white flares.)
Now it may seem contrary to link to
(let alone post) a YouTube video that’s just a black screen. In
fact, for anyone that image-fixated, there are other YouTube clips
that add the expected 9/11 disaster footage. But, honestly,
listen to the piece and the black screen works
better. (A white screen may have been better still. Or a black screen
which slowly shaded into white as the piece progressed. But
anyway...)
As Adams says in
this interview, almost in echo of my comments following the
Kronos Quartet Meditation, “9/11 had been so over-exposed... the
country had gone into an orgy of repeating these images.” So
instead of the sheer spectacle of the event the focus here is on the
human cost; in Adams’ words “not the political aspects but the
personal aspects.”
True, the inner sleeve does contain
recognisable 9/11 images but of post-attack ruins. Looking at them
feels contemplative rather than reactive. In fact there's something
almost cathedral-like about them, with a workman kneeling as if in
prayer. Which feels fitting to the music.
I’d called the earlier evening “the
sonic equivalent of a commemorative wall – the place where people
pin photos of the disappeared.” In this case the words from the
opening section, after the repeatedly intoned “missing” are from
actual missing persons boards pinned up after the tragedy. It's their
unadorned artlessness, such as the quote above, which make them
effective. Recordings of street noise add to this sense of verite.
(It later moves into longer personal reminiscences, published in a
New York Times series.) Adams has called the piece a “memory
space.”
And, again similar to the earlier
evening, the piece has a palindromic structure - building to an
explosive middle before turning back into reflection. However, it
doesn’t attempt to follow the same chronology of events. The line
repeated over this build, “I know just where he is”, feels
ambiguous. Though taken from a woman talking about her dead husband,
it could be taken to mean that we know from where we were attacked.
Similarly the music feels ambiguous, it could be illustrating either
anguish or a war-cry. (I am fairly sure that I heard this section
played on the radio, and it was explained Adams was giving vent to
the revenge instinct that was vibing at the time, though he didn’t
share it.)
Overall however, the piece seems to
share the same humanistic concerns as 'Awakening'.
Adams commented: “I hope that the piece will summon human
experience that goes beyond this particular event." If the
comparisons are there to be made, perhaps the main thing I got wrong
was suggesting that the passage of time had led to this response –
for Adams wrote this piece almost immediately. (“The request to
compose this piece came in late January, which meant I had not much
more than six months.”)
Indeed the CD's sleeve notes by David
Schiff take quite the opposite tack: “In the months that followed
the catastrophe, 9/11 became a source more of civic pride than of
nationalism. The heroes were policemen and firemen, not soldiers; a
mayor, not a president. The names read... reminded New Yorkers of
their diversity and commonality.”
”The world to come...”
Steve Reich's 'WTC 9/11',
also written for the Kronos Quartet and first performed in March
2011, uses actual voice recordings rather than transposing the words
onto performers, perhaps only a minor difference to Adams'. Yet these
surface similarities in fact merely place their differences into
sharper relief.
It might at first seem more natural for
Reich to create such a work than Adams. Unlike the West Coaster, he's
a long-term New York City resident who lived a mere four blocks from
the towers. (Though he did not witness the attacks first hand.)
However, though some earlier works
could be considered politically progressive, lately his concerns
became more mystical through a re-acquaintance with his Jewish
heritage. ‘Come Out’ was released in 1966, at
the height of the Civil Rights movement and shows it. Yet 1981's
'Tehillim', in which Psalms are sung in Hebrew,
marked a slow but steady change in direction. While, at least in
operas such as 'Death of Klinghoffer,' Adams has
taken a more explicitly political line. (He's
stated that things have since been made difficult for him,
not just in terms of his career but also in so simple a step as
security checks at airports.)
Yet listen to the pieces and it's as if
they get it the wrong way round. Adams was more the post-minimalist
composer, more willing to introduce symphonic dynamics to his work.
As
I've said before, I think of Reich’s work as harmonious
and serene. Yet 'WTC 9/11' is much the more
discordant of the two, composed significantly later but shorter,
sounding more urgent and contemporary, homing in on the events of the
tragedy.
Even that
trivial-sounding decision to use field recordings helps to throw
Reich's response into sharper relief. He's
commented “these
are actual recordings with the intensity and the grit that is
embodied in people who were there who didn't know what was going on.”
Based around actual recordings of
Aerospace Defence Command and the Fire Department, the strings
matching the line crackle as a flurry of communications try to
respond to the disaster. The first movement starts and ends with the
sound of a phone off the hook. It's another work which could be given
a Tower of Babel interpretation, falling towers scuppering
communication.
Yet, interestingly, controversy
ensued over the original CD cover for this release (above).
As said above, the choice to visualise the attacks is more logical
than for the other two pieces, for the focus is more specifically
upon that day. However, this choice was widely criticised, and not
just by the political Right. Reich finally released a statement that
the cover would be changed, feeling the furore was distracting people
from the music. (it was replaced, I kid not, with fluffy clouds.)
This perhaps underlines a dichotomy.
9/11 was a huge national, if not world, event. Yet minimalist and
even post-minimalist music are marginal pursuits, beloved perhaps by
the likes of you and me but bypassed by the general populace, their
influence well exceeding their reach. Why a number of such works on
this subject?
“What hit the coast was a
natural disaster, pure and simple. The flooding of New Orleans was a
man-made catastrophe, a federal fuck-up of epic proportions.”
With the Neoconservatives' rise in
political influence following the attacks, the right soon came to
’own’ 9/11. If it was ever questioned how failing to stop a
terrorist atrocity should be seen as a virtue, the answer was simply
that we need to get more right-wing. A notorious example of this
seeping into popular culture would be Paul Greengrass' 2006 film
'United 93.' The English director had previously
seemed something of a leftist, with films such as 'Bloody
Sunday' (2002) dramatising the murder of Irish
demonstrators by British soldiers. Significantly 'United
93' uses many of the same devices as both the previous film
and Reich's piece, even up to utilising the same air traffic control
transcripts. It's a very good film.
It's also the most blatant piece of
baseless right-wing propaganda this side of Fox News. The faux
documentary style merely convinces us that events must have happened
when there is no evidence for them whatsoever. Slipped in among the
actual is a German passenger acting as a 'surrender monkey' to the
terrorists.
The film's climax, when the passengers
rush the terrorists, is preceded with intercut scenes of their
reciting a Christian prayer and the terrorists intoning the Quran.
The poster, in tastefully pushing the burning towers to the back of
the image, shows a plane instead advancing on the Statue of Liberty's
crown – aligning perfectly with the right-wing insistence that
“they're jealous of our freedoms.”
Meanwhile, excluded from Ground Zero,
progressive opinion soon shifted to another disaster site - New
Orleans, hit by Hurricane Katrina in 2005. Though precipitated by an
act of nature the disaster was massively exacerbated by official
failures and neglect, with a response that matched astonishing
incompetence with appalling malevolence - including virtual ethnic
cleansing of poor districts. (Causing the rapper Kanye West’s ripple-inducing comment on live TV “George Bush doesn’t care about black
people”, which some took as though it was fresh
information.)
If the Twin Towers transmogrified into
the War on Terror, Katrina came to represent the destructive excesses
of free market capitalism, sucking up and destroying the lives of
working people. Government proved both incapable and unwilling to
protect people from it’s rampaging.
Perhaps the best example is Spike Lee’s
documentary ’When the Levees Broke’, begun
only three months after the event and released the following year.
It’s sub-head ’A Requiem in Four Acts’ takes
on similar language to the musical pieces we’ve looked at.
Structurally it also seems similar - built up of a myriad of
interviews from many different places, adding together to give a
ground-level perspective. However, even though there’s no grand
voice-over or editorialising, it’s much more polemical, much more
impassioned. It doesn’t just list the dead, it asks how they got
there.
(I’d like to say something about the
series ’Treme’, about the aftermath of
Katrina, from which comes the quote atop this section. It might make
for something of an interesting comparison as its maker David Simon,
best known for ’The Wire’ previously produced
’Generation Kill’, if not about 9/11 then
about the resultant invasion of Iraq. However, as I’m yet to see
any of ’Treme’ that might have to wait!)
It feels like separate tram lines have
been dug. It's reminiscent of the Red and Blue Americas, described in
art speigelman’s post 9/11 comic strip 'In Shadow of No
Towers.' “The map of the 2000 election – the one that
put the loser into office – made it clear that we’re actually a
nation under two flags! The state he lives in is the state
of alienation.” Talking of himself as a cartoon
character, in the third person, he continues “he’s barely ever
been in the Red Zone, where the 44% of Americans
who don’t believe in evolution tend to gather... He hardly knows
anyone who supports the war and no one who voted for that creature in
the white house [Bush].”
If this is the case then I’m not sure
how I feel about it. I may have stated out exploring something I
hoped to find a rich seam of (humanistic responses to 9/11 within
America) and instead run into a barrier. It sounds like the red and
blue Americas are happiest when their different reality systems don’t
collide. As is probably obvious from the above, I prefer one colour
to the other. Yet does that mean I should seal out the other from my
life? Yes, of course Katrina was an important event. But that doesn’t
mean 9/11 should be abandoned to the Right.
Of course it is absolutely correct when
considering 9/11 to start with the human tragedy. And music, always
better at evoking feelings than constructing arguments, is a
well-placed medium to do that. But should you stop there? A
documentary, in the style of 'When the Levee Broke'
might go on to do this, but none seems to exist. Even a folk or rock
song, with more of an emphasis on lyrics, would more naturally be
drawn into wider questions. I'm sure such songs exist. But they're
not public works like these musical tributes.
Many places in continental Europe now
have statues or other public installations commemorating the victims
of the Nazis. Yet of course none of them ask how it cam to be that
the Nazis arose - that's simply not what they're designed for, any
more than a gravestone would ask why cancer was widespread.
Similarly if you want to commemorate an event without commenting on
it, these musical memorials have become the go-to.
Restricting progressive responses to
such pieces, however moving and however valuable they are in
themselves, is almost tantamount to suggesting that going any further
takes you into the Right’s territory. Which of course is absurdly
incorrect.
Of course we should acknowledge the
problem. There are sections... sizeable sections of the Right whose
tactic is to repeat baseless lies in the hope that they stick. (The
so-called ‘mosque at ground zero’, the concocted ‘birther’ controversy over Obama, the British NHS supposedly running “death panels” and so on.) It is hard to respond
meaningfully to such absurd slurs, it’s like trying to start a
debate with a fanatic shouting things in the street. Seriously, how
do you respond to the screechy fantasies of Fox
News? How do you hold a conversation with someone who's not holding
one with you?
Perhaps we have domestic parallels, for
example the European Union. Even now, with it's insistence on
continent-wide austerity measures, when it couldn't be more obvious
what a reactionary banks-and-big-business-biased institution it is,
it's still difficult to the point of impossible to say
any of that. Being anti the EU is the property of far-right little
Englanders like the xenophobic UK Independence Party, fulminating
over Brussels' plot to wiping the Queen's head from our currency and
other such vital issues.
But there's significant differences. A
large number of people... perhaps the majority are agnostic or even
indifferent to the whole question, assigning it to the
incomprehensible and distant world of capital-P politics. (Rightly or
wrongly. Well actually wrongly, but never mind that now.) 9/11 was a
much more immediate and visceral issue. A large number of people
killed in a terrorist attack, targeted simply because of the building
they worked in, that's not something which leaves people on the
fence.
It amuses me when politicians talk
about political engagement like it's an automatic social benefit,
rather than something which simply suits them. The last election in
America seemed to carve the tram lines deeper, with the
“hopey-changey” arguments for Obama seemed to centre around his
personality differing from Bush, much more than his policies. In the
UK few people would seriously expect Miliband to act significantly
differently in office to Cameron, something which quite frankly is to
our advantage. In general I try to avoid “America bashing”, which
seems at best pointless and most often hypocritical. However, when
the evidence speaks you need to go with it...
The last, spoken line in Adams' piece
is “I love you.” Not, I fear, a sentiment which looks to be
widely shared any time in the near future.
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