John Adams
On the Transmigration of Souls

Loren Maazel Conducting The New York Philharmonic, The New York Choral Artists
And The Brooklyn Youth Chorus

Review By John Shinners
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  I can't say that I've thought this all the way through, but it strikes me that composers of the 20th and 21st centuries have been less apt than their predecessors to write music specifically in reaction to public tragedies.  Perhaps this is because composers of earlier eras were more bound to a patronage system that obliged them to produce memorial music: Bach, Purcell, and Beethoven were just the pinnacle of that mountain of composers who had to write funeral music for their departed princes. Perhaps it is because the managements of modern symphony orchestras are less willing to underwrite works that, in the middle of their public mourning, may offend the political sensibilities of the button-down subscribers who sustain most metropolitan orchestras, at least in America.

In the last century, composers certainly wrote earnest responses to tragic events. I think of Britten's War Requiem (commemorating the destruction of Coventry Cathedral specifically and the pacifist Britten's horror of war in general) and Penderecki's Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima — both of them written at over twenty years' distance from the events they recall — or William Schuman's To Thee Old Cause, written in 1968 just months after the assassinations of Martin Luther King, Jr. and Robert Kennedy.  John Adams stirred controversy with his opera The Death of Klinghoffer (1990-91)about the Palestinian terrorist hijacking of the Achille Lauro in 1985 — a controversy that resurfaced in 2001 when the Boston Symphony canceled a concert performance of choruses from Klinghoffer in the wake of September 11, 2001.

But how do we cope musically with a catastrophe as large and as fresh in memory as 9/11?  Here is Adam's response. On the Transmigration of Souls, one of the opening works of the New York Philharmonic's concert season in 2002, premiered just a week after the first anniversary of the  attacks. It must be the first significant work of public mourning commissioned from a major composer in this new century, which may in part be why it won last year's Pulitzer Prize for music.

In a thoughtful interview about the work, Adams says "I want to avoid words like 'requiem' or 'memorial' when describing this piece because they too easily suggest conventions that this piece doesn't share. If pressed, I'd probably call the piece a ‘memory space.' It's a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions." (The entire interview is here) "Memory space" is an apt description for the 25-minute work. It is not program music meant to recapture the disaster or funeral music meant to formally honor the dead.  Instead, it moves us into an ethereal zone where fragments of dialogue gathered from that terrible day and its aftermath commemorate details of the individual lives of some who died. In the end, the piece acknowledges our capacity, no matter the trauma, for love and endurance.

It falls into three uninterrupted parts. After a brief introduction of found sounds taped on the streets of New York, a boy's voice — toneless and detached — repeats the word "missing." Gradually, over quiet choral and orchestral chords, other voices, equally placid and almost weary, begin a spoken cenotaph, reciting the names of some who died. Other phrases drift in: brief memories of victims, snatches of physical descriptions taken from the "missing" posters left around Ground Zero. A large, angry orchestral crescendo ends this amorphous first meditation.

In the second part, around the recitation of more names the choir sings phrases collected from "Portraits of Grief," the series of biographies of the victims that The New York Times ran daily in the year after September 11. These flesh out the lives of the victims and underscore the ache of their loss. All of this is supported by shimmering, ghostly chords floating through the orchestra. Listeners familiar with Adams' El Niño or The Death of Klinghoffer will recognize elements of his sound world in the choral writing here: brief sung phrases of closely-clustered harmony.  As family members recall their dead, the orchestra and chorus swell to a massive, sustained crescendo, the longest, loudest moment Adams has ever composed.  Out of this giant communal cry, the repeated words "light" and "love" break through, transfiguring grief into something larger.

Finally, the music ebbs and the quiet, passionless chanting of the names of the dead begins again. A fragment of Charles Ives' The Unanswered Question surfaces and then drifts away. The casual street sounds that opened the work return, then fade as we leave the "memory space." (In his notes to the disc David Schiff, who writes so intelligently about modern music, reminds us that Ives himself commemorated one of the great national tragedies of his day, the sinking of the Lusitania in 1915, with "From Hanover Square North, at the End of a Tragic Day, the Voice of the People Again Arose," the last movement of his Second Orchestral Set. Listening to the two works side by side is an interesting lesson in musical influence.)

Music composed for public mourning always poses an aesthetic dilemma: are we moved by the music or by the recollection of the event it commemorates?  I have listened to On the Transmigration of Souls several times now, and I consistently come away from it moved to tears. I'm still trying to disentangle my reactions to it. At one level, I have always loved Adams' music — especially what he has written over the last decade. So I am hardly an unbiased listener, and I've been eagerly waiting for over a year for the release of this disc.  On another level, one of the best and brightest students I have ever taught died in the Twin Towers that day, so I cannot hear a list of the dead regardless of context without being moved by the memory of her life cut short. At still another level, Adams' melding of the names of the dead and the fragments of their lives into his music creates vivid extra-musical associations to September 11 that will prick anyone's still vulnerable memories of that terrible day. (One repeated refrain from the work: a flight attendant on board one of the doomed planes saying "I see water and buildings.")  In fact, I suspect that Transmigration's spoken words alone would be enough to touch an emotional chord in most of us.  If that's the case, then what purpose does Adams' music serve here?  Is it mere soundtrack for its sobering text?  One of art's oldest functions is to serve memory. Adams' art does that. No melodies will stay with you from repeated hearings of Transmigration; no structural development will immediately be apparent.  But you will come away with an ache of dappled recollection both personal and communal, of words of remembrance sustained in an almost liturgical musical frame. To this degree, Adams' work is a success: it pulls us out of ordinary time and for half an hour inserts us into "memory space."

Still, as much as I admire Adams' work, On the Transmigration of Souls feels a bit underdone.  As a musical reaction to September 11, it wields undeniable emotional power. Written quickly in just six months, it is spontaneous and heartfelt; but it is also less well thought out than, say, the Violin Concerto, which I think is the best thing he has written.

The work was recorded live over the course of several concerts at Avery Fisher Hall. Mark Grey did the "soundscape" engineering of the taped voices that are interwoven through the music and choir.  I've listened to a number of Super Audio Compact Discs (SACD) lately and I'm impressed by their rich acoustical possibilities. So I was disappointed that Nonesuch recorded this work in conventional stereo. If ever a piece was designed for the world of surround sound, this one — with its many sounds and voices both sung and spoken washing over the listener — is it.  As it is, the engineering is good, but not exceptional.  Without the text of the narration in hand, it is often hard to understand what is being said and sung.  The sound of the orchestra itself is rather two-dimensional.  Several months ago there was apparently a brief marketing scuffle at Nonesuch over which version of Transmigration would be released: this world premier with Maazel and the Philharmonic or the European premier with Adams conducting the BBC Symphony at one of last year's Proms Concerts.  The BBC recording was going to be cheaper to produce, but the New York Philharmonic decided to absorb the extra costs to keep the world premiere recording on home ground.  It would be interesting to hear if the BBC engineers managed to do anything more interesting with their sound design.  Finally, notice that the 25-minute On the Transmigration of Souls is the only work on this disc, but that it sells for slightly less than a full-priced disc.

Those who admire Adams, the most "public" and best serious composer now working in America, will hurry out for this disc. So will those who want to save the memory of September 11 in music.

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