Tag: September 11

The day after 9/11, I’m sure we’re all ready to put it behind us. But 25 years is a landmark, and I didn’t have a show yesterday on which I could share some appropriate music. There’s only so much one can do with a film music program!

The anniversary is especially sobering this year, as I realize that we are now as far away from the World Trade Center attacks as my birth was from Pearl Harbor. That’s the perspective from which younger generations now perceive 9/11. It’s something that happened a long time ago.

While I understood that abstractly, it only really registered a year or two ago, when I noticed all these irreverent 9/11 posts on social media. Now, I can be as irreverent as the next guy, but these are obviously people who were not old enough to remember 9/11. There are still plenty of folks out there, who aren’t all that old, who experienced the terror first hand or continue to suffer loss, debilitating illness, or even lasting trauma just from having witnessed it on TV. All of us are living now with the legacy of 9/11. The world was forever changed that day, and not for the better. September 11, 2001 was the dawn of a new century of anxiety and dark uncertainty. We are living in unkinder times.

There’s really very little I can add to the countless memorials and reflections surrounding the surreal, unforgettable events of that September morning – a morning that, for those of us old enough to have lived through it, still feels like yesterday. But I’m a radio host, and I have a platform, and I would like to use it to try to encourage some reflection and maybe even offer a little solace. To this end, this Saturday on “The Lost Chord,” I will be presenting an hour of music of remembrance and consolation.

Pulitzer Prize winner Kevin Puts addresses the horrendous imprint of the attacks in his Symphony No. 2, which in a single movement traces an emotional arc from comparative innocence of an almost cinematic benignity, shocked by a sudden, violent upheaval, from which emerges a more reflective epilogue of uncertainty and fluctuating hope. It certainly does not leave one feeling uncompromisingly desolate in the manner of Ralph Vaughan Williams’ Symphony No. 6, the last movement of which some have compared to a world laid waste by atomic warfare.

Philadelphia composer Robert Moran wrote his “Trinity Requiem” to mark the tenth anniversary of the attacks. Moran rises to the occasion to provide an ethereal masterpiece, a 30-minute journey into paradise worthy to stand alongside the transcendent Requiem of Gabriel Fauré.

“Trinity Requiem” received its first performance in 2011 at Trinity Wall Street, the so-called “Ground Zero church” in Lower Manhattan. Miraculously, a hundred-year-old sycamore tree preserved the church’s St. Paul Chapel, constructed in 1766, from destruction by debris from the World Trade Center, including what would have been a direct hit from a falling I-beam. A recording of Moran’s work was released on the Innova label, featuring the Trinity Youth Chorus and members of the Trinity Wall Street Choir under the direction of Robert Ridgell.

“Trinity Requiem” is scored for treble voices, four cellos, organ, and harp. Handbells are employed in the “Pie Jesu.” And, following in the steps of Fauré, Moran includes a setting of “In Paradisum,” emphasizing a desire to attain peace at last.

Listen for a remarkable moment that occurs in the “Offertory” – the fourth movement (built on a bass line employed by Johann Pachelbel in his famous Canon) – when a siren appears. It was not written into the score, but rather actual street noise that bled into the recording session – an eerie bit of serendipity, unavoidably conjuring memories of the horror that unfolded outside the venue a decade before. But it is horror recollected in tranquility.

I hope you’ll join me for “The Persistence of Memory,” music of remembrance and consolation to mark the 25th anniversary of 9/11, on “The Lost Chord,” now in syndication on KWAX Classical Oregon.

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Clip and save the start times for all three of my recorded shows:

PICTURE PERFECT, the movie music show – Friday at 8:00 PM EDT/5:00 PM PDT

SWEETNESS AND LIGHT, the light music program – Saturday at 11:00 AM EDT/8:00 AM PDT

THE LOST CHORD, unusual and neglected rep – Saturday at 7:00 PM EDT/4:00 PM PDT

Stream them, wherever you are, at the link!

https://kwax.uoregon.edu/