John Adams
On the Transmigration of Souls

Composed between February and July 2002, on a co-commission from the New York Philharmonic and Lincoln Center’s Great Performers series. This work was commissioned with the generous support of a longtime New York family in honor of the heroes and in memory of the victims of the attacks of September 11, 2001.
World premiere: September 19-24, 2002, New York Philharmonic, Lorin Maazel conducting.
Instrumentation: three flutes and piccolo, three oboes, two clarinets, bass clarinet, contrabass clarinet, two bassoons, contrabassoon, four horns, four trumpets, three
trombones, two tubas, timpani, percussion, piano, celesta, quarter-tone piano, two harps, strings, children's chorus, four-part mixed adult chorus, and pre-recorded sounds. References to The Unanswered Question by Charles Ives use by permission of Peer International Corporation. Duration: approximately 27 minutes.


John Adams speaks about the work
John Adams expressed some thoughts about On the Transmigration of Souls in a written interview for the New York Philharmonic.

NYP: Did you feel any uncertainty about accepting this commission?

JA:  The request to compose this piece came in late January, which meant I had not much more than six months. Normally you begin planning an orchestral work of this scope more than a year in advance. But I didn’t require any time at all to decide whether or not to do it. I knew immediately that I very much wanted to do this piece – in fact I needed to do it. Even though I wasn’t exactly sure what kind of shape the music would take, I knew that the labor and the immersion that would be required of me would help answer questions and uncertainties with my own feelings about the event. I was probably no different from most Americans in not knowing how to cope with the enormous complexities suddenly thrust upon us. Being given the opportunity to make a work of art that would speak directly to people’s emotions allowed me not only to come to grips personally with all that had happened, but also gave me a chance to give something to others.

NYP: How did your visit to the Ground Zero site affect you?

JA:  I visited the site about six months after the cleanup began. By then the area resembled just a huge construction project. It was only when one looked closely and noticed the many little shrines and spontaneous memorials and handwritten messages still in evidence that the lingering mystery and somberness of the area began to make itself felt. I had the good fortune to be taken around the area by several policemen who themselves had been right in the midst of the chaos and danger when the towers fell. Even after six months the intensity in their voices while describing the events was palpable.

NYP: How would you characterize the musical style of On the Transmigration of Souls?

JA:  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 otherwordly. 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 even though you might be with a group of people, or the cathedral itself might be filled with other churchgoers or tourists, you feel very much alone with your thoughts and you find them focused in a most extraordinary and spiritual way.

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 link to a particular historian event – in this case to 9/11 – is there if you want to contemplate it. But I hope that the piece will summon human experience beyond this particular event. “Transmigration” means “the movement from one place to another” or “the transition from one state of being to another.” It could apply to populations of people, to migrations of species, to changes of chemical composition, or the passage of cells through a membrane. But in this case I mean to imply the movement of the soul from one state to another. And I don’t just mean the transition from living to dead, but also the change that takes place within the souls of those that stay behind, of those who suffer pain and loss and then themselves come away from the experience transformed.

NYP:  How difficult was it to incorporate existing text and audio into an original work, especially considering the profoundly intense subject matter?

JA:  Well, if you are an experienced composer, you should not have to shy away from considering “the profoundly intense.” I have certainly confronted deep emotions in my music before, certainly in works like Harmonium, which has poetry by John Donne and Emily Dickinson, The Wound-Dresser with its Whitman texts about the suffering and death of young men and boys during war time, and The Death of Klinghoffer, my opera about terrorism and the assassination of an elderly American Jew.

Finding the right text to set is half the challenge to creating such a piece. In the case of Souls, I realized immediately that this event – “9/11” – was already so well documented, the drama so overdescribed, and the images so overexposed that I didn’t really need to worry about an “exposition” of my material. Every listener hearing this piece will already know the story. So, in a way, that kind of “numbing familiarity” gave me a certain freedom to work with the material.

I had no desire to create a musical “narrative” or description. Nothing could be more distasteful or banal. However, something I had seen on an amateur video taken minutes after the plane had hit the first tower stuck in my mind: it was an image of millions and millions of pieces of paper floating out of the windows of the burning skyscraper and creating a virtual blizzard of white paper slowly drifting down to earth. The thought of so many lives lost in an instant – thousands -- and also the thought of all these documents and memos and letters, faxes, spreadsheets, and God knows what, all human record of one kind or another – all of this suggested a density of texture that I wanted to capture in an almost freeze-frame slow motion.

So I eventually settled on a surprisingly small amount of text. And this text falls into three categories. 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 those 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, cards, 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 had been posted by the families of the victims in the area around Ground Zero. These signs, photos of which were taken by Barbara Haws, the New York Philharmonic’s archivist, had tremendous poignancy. Most had been hastily written and photocopied, usually with a snapshot photo along with a physical description and often a heart-wrenching little message at the end, something like “Please come home, Louise. We miss you and we love you.” What I discovered about the language of these messages was that it was invariably of the most simple and direct kind. No one stunned by the shock of a sudden loss like this has time or inclination to speak or write with eloquent or flowery language. Rather, one speaks in the plainest words imaginable. When we say “words fail” in situations like this, we mean it. So I realized that one of the great challenges of composing this piece would be finding a way to set the humblest of expressions like “He was the apple of my father’s eye,” or “She looks so full of life in that picture.”

NYP: Do the adult and children’s choruses play differentiated roles in this work?

JA:  It’s common to give the children’s choir a certain “ethereal” or “angelic” role in a big concert piece. Mahler does that in his Eighth Symphony, and Benjamin Britten takes advantage of their innate “innocence” in his War Requiem. I didn’t do quite the same thing. I wanted the children’s choir not just for these qualities but also because theirs is acoustically and timbrally a very different sounds from the mature voices of an adult chorus. So I used them a lot and I didn’t isolate them or give them the usual “innocent” role. In fact, they are right there in the thick of things, singing along with the adults and the orchestra. I first used children’s choir on my Nativity oratorio, El Niņo, and they appear there only at the very end, singing a folk-like song about the palm tree in the desert, an archetype of the eternal feminine. It was such a powerful effect to play the children’s sound off that of the adults that I was determined to take it much farther in Souls.

NYP:  Your past works have shown that art can be a true agent in healing both the individual and the collective. Do you see this work as a healing force?

JA:  I am always nervous with the term “healing” as it applies to a work of art. I am reminded that we Americans can find a lot of things “healing.” These days a criminal sentenced to death is executed and then we speak of “healing.” It’s perplexing. So it’s not my intention to attempt “healing” in this piece. The event will always be there in memory, and the lives of those suffered will forever remain burdened by the violence and the pain. Time might make the emotions and the grief gradually less acute, but nothing, least of all a work of art, is going to heal a wound of this sort. Instead, the best I can hope for is to create something that has both serenity and the kind of “gravitas” that those old cathedrals possess.

Modern people have learned all too well how to keep our emotions in check, and we know how to mask them with humor or irony. Music has a singular capacity to unlock those controls and bring us face to face with our raw, uncensored, and unattenuated feelings. That is why during times when we are grieving or in need of being in touch with the core of our beings we seek out those pieces that speak to us with that sense of gravitas and serenity.

Copyright 2002 by John Adams



TEXTS
On the Transmigration of Souls

Except where otherwise noted, the text consists of phrases from missing-persons poster and memorials posted in the vicinity of the ruins of the World Trade Center, Lower Manhattan, September and October, 2001.

“Missing…”
“Remember…”
“we will miss you…we all miss you.. we all love you.”
“I’ll miss you, my brother, loving brother.”
“It was a beautiful day.”
“You will never be forgotten.”
“She looks so full of life in that picture>’
“I see water and buildings…”¹

“Windows on the World”

“a gold chain around his neck, a silver ring…his middle finger…a small gap…his two front teeth…a little mole on his left cheek…a wedding band…a diamond ring.”

“Charlie Murphy. Cantor Fitzgerald. 105^th Floor. Tower One North. Weight: 180 pounds. Height: 5’11”.  Eye color: hazel Hair color: brown.  Date of birth: July ninth, 1963.  Please call… “We love you, Chick.”
“Louie Anthony Williams. One World Trade Center. Port Authority, 66^th Floor.  “We love you, Louie.  Come home.”
The sister says: “He was the apple of my father’s eye.”²




The father says: “I am so full of grief.  My heart is absolutely shattered.” ³
The young man says “…he was tall, extremely good-looking, and girls never talked to me when he was around.”⁴
Her sister says: “She had a voice like an angel, and she shared it with everyone, in good times and bad.”⁵
The mother says: “He used to call me everyday.  I’m just waiting.”
The lover says: “Tomorrow will be three months, yet it feels like yesterday since I saw your beautiful face, saying, ‘Love you to the moon and back, forever.’”
The man’s wife says: “I loved him from the started…I wanted to dig him out.  I know just where he is.”

“light…day…sky…”

“My sister.”
“My brother.”
“I love Dave Fontana.”
“My daughter.”
“My son.”
“It was a beautiful day…”
“I see water and buildings…”⁸
“I love you.”

¹ AA #11 flight attendant Madeline Amy Sweeny
² sister of Francis Nazarios; quoted in the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” February 17, 2002.
³ father of Paul Lisson; quoted in the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” February 17, 2002.
⁴ David Wilson speaking of Joshua M. Piver; quoted in the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” February 24, 2002.
⁵ sister of Mary Yolanda Dowling; quoted in the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” September 16, 2001.
⁶ mother of Michael Mullin; quoted in th e New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” September 15, 2001.
⁷ wife of L. Russell Keene III; quoted in the New York Times’s “Portraits of Grief,” September 17, 2001
⁸ AA #11 flight attendant Madeline Amy Sweeny


The Names

John Florio
Christina Fannery
Lucy Fishman
Richard Fitzsimons
David Fodor
Sal A. Flumefreddo
Carl Flicinger
Eileen Flecha
Jane S. Beatty
Manuel Da Mota
Marice Barry
James Patrick Berger
Marilyn C. Bautistsa
Jacquelyn P. Sanchez
Kenneth W. Basnick
Lt. Michael Fodor
Guy Barzvi
Oliver Bennett
Charlie Murphy
Jeffrey Coombs
Benilda Domingo
Manette Marie Beckles
Paul James Battaglia
Thomas J. Fisher
Alysia Basmajian
Iyhan Luis Carpio Bautista
Kalyan K. Sarkar
John Bergin
Mario Santoro
Herman Sandler
Michael Beekman
Andre Fletcher
Bryan Craig Bennett
Inna Basina
Jasper Baxter
Lt. Steve J. Bates
John Santore
Denise Benedetto
Joseph W. Flounders
Jennifer De Jesus
Donna Bernerts-Kerns
Karleton Fyte
Kevin D. Marlo
Michael Laforte
David Fontana
Nicholas C. Lassman
Paul Rizza
Donald A. Foreman
Juan Garcia
Alisha Caren Levin
Fredric Gabler
Betsy Martinez
Giann F. Gamboa
Peter J. Ganci
Brian E. Martineau
Grace Galante
James Martello
David S. Berry
Dominick J. Berardi
Alexis Leduc
Brian Magee
Christopher Larrabee
Daniel Maher
Denis Lavelle
Edward J. Lehman
Elenda Ledesma
Eugen Lazar
Gary E. Lasko
Hamidou S. Larry
James Leahy
Juanita Lee
Jeannine LaVerde
Jeffrey LaTouche
John D. Levi
John Adam Larson
John J. Lennon, Jr.
Jorge Luis Leon