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John Adams
On the Transmigration of Souls
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Right now, the five stars might seem like a shock to you, the reader, but someday you will understand.
I suppose the wounds are still fresh for me, sitting here in Jersey with a faint glimpse of New York City past the Hook and out across the water. 2001 to 2004, and there is the necessary distance between September 11th then and mid-October now. That was the day everyone felt the cut, from coast to coast, but those that were closest got the full width of the edge. I can only speculate how it was in Manhattan, the smoky, dirty cloud storming the streets like a horrid juggernaut, the confusion, and the voices... mostly the voices.
When he was commissioned to write a tribute / memorial / requiem for that day, John Adams probably had that notion as his starting point. Voices, asking questions, looking for the missing, rolling through flooding memories and, ultimately, asking more questions. As one of the progenitors of the minimalist movement, with Steve Reich and Phillip Glass, Adams knew how to take loops, voices and effects and combine them, or isolate them, to produce this new sort of music. He also knew how to work with difficult subjects like the tragic Achille Lauro hijacking in “The Death of Klinghoffer” or the seemingly unmusical topic of “Nixon In China”. But here was the ultimate difficult subject. How do you memorialize the day America was seized by a cold, unblinking act of terrorism? How do you make it, God forbid, musical? How do you capture the smell of ash and the voices that stumbled around in it, looking for something but only finding more ash?
I don’t know how myself, but Adams managed to do it. This short epic, “On The Transmigration Of Souls” clocking in at less than a half-hour, might one day be mandatory listening for serious students of music. Dare I say that it is occasionally beautiful, often harrowing and dissonant, loud when it needs to be and deathly quiet when it must, and always, always mindful of the voices.
I heard the performance, as it was simulcast on public radio at the start of Loren Maazel’s tenure as the New York Philharmonic’s conductor. I was driving around through the dark night streets of town where the windows and street lamps were bright but the buildings were much, much smaller. It was a cool night and the air smelled of the coming of Fall, pinpointed with the occasional whiff of a fireplace flue or two. It was much different than the day all the broadcasts but one went off the air (because all the signals were sent from the Twin Towers array of satellite transponders), but the music put my head right back there, in the daylight, in the open September air when I could smell distant fires but couldn’t wrap my mind around the spent life inside it.
Someday, “On The Transmigration Of Souls” will wedge its way among the ranks of storied modern composition and Adams will be there with Copeland and Gershwin; this piece is that iconic, important and, all at once, terrifying. Its title says it all.
Release Date: August 31, 2004
Tracks: 1 - Time: 25:04
Produced by: John Adams
Format: CD
Website: www.earbox.com
Track Listing:
On the Transmigration of Souls.
Principals:
John Adams - Composer
Lorin Maazal - Conductor
Preben Antonson - Boy Soprano
Philip Smith - Trumpet
Ensemble - Brooklyn Youth Chorus
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