ABSTRACT
Samuel Barber's Adagio for Strings (1938) is the most widely performed musical work for public mourning in the Western art music repertoire. This chapter examines three recordings of the Adagio such as Toscanini, Stokowski, Slatkin; and explores how the work transformed over a period of seventy years to become, by 9/11, a nation-based, emotionally drenched, American anthem of mourning. Music, then, is doubly dangerous: although it has the ability to communicate and to move people emotionally, it does not have the capacity to narrate. The dramatic performance of the Adagio does not communicate a shared universalism, but is used to commit a form of symbolic violence: it is performed in such a way that it separates us from them, grievable from non-grievable, victim from perpetrator, and in doing so, helps forges a dangerous nation-based community who militarily will soon seek revenge.
