For Alle Menschen?

At a time when the Western classical music canon seems to be of ever-diminishing importance in our cultural economy, at a time when the cultural capital once bestowed by such “high-brow” music has been largely usurped, as John Seabrook might put it, by “no-brow” music, it is curious that there yet remain circumstances when we seem irresistibly drawn to this venerable repertoire. ¹ Just such a circumstance was the commemoration of the anniversary of the attacks in America on September 11, 2001. To take a handful of examples: at exactly a year to the moment when the first hijacked plane hit the north tower of the World Trade Center, the former mayor of New York, Rudolph Giuliani, stood within the footprint of the destroyed Twin Towers and began a recitation of the names of the 2,801 known victims to the accompaniment of the Sarabande from J. S. Bach’s Suite for Unaccompanied Cello in C Minor (BWV 1011), performed in situ by Yo-Yo Ma. Meanwhile, a “Rolling Requiem” had already been underway for some hours, for which around two hundred choirs in some twenty-eight countries sang Mozart’s Requiem Mass, cued to begin according to the time zone of their respective host nations. ² And just over a week later, the New York Philharmonic launched a series of commemorative concerts with a performance of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony alongside a new commission by John Adams, which had been composed to accompany it and which would later win a Pulitzer Prize, entitled On the Transmigration of Souls. ³ To be sure, as indeed other essays in this book testify, such commemorative programming forms only a small part of the musical record that related directly to the aftermath of the events on 9/11, but the official status and particular prominence of the events mentioned above makes their choice of music worthy of particular comment.