{ Program Notes
describing this piece because they too
easily suggest conventions that this piece
doesn’t share. If pressed, I’d probably
call [it] a ‘memory space.’ It’s a place
where you can go and be alone with your
thoughts and emotions. … My desire …
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. … Even though you
might be with a group of people … you
feel very much alone with your thoughts
and you find them focused in a most
extraordinary and spiritual way.”
Ultimately, Adams decided on a soundcollage approach that would mingle
a large orchestra and mixed chorus,
including a children’s chorus, with a prerecorded tape of voices speaking words
and phrases about the event drawn from a
variety of sources. “I eventually settled on
a surprisingly small amount of text. One is
the simple reading of names [of the dead],
like a litany, …starting with the voice of
a nine-year-old boy [saying over and over,
“Missing”] and ending with two middleaged women, both mothers themselves.”
The two women at the end repeat an
enigmatic phrase: “I see water and buildings”; these were among the last recorded
words of Madeline Amy Sweeny, a flight
attendant on American Airlines Flight 11,
as she tried to tell her supervisor what was
happening on her doomed plane. Adams
continues: “I mixed this with taped sounds
of the city — traffic, people walking,
distant voices of laughter or shouting, …
sirens, breaks squealing — all the familiar
sounds of the big city which are so common that we usually never notice them.”
These ambient street sounds are what we
hear at both the beginning and the end
of Transmigration; it is as though we are
still outside the door of Adams’ imaginary
cathedral, about to enter and later depart
from the sacred space of the music.
The composer chose other bits of texts
from the New York Times’ remarkable
series “Portraits of Grief”: brief, touching
biographies of the victims as remembered
by family members and friends. Another
source was the missing-persons signs that
dotted New York in the days and weeks
after the tragedy.
34 O v ertur e |
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The completed work was given the
evocative title On the Transmigration of
Souls. Adams explains its meaning:
“ ‘Transmigration’ means ‘the movement from one place to another’ or ‘the
transition from one state of being to
another.’ …In this case I mean it 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 who stay behind, of those who suffer
pain and loss and then themselves come
away from that experience transformed.”
Since at least the early
1790s, Beethoven had loved
Schiller’s “Ode to Joy”
(written in 1785 as a drinking
song!) and considered
setting it to music.
For its first audiences in New York in
mid-September 2002, On the Transmigration of Souls seems to have had the deep
cathartic effect Adams had intended; it
has since traveled around the United States
and to Europe as well. In 2003, it won the
coveted Pulitzer Prize for Music, and in
2005 a recording made at those inaugural
performances received three Grammy
awards. But more than most musical
works, its effect depends to a large degree
on the depth of concentration and feeling
its listeners bring to it. “Modern people
have learned all too well how to keep our
emotions in check,” says Adams, “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