Steve Reich – WTC 9/11

I was 100 miles away from New York City on 9/11 in a middle school classroom. I didn’t even hear about the attacks until getting home from school that afternoon. And even when I did hear, I had no idea what this day meant. With ten years of hindsight, I realize I stand on a generational border, being slightly too young to have comprehended 9/11 at the time, but too old not remember where I was that day. I remember the world before 9/11; I remember flying without removing my shoes; but all of my political consciousness is in a post-9/11 world.

I mention all this not to spend this post discussing my own personal experience, but instead to introduce a unique musical tribute. Steve Reich, most famous for his “speech melody” composition Different Trains, again utilizes this technique in WTC 9/11. (Listen to WTC 9/11’s final words about “the world to come” to discover an interesting second meaning of that acronym.) “Speech melody” involves combining recorded voices with instruments, to find the melodies within speech and use them to compose.

The first movement is called “9/11,” and its opening, with its sharp percussive string attacks, is reminiscent of Bernard Hermann’s hugely influential score for Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. As the first movement continues, the strings combine with a telephone noise and seem to replicate the sound of alarms going off. The sampled voices and extraneous noises recall the emergency, fear, and confusion everyone felt that day.

Movement two, titled “2010,” begins with reactions and aftermath of the attacks. By finding the natural melodies in people’s language about the event and manipulating them, Reich recreates the emotions of people’s verbal responses with the music. While the main melodies come from the sampled voices, the rhythmically accompanying strings resonate the nervousness all Americans felt in the months following the attacks.

Movement three, “WTC,” is metrically and melodically more free than its predecessors. The accompaniment abandons the percussive ostinato figures of the earlier movement; instead it tends towards extended chords. Emotionally this seems to suggest moving towards collective mourning and recovery as a nation, though the telephone noise of the first movement returns with percussive string attacks in the piece’s final moments.

WTC 9/11 comes out September 20th; listen to it in its entirety ahead of time at: http://www.npr.org/2011/09/11/140144067/first-listen-steve-reich-wtc-9-11