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Michael Gordon's young son provided the title to his father's composition, The Sad Park.

This week, we are posting interviews with composers who have written works that respond to the events of Sept. 11 in diverse ways. (Read yesterday's story about Steve Reich here.)

Michael Gordon never planned to write a piece of music based on the events of Sept. 11.

"I wouldn't have known how to approach this subject," he says. "I wouldn't have dared approach this subject. It's huge and I don't think I could have done it justice."

But Gordon, one of the co-founders of the new music collective Bang on a Can, eventually did write a Sept. 11 piece, The Sad Park. He found inspiration amid an unlikely group of commentators — the 3- and 4-year-olds who attended a Lower Manhattan preschool with his son after Sept. 11.

"The children would be sitting around doing what they normally do, and then all of a sudden one of them would burst out something about 9/11, and the others would start talking," Gordon says. "They were in there building things. I remember I would walk in and they would have rebuilt the twin towers."

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John Adams took on a major responsibility when, shortly after Sept. 11, 2001, he accepted the assignment to compose music for New York Philharmonic performances marking the first anniversary of the attacks. The piece ended up earning him a Pulitzer Prize.

While most of America was still in shock, Adams was wondering how to distill the horrific experience in 25 minutes of music for chorus and orchestra. The composer spoke with NPR Music in 2002, just before the premiere of On the Transmigration of Souls.

"I realized right up front that the public did not need any more images," Adams said. "It didn't need any more reiteration of the narrative of that day. Certainly it didn't need some tasteless dramatization of the events in music and text. If I was going to do something meaningful, I was going to have to go in the opposite direction."

That direction was to focus on the loss and grief expressed by those who were left behind. Adams didn't look to poets past or present for his texts. Instead he chose words scribbled on posters plastered around Ground Zero by families searching for and mourning their loved ones.

"They were a mixture of hope and a slowly dimming acceptance of reality," Adams said. "I was touched by the fact that when people are deeply in shock over the sudden loss of a family member, they don't express themselves in fancy language. They don't start sprouting sonnets or highfalutin verse. They speak in the most simple of terms. When we say 'words fail,' we really mean it."

Adams challenge was to set such mundane phrases as "He was the apple of my father's eye," and "She had a voice like an angel and she shared it in good times and bad" and "He used to call every day, I'm just waiting for the phone to ring."

Adams thinks of Transmigration as a soundtrack "sewn together, like the AIDS quilt." Into it he weaves a tape of city sounds, footsteps, cars passing by and a litany of victims read in plain speech, mixed with what almost seems like random quotes from people featured in the New York Times "Portraits of Grief" series.

Ultimately, Adams says he hopes that his piece will give people a "memory space."

"Where you can go and be alone with your thoughts," he says. "And the music and the words are giving you stimulus but they are not directing your emotion, and they are not pounding you over the head with a point of view."

This week, we are posting interviews with composers who have written works that respond to the events of Sept. 11 in diverse ways. (Read earlier stories about Michael Gordon, Steve Reich, John Corigliano and Ned Rorem.)

When grave tragedy strikes, what happens to artists? Some are driven to create. Others, like Christopher Theofanidis, get frozen in their tracks. That's how the award-winning composer, who was in New York on Sept. 11, 2001, describes what happened to him.

Reflecting On Sept. 11, 2001

'Heart Of A Soldier': An Opera At The Heart Of Sept. 11

"That event really stopped me from composing for a number of months," Theofanidis recalls. "Most composers, visual artists and writers I know were in a middle of a project, as they always are, and people have very different reactions. My reaction was to stop writing. I abandoned the piece I was working on and just stopped doing what I was doing for some time — to process what that was about and what happened to my general sense of optimism and esprit."

Theofanidis eventually started composing again, and found himself with an opera commission but no suitable subject. His search ended when opera director Francesca Zambello suggested he read Heart of a Soldier, the true story of a Sept. 11 hero and decorated U.S. Army veteran named Rick Rescorla, written by Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist James B. Stewart.

"I completely fell in love with it," Theofanidis says. "And over time it just got more and more rich and full of connections and meaning."

With librettist Donna DiNovelli, Theofanidis funneled all of those rich connections into a new opera, also called Heart of a Soldier. It receives its world premiere at the San Francisco Opera on Saturday, the eve of the Sept. 11 anniversary.

The first half of the opera tracks the life of Rescorla (played by baritone Thomas Hampson), who befriends fellow soldier Dan Hill on the battlefields of Rhodesia and Vietnam. The second half shifts forward several decades, finding Rescorla retired from the Army and serving as vice president for security at Morgan Stanley, the largest tenant at the World Trade Center.

"Basically, after the 1993 World Trade Center attack, Rick knew that something else was coming, most probably the idea of airplanes flying into the towers," Theofanidis says. "And so he started training his people in a ridiculous military fashion — in retrospect, obviously brilliant — but at the time it must have seemed obsessive to have all of his people do these stair drills once a month to make sure they could get down in case of fire and smoke. It's kind of shocking. The more you look into it, the more you see how prescient these guys were."

The real-life Rescorla saved nearly 2700 lives on Sept. 11, 2001. Determined to escort everyone to safety — he literally sang them down the stairs — he never emerged from the second tower before it collapsed. But for Theofanidis, collapsing buildings and exploding planes are not the way to tell the story of Sept. 11.

"You don't make the story about the actual physical events of that day," the composer says. "You make it about people, and the value of their lives. We focused primarily on the characters, their life stories and the meaning of their lives in the context of these events."

Another important theme, Theofanidis says, lies within the opera's title, and the powerful conviction of its lead characters.

"What do we do with a soldier's heart, once the war is over?" he asks. "The answer is there's always a need for that kind of heart, that kind of strength. There are moments when the context calls for that set of skills, and that way of thinking is incredibly invaluable on a societal level, and these guys hit it at the right moment."

Enlarge Wikimedia

William Blake's 'Los,' from the poet and artist's mythological work. Ned Rorem sets words from Blake's 'Proverbs of Hell' within his song cycle 'Aftermath.'

Wikimedia

William Blake's 'Los,' from the poet and artist's mythological work. Ned Rorem sets words from Blake's 'Proverbs of Hell' within his song cycle 'Aftermath.'

This week, we are posting interviews with composers who have written works that respond to the events of Sept. 11 in diverse ways. (Read yesterday's story with John Corigliano, Tuesday's story about Michael Gordon and Monday's story about Steve Reich.)

Ned Rorem, one of America's most prolific artists, is the Pulitzer Prize-winning, 87-year-old composer of thousands of pieces and author of sixteen books. Out of everything he's created, he says his mournful song cycle Aftermath, written immediately following Sept. 11 for voice, violin, cello and piano, holds pride of place.

"If I was to be remembered only by one piece, it would be this piece, out of the several thousand works that I've written," he says emphatically.

Enlarge Christian Steiner/courtesy of the artist

Composer Ned Rorem.

Christian Steiner/courtesy of the artist

Composer Ned Rorem.

The commission for Aftermath arrived from the Ravinia Festival before Sept. 11, but it became clear to Rorem that he had to address the attacks – and specifically in vocal music, an arena in which he is justly celebrated for his direct and piercing writing. "Music doesn't mean anything in the way that painting does or literature does," Rorem says. "It has only its own meaning. However, vocal music takes on the meaning of what the words say."

"Since I'm a Quaker and a pacifist," he continues, "I wanted to write something that would reflect my sentiments in those directions. So I wrote Aftermath, which is all on poems that are anti-war or the results of war, or in a more distant way a remorse for any death."

Enlarge Wonge Bergmann/Courtesy of the artist

Composer Steve Reich.

Wonge Bergmann/Courtesy of the artist

Composer Steve Reich.

Throughout the coming week, we'll be posting excerpts from interviews with composers who have written works that respond to the events of Sept. 11 in diverse ways. We begin our series with Steve Reich (whose "WTC 9/11" you can hear as a First Listen) and continue with Michael Gordon, John Corigliano, Ned Rorem, Christopher Theofanidis and John Adams.

Although he lived and worked just blocks away from the World Trade Center, composer Steve Reich took more than eight years before he realized he would address what he calls "unfinished business": what became the harrowing and haunting WTC 9/11, commissioned by some longtime friends and colleagues, the Kronos Quartet.

Written for string quartet and tape – a setting that recalls two of his earlier groundbreaking works, 1965's tape piece It's Gonna Rain and 1988's Different Trains, also written for Kronos – Reich weaves documentary audio from Sept. 11 firefighters and air traffic controllers with recollections he recorded later with his own family and friends. Although he and his wife, video artist Beryl Korot, were actually in Vermont on the morning of the attacks, their son and his wife and child were in their downtown apartment that day. It took the family a month to be allowed back into their home below Chambers Street.

"I had one idea only originally," Reich says, "and that was a totally abstract, structural, musical idea. Whoever was speaking – whatever they were speaking about – their last syllable would be prolonged. So," he begins half-singing, "'They came from Bostonnnnnn' – and the n would go on indefinitely – and that could be doubled by viola or by a fiddle or by a cello. "Then the next person would speak: 'Goin' to LAaaaaa' – and the a could go on, and that could be doubled by another. And you start building up these textures of what the memories – or the vapor trails, if you like – of what people had said."