The first performance of WTC 9/11, Steve Reich's memorial to September 11, took place at Duke University-- 500 miles south of Ground Zero. From there, it traveled to L.A.-- nearly 3,000 miles west of the attacks it commemorated-- before touching down in Carnegie Hall a month later. It was an oddly circuitous cross-country tiptoe for a work by a native New Yorker about the collapse of the towers he lived four blocks from, but it spoke to the fearsome difficulty in addressing 9/11 headlong. There is still, 10 years later, an instinctive flinch mechanism built into our communal central nervous system surrounding the day, and it presents a forbidding hurdle for artists attempting to speak to it.
Reich, as unofficial American composer laureate and a quintessentially New York City figure, would seem more outwardly qualified than most, which only makes his failure all the more disheartening. WTC 9/11 takes the same form as Reich's Different Trains, another piece that treated an atrocity-- in that instance, the trains transporting Jews to concentration camps-- with a sorrowful Zen gaze. Like Trains, WTC pairs the Kronos Quartet with manipulated recorded voices, the strings accompanying the recordings to draw out the anxious unheard music in their intonation and rhythm. It's a spectacular compositional technique, bridging the invisible gap where words become music.
Within minutes, however, WTC 9/11 rams up against an unavoidable problem: These raw materials are, well, simply too raw. The voices Reich highlights in his music are a mix emergency dispatches from 9/11 and interviews conducted in 2010 with his close friends. Much of what they say is nearly unbearable to hear, even a decade on. If there is a way to subsume a 9/11 survivor saying, "Three thousand people were murdered. What's gonna happen here next?" into a larger musical work, Reich didn't find it. The words burn through the music's fabric like tissue paper, leaving you jarred but neither enlightened nor transformed.
The smaller moments in the piece, painting the texture of daily life on the morning of the attacks, ring true with tension and foreboding. The conversational, lilting swing of "I was sitting in class. Four blocks north of Ground Zero", for instance. A sobbing cello catches the falling note of plaint in the phrase "Nobody knew what to do." At the intonation of "We all thought it was an accident" (spoken by Reich’s friend and colleague, Bang on a Can co-founder David Lang), the strings allow a brief glint of a major key to peak in, a moment of fugitive hope. Unfortunately, the moments that freeze you in place -- lines like "debris engulfed everybody that was there," or a desperate shout of "I'm trapped in the rubble"-- owe nothing at all to Reich's music; indeed, they all but erase your awareness of the music around them.
The Nonesuch recording of WTC 9/11 is rounded out by other recent-vintage Reich pieces, and to spend time in their company after the heightened, jagged WTC is a relief. His 2009 Mallet Quartet is a delicate and ringing interlocking of marimbas that feels as cleansing as spring rain, while Dance Patterns, for a battery of vibraphones, xylophones, and pianos, plays like a glistening, fond medley of Reichisms. The framework of Reich's pieces feels well-worn by now-- his "fast-slow-fast" structure now has a "loud-quiet-loud," "verse-chorus-verse" inevitability to it. The shifts in key midway through movements feel less like the blooming of an unexpected thought now than slides in a ViewMaster clicking duly into place. You smile and nod knowingly, but the goosebumps are gone.
These low-key joys are reminiscent of latter-day Neil Young or Sonic Youth albums-- a master operating comfortably within his groove. They are modest, but they feel honest in their serene confidence. WTC 9/11, on the other hand, feels marred by miscalculation and overcompensation. This uneasiness found public expression when Nonesuch revealed the album's original cover art: a photo of the smoldering Towers, with the second plane zeroing in. The stark image was surrounded by a woefully cheap-looking graphical treatment, and prompted an immediate outcry. Nonesuch swiftly replaced the image, but the episode made its impression. Unfortunately, it could stand in as a diagnosis for the piece itself, a project conceived in noble intentions but hobbled by confused, muddled execution.
