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“Meaningful Adjacencies”: Disunity and the Commemoration of 9/11 in John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  31 October 2013

DAN BLIM
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Abstract

Although responses to 9/11 have often called for unity, the process of memorializing it has proven extremely contentious. This article examines the role of disunity in modern memorialization, focusing specifically on John Adams's On the Transmigration of Souls, a work commissioned and premiered by the New York Philharmonic in 2002 to commemorate the victims of the World Trade Center terrorist attack. Drawing on critical theories of memorialization and on audience surveys I conducted at several performances of On the Transmigration of Souls, I suggest that disunity serves the process of memorializing by mirroring the experience of traumatic memory, by acknowledging loss and absence, and by negotiating regional, racial, gendered, religious, and political differences. Disunity thus encourages reflection on how multiple perspectives recast the act of memorialization. Such reflection, I argue, can inform both performance and scholarship of musical memorials toward what Judith Butler calls the “ethical responsibility” of mourning.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of the Society for American Music , Volume 7 , Issue 4 , November 2013 , pp. 382 - 420
Copyright
Copyright © The Society for American Music 2013 

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Discography

Adams, John. On the Transmigration of Souls. Performed by the New York Philharmonic; Lorin Maazel, conductor. Nonesuch 79816-2, 2004.Google Scholar