You can hear the entire webcast at the link above. The "Remembering September 11" concert webcast was hosted by NPR Music's Anastasia Tsioulcas and WQXR/ Q2's Helga Davis. 11 unfolded he watched from his Brooklyn roof, just over the river from downtown Manhattan. He was finishing work on The Disintegration Loops as the destruction of Sept. In the midst of archiving and digitizing analog tapes from the early 1980s, the composer realized that his material was literally disintegrating, leaving eerily silent passages in the midst of lush, pastoral music - "my paradise lost," he says. For example, Golijov - with the violence of historical and contemporary Jerusalem in mind - loops melismatic quotations from Baroque composer François Couperin's somber Troisieme Leçon de Ténèbres.īasinski's The Disintegration Loops had its genesis in the physical process of decay. Now surrounded by a reflecting pool - evoking the waters of the Nile and housed within a glass atrium that overlooks Central Park - the temple is a space which lends itself beautifully to musical contemplation.Īll the works on this program are haunting reflections on loss, grief and remembrance, interweaving past and present in hypnotic and moving arcs. The concert was held at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dendur, a Egyptian sandstone edifice from about 15 B.C. The concert also included three pieces for string quartet: Ingram Marshall's Fog Tropes II, Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae and Alfred Schnittke's Collected Songs Where Every Verse Is Filled With Grief, passionately and movingly performed by violinists Keats Dieffenbach and Caroline Shaw, violist Nadia Sirota and cellist Clarice Jensen. The program featured the world premiere of Maxim Moston's orchestration of an arresting work by William Basinski, The Disintegration Loops. Led by the dynamic conductor Ryan McAdams, New York's Wordless Music Orchestra performed four works centered on the idea of loss and remembrance. The concert, presented as a live webcast by NPR Music and Q2, can now be heard as an archive stream - and it is an unmissable event. Not only lauded by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal, Pitchfork, NPR and dozens more, the Disintegration Loops have become considered by many to be 'one of the most pre-eminent American artistic statements of the 21st Century. 11, the audience responded with utter eloquence: two minutes of astonished silence, followed by wild applause. The very passage of time is it's most effective instrument. The day Basinski finished The Disintegration Loops was a Tuesday - September 11th 2001.At the conclusion of the astonishing "Remembering September 11" concert, held by the Wordless Music Orchestra at the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Temple of Dendur on the 10th anniversary of Sept. Close enough to our houses or friends houses or favorite places in the mountains that we watch slowly be eaten by a red line as the Facebook group updates the fire perimeter. Because if you aren’t talking about the smoke, it’s because a fire has come close enough to talk about that instead. He immediately realized that he was recording the life and death of a melody, as it devolved, and distorted, and disappeared. I have not had a conversation in over a month that didn’t at least touch on the smoke. The loop would start out fully-formed but as it ran through the machine over and over and over, bits of tape peeled off and the sound morphed in real time. The old worn out magnetic tape began to slowly flake off as he digitized them. Fire has become its own season, largely ousting summer apart from a few weeks after the solstice. Both conversationally and to some degree physically. Where I live it has replaced the weather. Its the kind of music that makes you believe there is a Heaven, and that this is what it must sound like. But what he didn’t expect was that these short repetitive melodies and fragments of music would begin to change right there. Removed from the context of that disaster and transposed into the mundane world we live in every day, The Disintegration Loops still wield an uncanny, affirming power. While living in Brooklyn, he set up a tape machine, hooked it to a digital recorder and began recording these short loops, knowing that the tape would eventually deteriorate if left in storage. In 2001, William Basinski began digitizing his collection of analog tape loops.
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