Howard Who?

Today we remembered 911.

I’m not particularly sentimental about it, even though it is the pivotal fifth anniversary. I still haven’t seen the World Trade Center movie, and I only sat through half of United 93 (I felt sick though I couldn’t say it was entirely the movie’s fault). I only caught a few minutes of the ABC miniseries just to get a taste. I didn’t hear Bush’s speechifying. I went to work and held it in the back of my mind.

But I just had to do something so I decided to blog it. And I will remember the loss with pieces by composers who themselves were remembering loss.

1. Le Deploration de la mort de Johannes Ockeghem (mp3) - Josquin Desprez. Buy Written in 1497, Josquin honored the previous generation’s master composer Ockeghem with a musical tribute, imitating his style.

2. Threnody for Carlos Chavez (mp3) - Lou Harrison. Buy One of Harrison’s first pieces to combine a gamelan orchestra and a Western soloist, the 1978 Threnody memorialized Chavez, still considered Mexico’s finest composer and most influential musical figure. It is a truly amazing piece of pathos and otherworldly transcendence.

3. Cantus in memory of Benjamin Britten (mp3) - Arvo Part. Buy Mourning the English composer Britten, the Estonian Part wrote this in 1977 for the sadness he felt of never being able to meet the man. The piece also has the distinction of being the music Michael Moore uses to underscore the World Trade Center scene in Fahrenheit 911. Whatever you want to say about his politics, the man does have decent taste in music. For you Moore haters, please don’t let that diminish this music, which has the etheral power of Part’s tinntinnabulation…his signature style that James Horner likes to steal every now and then.

4. Hymn to the Fallen (mp3) - John Williams. Buy Okay, so this track doesn’t quite fit in with the others, but it fits in with the spirit of the day.

God bless America.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 12th, 2006 at 6:48 am and is filed under Uncategorized, Classical Music, Film Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.