The Strings of 9/11: Elegiac Reflection, Catharsis, and Reenactment in Works for String Instruments

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the eighteen years since 9/11 and the collapse of the World Trade Center towers, art composers have created over one hundred composition attempting to come to terms with this tragic event. More than a dozen of these works focus on string instruments to give shape to their artistic expressions in the tradition of other significant war-related music. Four composers in particular responded to 9/11 in different ways, each utilizing string instruments to turn this catastrophe into some of the most important music composed to commemorate the event: Joan Tower (In Memory), Chen Yi (Burning), Gloria Coates (String Quartet No. 8), and Steve Reich (WTC 9/11). Recent trends dealing with testimony, memory, and memorialization illuminate the compositional and instrumental techniques used in these works. From violins creating the sound of a disconnected phone line in Reich’s WTC 9/11 to Coates’s eerie descending and falling glissandi in the second movement of her quartet, it can be argued that strings are perhaps the most effective instruments in their ability to evoke the multiplicity of psychological sensations and sounds to best memorialize tragedies such as 9/11.