I have updated this post from a few days ago with a few additions.
My own personal reflections for this Sunday's Tenth Anniversary of 9-11 are here.
and here.
My own personal reflections for this Sunday's Tenth Anniversary of 9-11 are here.
and here.
The resources on the web have been overwhelming and it is hard to choose which ones to highlight and no doubt people will want to find their own ways of remembering and commemorating but I thought these resources worthy of a mention.
Fr.James Martin S.J.returns to the spots where he and his brother Jesuits ministered in the days following the attacks and speaks about the spiritual side of the events.
Thanks to Fr. Austin Fleming at A Concord Pastor Comments for this video.
A website devoted to Franciscan Fr Mychal Judge who many wish to be recognised formally as a Saint.
The BBC website has many resources accessible under one roof from here.
This section titled Stories From The Embers is particularly recommended
where there are seven individual videos of people who reflect on the momentous events that changed their lives forever.
Fr.James Martin S.J.returns to the spots where he and his brother Jesuits ministered in the days following the attacks and speaks about the spiritual side of the events.
Thanks to Fr. Austin Fleming at A Concord Pastor Comments for this video.
A website devoted to Franciscan Fr Mychal Judge who many wish to be recognised formally as a Saint.
The BBC website has many resources accessible under one roof from here.
This section titled Stories From The Embers is particularly recommended
where there are seven individual videos of people who reflect on the momentous events that changed their lives forever.
This week on BBC Radio 4 The Book Of The Week is "The 9/11 letters":-
Five internationally acclaimed writers including :Irish writer Joseph O'Neill, New York based novelist Caryl Phillips, Lionel Shriver,
author of "We Need To Talk About Kevin"and Michael Morpurgo use an open letter to consider the consequences of the events of September 11 2001 for Britain, America and the world. The programmes are each 15 minutes long and are available on BBC i-player for about 5 days only.
The cover image, pictured here, is by Julian LaVerdiere and Paul Myoda, co-creators of the original tribute-in-light memorial in New York. It imagines that same memorial as seen from space.
A letter to readers by editor Richard Stengel headlines "American history has never followed a straight line."
He describes the issue as "a fitting memorial to what we have all lived through and what we all remember."
Time has devoted nearly 100 covers to the events engendered by the attacks on the World Trade Centre and Pentagon.
Stengel explains that the commemorative issue will be accompanied by an hour-long TV special, Beyond 9/11: portraits of resilience, to be screened on Sunday on a variety of platforms.
Interviews with over 40 of the people directly affected by the attacks - the first responders, the survivors, the politicians and the troops - can also be read at time.com/beyond911.
It is cleverly laid out as a mosiac of photos that can be clicked on and read as a text or listened to as an audio. It takes a few seconds to load.
If words are not adequate then music may help.
Throughout the coming week, NPR are posting excerpts from interviews with composers who have written works that respond to the events of Sept. 11 in diverse ways.
The series begins with Pulitzer prize winning composer Steve Reich whose "WTC 9/11" you can get as a First Listen from here and continues later this week with Michael Gordon, John Corigliano, Ned Rorem, Christopher Theofanidis and John Adams.
Below is a description of Steve Reich and his composition :
Although he lived and worked just blocks away from the World Trade Center, composer Steve Reich took more than eight years before he realized he would address what he calls "unfinished business": what became the harrowing and haunting WTC 9/11, commissioned by some longtime friends and colleagues, the Kronos Quartet.
Written for string quartet and tape – a setting that recalls two of his earlier groundbreaking works, 1965's tape piece It's Gonna Rain and 1988's Different Trains, also written for Kronos – Reich weaves documentary audio from 9/11 firefighters and air traffic controllers with recollections he recorded later with his own family and friends.
Although he and his wife, video artist Beryl Korot, were actually in Vermont on the morning of the attacks, their son and his wife and child were in their downtown apartment that day. It took the family a month to be allowed back into their home below Chambers Street.
"I had one idea only originally," Reich says, "and that was a totally abstract, structural, musical idea. Whoever was speaking – whatever they were speaking about – their last syllable would be prolonged. So," he begins half-singing, "'They came from Bostonnnnnn' – and the n would go on indefinitely – and that could be doubled by viola or by a fiddle or by a cello. "Then the next person would speak: 'Goin' to LAaaaaa' – and the a could go on, and that could be doubled by another. And you start building up these textures of what the memories – or the vapor trails, if you like – of what people had said."
The piece's raw emotional impact wells up not just from those incidents of "speech melody," as Reich calls them, but also from what became the marrow of the piece: the documentary audio and the context of meditating upon 9/11. The piece is shot through with the anxiety, confusion, chaos and searching that characterized not just the day itself, but the burdens of uncertainty and anxiety that settled heavily over the ensuing decade.
"9/11 is not an isolated event," Reich says. "It was sort of like the signpost, you know, over the whole planet, saying, 'Here comes a whole new chapter in world history.' When I interviewed every friend and every neighbor, I asked them one question which never appears in the piece, which is: 'Do you think this could happen again, and do you think it could happen again in New York?'
And everybody said, "Do I think it could happen again? It's not a question of 'if,' it's a question of 'when.'"
(Tomorrow, composer Michael Gordon talks about his piece, "The Sad Park")
No comments:
Post a Comment