"Remembering September 11," a concert by the Wordless Music Orchestra conducted by Ryan McAdams, will commemorate the 10th anniversary of 9/11 at The Temple of Dendur in The Sackler Wing of The Metropolitan Museum of Art on Sunday, September 11, 2011, at 3:30 p.m. The hour-long program is free with Museum admission.
"The Museum is offering this concert in remembrance of a day that profoundly affected all of our lives," statEd Thomas P. Campbell, Director and CEO of the Metropolitan Museum. "The Met has long provided a place for reflection and solace, and on this important anniversary it will do so through the thoughtful works of these contemporary composers, brought to life in moving musical performances."This concert has been made possible by The Metabolic Studio. It is presented by Wordless Music and The Metropolitan Museum of Art.The event is part of a slate of activities on that day at the Museum commemorating the anniversary, including a talk with artist Faith Ringgold about the concurrent exhibition The 9/11 Peace Story Quilt, on view at the Metropolitan Museum from August 30, 2011, through January 22, 2012.
At the center of the concert program is a world premiere live orchestration (by composer/violinist Maxim Moston) of William Basinski's ambient masterwork The Disintegration Loops, an elegiac work conceived and created in Basinski's residence in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, in the weeks before and after the World Trade Center's destruction. The accompanying video piece of the same title, showing one static shot of the smoke billowing from downtown as day turns to night on September 11th, 2001, will be permanently installed in the 9/11 Memorial Museum. In addition to the premiere of the orchestration of Disintegration Loop 1.1, the program will also feature two other works of memory and remembrance: Ingram Marshall's Fog Tropes II for string quartet and tape, Alfred Schnittke's Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief (an arrangement by the Kronos Quartet's David Harrington of music from Schnittke's Concerto for Mixed Choir), and Osvaldo Golijov's Tenebrae for string quartet.
The concert will be webcast on NPR Music, www.npr.org/music.Limor Tomer, the Metropolitan Museum's General Manager of Concerts and Lectures, said, "William Basinksi's Disintegration Loops, which was extraordinarily meaningful to a whole generation of artists working in New York City after the attacks, will be transformed radically, from an electronic score to a piece for acoustic chamber ensemble. This transformation is a poetic tribute to the transformation we all underwent in the years since the attack. The Metropolitan Museum played a hugely important role on the day of the attacks, and the days directly following. It is in the spirit of contemplation and healing that we offer this concert."About the programming of his piece at this event, composer William Basinski said, "What can one do on such an inauspicious anniversary? As I think back to 2001, I remember having the same thought. What can I do? Eventually, I came to realize the only thing I could do was to continue making music. It's a profound honor for the orchestral transcription of Disintegration Loop 1.1 to be presented as an elegy for those who were so brutally taken from us on that tragic day of September 11th, 2001. I am grateful to The Metropolitan Museum of Art for hosting this memorial concert and to the Metabolic Studio who generously provided the funds to offer this gift to the people of New York."
