{"id":339903,"date":"2026-09-07T13:32:08","date_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:32:08","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/339903\/"},"modified":"2026-09-07T13:32:08","modified_gmt":"2026-09-07T13:32:08","slug":"the-new-york-philharmonic-marks-the-25th-anniversary-of-9-11-with-concerts","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/339903\/","title":{"rendered":"The New York Philharmonic Marks the 25th Anniversary of 9\/11 With Concerts"},"content":{"rendered":"

Twenty-five years after the tragedy of 9\/11, the New York Philharmonic and Tang Music & Artistic Director Gustavo Dudamel offer commemoration and consolation through music on September 11 at Ground Zero, at the Perelman Performing Arts Center<\/a>, and on September 16\u201318 and 19 with John Adams<\/a>\u2019s On the Transmigration of Souls in David Geffen Hall. This is far from the first time that the Orchestra has played a vital part in marking a pivotal moment in history.<\/p>\n

On September 20, 2001, then Music Director Kurt Masur conducted Brahms\u2019s A German Requiem in a concert that did more than raise money for disaster relief. Screened free of charge on Lincoln Center\u2019s Josie Robertson Plaza and broadcast nationwide, it served a larger, farther-reaching purpose, acting as a ceremony of grief and resilience for a public facing unimaginable loss.<\/p>\n

A year later, the Orchestra premiered On the Transmigration of Souls, co-commissioned by the Philharmonic and Lincoln Center. Through a litany of names as well as snippets from posters reflecting the desperation of those seeking loved ones, it\u2019s a piece that remembers both those who were lost and the time itself. Adams described the work as \u201ca \u2018memory space,\u2019 where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions.\u201d In returning to the piece a quarter-century later, both in New York and on a Euro-pean tour in October, the Orchestra is bringing this \u201cmemory space\u201d to listeners who may have their own memories, and also to those too young to have witnessed the events firsthand.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s one of those events in life where every-body remembers exactly where they were and what they were doing,\u201d Philharmonic Principal Associate Concertmaster Sheryl Staples says of 9\/11. She remembers the Brahms concert as being \u201cjust so powerful. Masur asked that there be no applause, and that brought the feeling of doing something so meaningful. A sa musician, when some huge tragedy occurs, it\u2019s easy to wonder, \u2018What am I doing here? I\u2019m just playing my violin,\u2019 but then I think about Bernstein\u2019s response to President Kennedy\u2019s assassination: \u2018We will make music more intensely and more beautifully and more devotedly than ever before.\u2019\u201d\u00a0<\/p>\n

The Brahms was meaningful in the moment; the Adams represented a step toward rebuilding, cementing how the Philharmonic can act on Bernstein\u2019s idea. \u201cA year later we had enough space that we could handle listening to that,\u201d Staples believes. \u201cIt becomes very important to remember, especially for those who don\u2019t have that immediate personal memory.\u201d<\/p>\n

Music can be a time machine: composers\u2019 notes on the page document a set of instructions, which might be hundreds of years old;\u00a0performers bring them to life in the present. Philharmonic trumpet player Thomas Smith<\/a>, who also was in the Orchestra at the time, considers the players who have joined the Orchestra since these two powerful performances, without memories of that time. \u201cHopefully,\u201d Smith says, \u201cwe can shed some light on it, take a little bit more out of it than just the notes on the page.\u201d<\/p>\n

Smith explains that musicians are curious about the history behind the music: \u201cThey\u2019ll read up on the events, or ask of their older colleagues, \u2018What was going on?\u2019\u201d Music is not just a way to commemorate a piece of history, but, through sound, he feels it can evoke that time for newer New Yorkers who didn\u2019t directly experience this tragedy. He recalls something acute from the Philharmonic\u2019s collective memory: the sequence of funeral cort\u00e8ges, one for each of the dozen fallen firefighters from Engine 40 \/ Ladder 35 firehouse, located around the corner from David Geffen Hall. Almost 100 years earlier, Philharmonic Music Director Gustav Mahler witnessed a fireman\u2019s funeral\u2014the steady drum stroke stuck in his mind and reappeared in his unfinished Symphony No. 10.<\/p>\n

Music brings people together, not only in the present but also across time. Music remembers.<\/p>\n

Visit NYPhil.org<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Twenty-five years after the tragedy of 9\/11, the New York Philharmonic and Tang Music & Artistic Director Gustavo…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":339904,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[37],"tags":[9,24,63,122,124,123],"class_list":["post-339903","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-queens","tag-new-york","tag-new-york-city","tag-nyc","tag-queens","tag-queens-headlines","tag-queens-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339903","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=339903"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/339903\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/339904"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=339903"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=339903"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ny\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=339903"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}