#time's echo

He would have been nearly eighty. He’s at a stadium wearing a Yankees cap, with a bunch of kids around him. Kiernan’s grin is as wide and happy as the one on the face of the little girl he holds on his lap. Does she know that Grandpa (Great-Grandpa?) has already seen that game? Probably more than once, in fact.

Composer John Adams reviews Jeremy Eichler’s new book, Time’s Echo—which examines how music can serve to memorialize, through works by Strauss, Schoenberg, Shostakovich, and Britten—in the latest issue of the New Yorker. “How could one create music to ‘commemorate’ a public trauma that the nation was still processing?” he recalls wondering when asked by the New York Philharmonic, in 2001, to write a piece honoring the victims of the 9/11 attacks. “My only wish,” he says of that work, On the Transmigration of Souls, “was to somehow acknowledge the sense of loss that such a calamity wrought on those who lost their loved ones.” You can read the article here.