Jeevan Rai - Ten Year Threnody
I remember the images. I think we all remember the images. Ten years on, the decade anniversary of 9/11 was surrounded by media talk of how it changed the course of history and its political aftermath - with little attempt to remember, acknowledge, recognise or confront the event itself. And to me that seems odd, because it is the event itself which sums up everything important about how I feel about it. It was the bubble of our western first-world security bursting. In that moment of impact, from that image of the towers aflame screamed one word: helpless.
To me art is something which can take us places we could not otherwise get. Steve Reich and John Adams have both done 9/11-related works which are respectively spectatorial and eulogic. What I have tried to do is connect with the moment right inside the event. Because what few people seem to be willing to do in recollection of 9/11 is really try to imagine what it might have been like in the last few moments of those lives. What happens in that terrible epiphany of helplessness, the realisation that there is no way out? In accounts of those who have brushed with death, the same descriptions keep cropping up: time stops, gravity stops, everything stops.
I used (among other sound sources) sirens of NYC emergency service vehicles, some piano recordings, fire alarm klaxons of the type typically installed in New York skyscrapers, the sound of Boeing 757 and 767 jets taking off, inflight soundscape elements of aeroplane passenger cabins, Northeastern-US news footage from the morning of the event, and the static noise of a phone call being cut off.
May the dead rest in peace.
May we hope for humanity’s future to be better than its past.
By night, Jeevan Rai is a composer, sound artist and improviser. By day, he is a mathematician. He completed an MMus under Stephen Goss and Matthew Sansom at the University of Surrey, where he now does doctoral research on symmetry algebras.