The Three Movements in WTC 9/11, a Composition by Steve Reich

Steve Reich’s piece WTC 9/11 was previewed in 2010 and then officially released in 2011. This piece has three movements, each describing a stage of the act of terror upon the twin towers. Steve Reich was born in the 1930’s in New York City, and grew up in the city and in California as well. He studied music at Cornell, Julliard, and Mills College, and has received many awards for his work, including a Premium Imperial award in Music, which is the sort of Nobel Prize for music. He is debatedly the best classical composer of America, and he has made a huge in his music by adding audio recordings into his compositions. He is widely known for altering classical music very drastically, so much so that he has created a new sort of sub-genre within classical music.

The first movement, 9/11, narrates the very beginning when they first noticed that the planes were heading in the wrong direction. It has an overlying recording of what happened and alarm sounds from the airplane. The music supplements these recordings with tense, staccato, discordant notes from the violins. It then depicts the panic of the officials in the air traffic control towers, the pilots, and the passengers. It has audio from the people in the plane when and after they crashed into the World Trade Center. It then depicts the crash and the chaos of people trying to escape; jumping out of the building, being crushed by shrapnel, slowly dying from inhaling the smoke and catching on fire.

The second movement is named 2010. It has laymen narrating their memories of that day nine years before. The music is very ominous and legato, with a sense of impending doom. The instruments mirror the music in the people’s speaking voices, emphasizing what they are saying. The music then transitions into the same staccato, tense, and discordant manner that played earlier in the first movement. The people were a few blocks away from the World Trade Center when it happened. They describe their reactions to the first crash, how they thought it was or wasn’t an accident, how everyone was screaming and running and everything was chaos. That’s when the second plane hit. The music begins to vary from its usual pattern here, with the staccato in the background, but also an overlying harmoniously syncopated melody. There was fire, smoke, the ground was shaking, the building started to crumble, and everything turned black. The music is building tension with several string instruments playing short staccato notes with an ominous bass part underneath. The music turns fluid and melancholy and discordant while the people narrate the destruction and death and fear.

The third movement is called the WTC and depicts what happened right after the collapse of the building. The music returns to the ominous legato melody with a strong bass line. The bodies were moved into a massive tent filled with recovered bodies. A woman describes her experience sitting with the bodies, singing to them and praying for them and what is yet to come from this horrible, horrible event. She sings a beautiful melodic tune over a familiar legato bass melody with other string instruments harmonizing in a higher range. “The world to come; I don’t really know what that means-” the music turns into a happier key with uneasy discordance and singing weaving in here and there, “and there’s the world-and there’s the world right here.” The music turns from legato and melancholy as it has been in this movement, to abrupt and discordant again, adding in the alarm sounds from the plane as they grow louder and louder, and then suddenly, in unison, stop.

Cite this page