WTC 9/11

Two decades after the 1988 premiere of his pioneering work for string quartet and pre-recorded voices, Different Trains, Steve Reich was asked to write another piece for a similar combination of performers. The result was WTC 9/11, a 15-minute composition prompted by the 2001 attack on the World Trade Center in New York City. WTC 9/11 opens with pulsing string figurations which anxiously shadow the recorded voices of air traffic controllers and fire department staff at work on 11 September. Screeching waveband interference further ratchets up a sense of foreboding and tension. The middle movement uses recordings Reich himself made in 2010, of neighbourhood residents who witnessed the disaster unfolding. The lamenting final movement features the voices of two women who recited psalms over the dead bodies of victims, and the singing of a Jewish cantor. Throughout WTC 9/11 the string parts—there are two pre-recorded quartets as well as one playing “live”—latch on to both the rhythms of the voices heard, and the note pitches they suggest. An umbilical connection between music and spoken word is thereby created, considerably heightening the work’s emotional intensity. Reich’s initial instinct was to make WTC 9/11 a longer, more expansive composition. But “extending its length reduced its impact,” he discovered. “The piece wanted to be terse.”