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the day. >> We are on our last panel of
here. For those of you just joininge
us, I am Margaret Lewis, the
Wisconsin Academy of Sciences, executive director of the
I welcome you to this very Arts and Letters.
10th anniversary of 9/11. spToday's afternoon of panele
discussions and exchanges is part of our Academy Evenings,
a series of talks held
the state. throughout the year and around
theme of perspectives on a This Fall we are focusing on the
We hope you'll join us for the post-9/11 world.
out more about in our Academy otEvenings season schedule.ind
Please feel free to grab one on your way in, or check our
website.
the Wisconsin Academy in either Yof those ways, or come to ourin
website at www.wisconsin.org. So, this is our third and final
panel of the afternoon. We turn to the arts for a
discussion about how music, art and literature
historically have not only
crisis, but have also dealt with helped us through times of
particularly revealing. We're fortunate to have three
panelists with us to consider how the arts provide new ways of
understanding catastrophe.
the Madison Symphony Orchestra John DeMain, music director of
also a Wisconsin Academy Fellow. is here with us today, and is
professor of English at UW-Milwaukee, and author of
Separate Kingdoms,
Contemporary Art Museum at the curator of the
all with us today. University of South Florida, are
start with John. I think that we're going to
speakers. Or did we agree something else?
I lost track of that coin toss, apparently.
We're going to start in the middle, so let me start with the
middle introduction first.
Jane is the curator of the I believe that's Jane.
University of South Florida where she is also the professor
of museum studies.
of exhibitions here, at the Madison Museum of Contemporary
Art.
positions at Independent Simon has also held curatorial
Who's the next speaker, Curators did we decide?and MOCA.
Is that Valerie?
Prize winning author of the novel Dream House which --
received the Ann Powers award and was named among Kirkus
Review's "Best Books of 2009."
University of Michigan and She holds an MFA from the
of creative writing at the teaches in the graduate program
Wisconsin-Milwaukee. University of
Separate Kingdoms, was Her new short collection,
published by Harper Perennial in February
of 2011.
introduction in this town, is difficult to describe in just a
few words because of so many
Now in his 18th season as music director of Madison Symphony
Orchestra, John DeMain is noted for his dynamic performances on
dozens of concert and opera stages throughout the world.
He just arrived an hour ago from
The New York Times calls him a Pennsylvania.
how. "gifted orchestra builder" and
American's leading regional He has buiorchestras.into on of
In addition to overseeing it's
expanding the subscription move to the Overture Hall and
he has steadily elevated the season to triple performances,
creating exquisite performances of evermore challenging works.
He also serves as the artistic
and until recently, Opera director forPacific.ison Opera,
He is a regular guest conductor with the Washington National
Orchestra, New York City Opera, Michigan Opera Theater and Los
Angeles Opera.
that I'm missing. During his distinguished 17 year
tenure with the Houston Grand Opera, he led a history-making
production of "Porgy and Bess," winning a Grammy Award and a
Tony Award, as well as France's top award for the RCA recording.
In all, he has conducted more than 350 performances for "Porgy
and Bess" throughout the world. So, let us turn to this
distinguished panel to help us
deal with tragedy. think about how the arts help us
Thank you aoff, Jane.tarting us
Thank you for coming. It's a beautiful day out, and
you decided to spend your time
I'm going to begin in the past, and then we'll work more towards
the future. In 1951, noted scholar and
philosopher Theodor Adorno, in
World War II and the Holocaust response to the tragedies of
Auschwitz is barbaric." wrI think this sent all ofer
Europe into a tailspin because
room for the arts? they thought, well, is there
the stage for what is Iessentially an impossibility.ts
We experience trauma and we experience hardship and grief,
but can an art form encompass the complexity of those
emotions? Can it help us heal?
Can it provide a form for outlining our fears, anxieties
and even silly hang-ups?
many of us are driven to make things out of our own trauma and
those things, be it paintings,
whatever they may be, become the cartoons or sculptures,
experience. Both awful and wonderful at the
same times. I begin with, this is an
abstract painting by Philip Guston, that's owned by the
Minneapolis Institute of Art. It was created in 1958.
Guston was a Canadian born
He was born in Montreal in 1913 as Philip Goldstein to Ukrainian
refugees. His father could not make a
living in Montreal, so they moved to California as a young
child.
collector, which drove him to His fatinsanity. garbage
He actually killed himself and a
the woodshed out back as a young young Guston found his father in
You'll see in his paintings, child.
them, he was dealing with all of these things all the time in
his art.
only in abstraction, as were By the 1950s he was painting
This is an example of one of many painters of that time.
He stopped painting for a while, those works.
the 1960s, because he felt like ahe could not paint actually.f
When he returned to painting it was during the height of the
Vietnam war.
from 1969, and another one from Here's a p1973, calledthe right,
Painting, Smoking and Eating. In the end Guston decided
cartoonish figures in a reductive white and red palette,
there are other tones in there
white, would be the only way to budeal with life, with his ownd
anxieties, with the death of his
Vietnam war. father, and with the looming
always use, he used these HKlan-like figures as a way tot
deal with it. The Klan, at the time of his
childhood, was rampant in California.
He at one point felt that that
father's death. So the Klansmen are, you know,
are himself.
self-portraits that were himself He often would paint
He could sort of see the evil in as the Klansmen.
He didn't sleep well at night I don't think.
He smoked all the time, as one
In the end he decided to use way to deal with this.
white palette to create crealistic but troubled scenes.
The painter smoking, eating,
anxieties. creating, but rattled by
outside the studio would always Hiimpregnate the studio.s
They would always leak in.
would fail to soothe him. We can see Guston's complicated
exploration of the Klan related to California and even his
father's death. Driven to the point, he would
say, at the end of his life,
archaic forms, but it's the only "Painting and sculpture are very
society where an individual alone can make something which,
not just his own hands, but with
and maybe his heart." The next subject that I'm using
is a changing things a little bit.
Although Guston himself was very
The next subject is legendary graphic novelist Art Spiegelman,
who made his career from
life, creating comics came from crhis family, his father'swn
anxieties, his mother's suicide and even his own life.
He was an only child of two Holocaust survivors and his
first three books, The Mouse
his father. seHis mother had died by that of
point.
what seemed to his son, these As crazy precautions againsteat
starvation, destruction and anti-Semitism.
This is an image of, he takes on
and he's worried about if he made a book about this, thate
it would just be read as his
old Jew. father a being crazy, racist,
the Pulitzer Prize. It'There are three of them.on
This is from the first one, 1973.
Then these are-- Spiegelman famously married the photo
editor from the New Yorker. Francoise is his lovely wife and
she always shows up as a very foxy mouse in his cartoons.
We'll see her in a few minutes. He lives in downtown Manhattan
and so, when the towers came
He spent years dealing with what down he was right there.
He and Francoise are at home and the trauma was.
to rush further downtown to their daughter's school and they
go through this whole panic of
has survived. Their daughter, incidentally,
actually doesn't panic until she
It sends Spiegelman on this whole other tirade about, am I
just like my father, what does
standpoint? You can see in the center of the
picture is actually Dan Rather
Then at the bottom are people running from commercialism
destroying American.
cartoon-like image of the towers On the far right is a
everyone thought could never burning, which of course,
I'm already at the next thing. happen.
same thing. The top is Spiegelman freaking
out about himself, freaking out about creating a book like this.
At the bottom is the towers burning again.
This book was first published many years later in Der Spiegel,
oddly enough a German newspaper.
work, which is a whole other The Germans loved Spiegelman's
Then by Pantheon in over-size dbook form.
What is most interesting to me
of his father's hang-ups, like is how Spiegelman turns to many
mechanisms. antiIf your terrified aboutping
something else it's easy to displace those angers on to
something else. As if to say the world would be
all right with all the same old problems.
He didn't want these new
I want to show you one more image by him.
Actually, here we go. This is actually where he
detailed-- he's imagining what
thought during the whole thing. The school never told them what
was going on. Nadja didn't know what was going
on until her parents showed up
Then in 2008 for the New Yorker absolutmagazine.ed out.
These were published in 2004, four years after he had gone
through this supposedly therapeutic thing.
He said I think the most
whole thing, "There's a retherapeutic side to allhe
art-making, but the nature of working is to compress, condense
and shape stuff, not to expunge it.
And it's not just an exorcism.
vomit." Art isThis is a cover.ur own
I had to include this, because
artist's work that I'm going it's relevant to a local
This is the cover of the New discuss at the end of the talk.
his wife Francoise who was the Yorker that Spiegelman did for
right after the 9/11 attacks. pThere are two towers that are,
just shadows. They're just a figment of our
imagination.
Turning to the contemporary, I
just going to talk briefly have three artists that we're
their lives, or in their work. about, who deal with 9/11 in
channel video installations that This is a photo from a two
2010. It was ten years, or almost ten
years, after the 9/11 attacks.
actually release this work of art and release her own take on
what had happened in New York.
towers were happening, she lives What she did was, just as the
is, you know, across the water, ieven from where the towers had
fallen. She took a battered Bolex camera
and went around her neighborhood.
It was a very mixed neighborhood, Polish people,
artsy-fartsy types. She photographed what was going
on in the neighborhood. How people were responding
publicly to this tragedy. Then she went back ten years
later and photographed the
still in this collective same places, to see if it was
This is one image of that. consciousness or not.
of neighborhood. It's a sort of vinyl siding sort
building, two flats in each Tbuilding, sometimes three.
This is another image of how
Osama bin Laden is in the upper peopright hand corner there.t--
People were publicly
Laden thing. addressing this whole Osama bin
have whole other relationship to Of course, now he's dead so we
But this was right after. Here, this is many years later.
Either somebody forgot to take
to leave it up. dThere was still this semblance
of patriotism.
actually in New York at the time Elena Del Rivero was not
was downtown and the windows of the attacks, but her studio
I guess, when the towers fell. were blown out of her studio
Spain and she came back and was sort of horrified by what had
happened to her space.
she felt that she had been She felt victimized by that, and
space was taken over with this violated because her private
Then she was asked by the Corcoran Gallery of Art to
create something, which is in Washington D.C.--
to do a site specific instillation.
She used all of the things that were left in her studio and
sewed them together to hang something from the rotunda.
That's what this is here. She claims that the act was a
therapeutic act and was the best
been so disruptive. waIt took her five years toad
catalogue everything, then to reassemble them.
That's what this is here. It's a scroll-like thing which
reads as both information but also something very personal.
There's up in the middle of the instillation.
Then here are the letters and other things like that.
So they still read as individual
together to be something. They're not individually
interesting at all. There's no narrative in them,
there's no personal information about the artist.
Some off them even just say "error" on them.
They're just like receipts and
But you realize, you know, your thinlife is made up of thesept.
insignificant pieces of paper,
transactions, the shards of your of the shards of your economic
page or grocery list, or things drawings, olike that.dles on the
All of those things were
If it hadn't been created from compiled into this one work.
it wouldn't even be about her dowSeptember 11th.tensibly
Here's another one which was an essay, and then you can see that
she catalogued it is her studio to be placed in this work.
It was just recently shown in New York for this anniversary,
But before then, it was really
This is a local artist who made for Washington.
audience. actuaIt's just wonderful. the
When I put out a call-out if
responded. anyone was thinking about this,
responded to me. I was very happy that she
environment, she was really thinking about September 11th in
her work. She was really thinking about
the grander meaning of all of these things.
She was also very much thinking about the differences between
black and white, and what we
Thinking back to the Art associate with black.
this morass-like reaction to the Spiegelman cover, we do have
be good and sometimes be bad. My reaction as an art historians
or as a curator is always like, well, black is normal.
Black is what we wear.
But it has a whole other host of It's the norm.
This was installed in Berkeley connotations.
It was set into the wall. It's this crumbling downed
tower, rickety tower. This is something else built
into the underbelly of a
Actually, an HVAC system in the basement.
The city is placed on top of it.
city that could be vulnerable. We're imagining, you know, a
actually in the collection at Thisthe Madison Museum ofch is
Contemporary Art. I'm going to end with a quote
that bookends more with Guston's
was written a London based than with anything else, but it
New York about a year ago. artist, Sadie Smith, who was in
standing in an apartment She says, "Last Christmas I was
struck by a hallway where paper mâché stars of David and holys
crosses came together in a
These 'people of the book,' whose religious texts overlap
and divide us as deeply as
They were living peaceably in eitherthe same space."oran.
Remember they're just symbols in this thing, but she's, you
know, having a very sentimental attachment to these Chanukah
and Christmas decorations.
Maybe this took generations and Shepassed through periods ofis?
unspeakable horrors.
Sometimes they forgave. They did both of these things
imperfectly.
helped. General economic parity and
difficult acts of goodwill on both side, and then a democratic
country in which the apparently impossible has the freedom to
happen. It's not a perfect relationship.
There is not such thing, and it took 2000 years to get this far.
We forget that these things take
'Let us realize that the arch of time.
bends towards justice.' msaid Martin Luther King whot
resided over a meeting of supposedly irreconcilable
peoples.
Not every[applause]onster."
I'm going to talk about-- I guess I should stand
by the microphone.
literature, and the wake of I'm going to 9/11.about, mostly
There's been a fair amount of it, so there's a limit to how
much I can cover. I decided to focus on just one
or two specific novels. Also a little bit of art and
people's reactions to these things.
There's a curious scene late in Don DeLillo's novel,
Man , when his Falling
downstairs neighbor for playing "a certain kind of music,
wailing music, lutes and
Over and over. tambourines and chanting voices.
angry." Now, Lianne is a mild-mannered
sort, a mother and book editor
patients in her spare time, but wher husband has just surviveds
the Twin Towers attacks and she is now seeing the world
in new ways.
confrontation with her neighbor she thinks to herself, "Maybe
the neighbor was Greek. But the music wasn't Greek.
She was hearing another set of
North African, Bedouin songs traditions, Middle Eastern,
located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on
the door and saying something." In his typical, seemingly casual
fashion DeLillo highlights a
writing about 9/11. In the wake of the attacks many
choices of expression and reaction suddenly became taboo.
Added to our shock and confusion
the wrong thing. was a new, deep fear of saying
her neighbor's door, enraged by Lithe music but unable to sayast
anything. She thinks, "Knock on the door.
Adopt a posture.
Knock on the door, mention the Mention the noise as noise.
civility and calm, the parody of noise, use the open pretense of
every tenant sees as such, and fellow-tenant courtesy that
Mention the noise only as noise. gently mention the noise.
theme of a certain kind of Do not allude to the underlying
political and religious statement, now of all times."
When Lianne finally works up the
her neighbor, the woman neparticipates in this dim andto
willful circumlocution, she expands the blank space where
the unspeakable, Islam, 9/11, terror, silently festers.
The neighbor says, "Music,
I like it. that's all.
It gives me peace. It's beautiful.
"Why now? Why at this particular time?"
"Now, later, what's the difference?
It's music."
"Nobody ever complained. "But why now and why so loud?"
hearing loud. ThisIt's not so loud." I'm
"It's loud."
You want to take it personally, what can I tell you?"
"Of course it's personal. Anybody would take it
personally. Under these circumstances.
There are circumstances.
you?" "There are no circumstances.
It's music," she said.
As in DeLillo's book, in "It gives me peace."
of people pushing for silence, post-9/11 America we saw a lot
blindness or feigned for restraint, for selective
matters. obliviousness on certain
represent the forever silenced Some people, often purporting to
images and facts were too victpainful, graphic, ortain
inflammatory to be spoken or
So the shots of the people shown.
quickly exhumed from the live fallingnews coverage.rs were
Some of us saw a few images like
decided to focus instead on the thequally shocking but morers
palatable images of architecture, rather than
individual people, under attack.
"Falling Man" flashed once in Phcertain newspapers, sparked's
outrage, and were basically stricken from the record.
But other people, also reeling
went in the other direction. and devastated by the attacks,
palpable ways to more fully feel and understand They grasped for specific,
witnessed. They gravitated toward the
images that others deemed off-limits.
There was something grotesque and lurid about watching the
planes crash into the towers, or
and yet many of us couldn't tear the victims fall from the sky,
We stood riveted before our TV our eyes away.
from different angles, over and screens, watover. the attacks
We watched it until we could
feel we'd been a part of it.
We watched it in an effort to pull ourselves a little closer.
It has always been the job of artists, of writers, to bring
people into closer contact with the world around us, to force us
to look at what we'd rather not see, and in so doing to help us
more fully understand the world's terror and glory.
Newspaper clippings and history books can transmit every last
known fact about the invasion of
event the first thing that comes Normandy, but if you mention the
to my mind is the visceral
opening sequence of Saving Private Ryan.
This isn't because the film gives a more thorough or
accurate sense of the events; it's because the film gives a
more palpable one. It's because the film brings me
closer ...
We expect this of art and or sliterature.
Yet those who attempted to write
with the daunting challenge of fiction about 9/11 were faced
bringing readers close but not
too close , faced with
the call twrong thing.ing , but not the
wrong thing suddenly felt like In post 9/11 America, saying the
bad list somewhere. itWhen the novelist Jonathanry
Safran Foer used photographs of one of the falling victims in
his 2005 novel, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, many
critics rejected the move out of
The photos are placed in reverse hand.
of the novel, so that as you flip to the final page order in a flitheook at the end
falling man, a stand-in for the boy-narrator's dead father,
rises back up to the towers and survives.
The San Francisco Chronicle critic Tom Barbash wrote, "I
imagine that Foer debated whether to include the
photograph of the man leaping from, or ascending back into,
the building. I for one wish he'd made a
different decision. It lends to the story a horrific
and unearned gravity."
9/11 were likewise slammed for Other works of art dealing with
exploiting pain they hadn't being iearned.ive, for
Eric Fischl's sculpture,
controversy at Rockefeller "Tumbling Woman," sparked such
covered with a sheet and Center that it was quickly
Fischl promptly offered a grave apology for, what I think is, a
very beautiful work of art. One passerby said of the
sculpture, "I don't think it
It's not art... It's very disrupting when you
see it."
Fischl highlighted another key Asked about the controversy,
9/11, the idea that "some people problem that artists faced after
suffering and others don't, havthat there are those ineir
this hierarchy of pain who own
It's not necessarily about it more than you do.
the experience. Picasso wasn't at Guernica when
it happened, Goya wasn't there
This is what a culture looks to art for, to put image, or voice,
or context to a way of
re-experiencing." The fact that the worlds of art
and publishing and cultural criticism are so centered in New
York may have made the act of making art about 9/11
particularly perilous.
culturally powerful New Yorkers at the top of the hierarchy of
pain, and while they didn't want
their pain mis represented, they
also didn't want it ignored.
first book DeLillo published after 9/11, the novel
Cosmopolis , the New York Times' Michiko Kakutani captured
the high expectations critics placed on New York writers.
She wrote, "In novels like
Libra, Mao II, White Noise
and the magnificent Underworld, DeLillo has drawn
a vivid fever chart of American history, showing us, often with
uncanny prescience, how random
insinuated themselves into the violence and paranoia have
madmen and terrorists have used bombs and guns and the media to
seize hold of the historical
It is with great anticipation, imagination.
his latest novel, the first book then, that the reader turns to
since the terrorist attacks of by Mr. DeLillo to be published
Cosmopolis, however, 9/11.
It's not that the novel, which turns out to be a major dud.
2000, declines to depict our is set in New York City in April
It's that its portrait of a millennial Manhattan is
hopelessly clichéd."
statement, it seems to me, by the very fact that she mentions
it, "declining to depict our
first misstep. post 9/11 world" is DeLillo's
satisfying her desire for a 9/11 When he got around, in 2007, to
novel, she met the book, Falling
Man , with the same high
inevitable disappointment. expectations and almost
approaches Mr. DeLillo's She wrote, "The reader
anticipation. Unfortunately, his strangely
stilted 2003 novel, Cosmopolis, was a terrible
disappointment, and so is his spindly new novel,
Man. Falling
critic that DeLillo's two post-9/11 books might have beens
"spindly" or "stilted," because actual New Yorkers had been
struck speechless and numb by 9/11, and DeLillo either wanted
to capture it or couldn't,
After all, writers are just as himself, escape it.
that they have, as Elif Batumen writes, "accidentally checked
out from the human condition."
quote that Jane mentioned. This reminded me of the Adorno
after Auschwitz is barbaric. The line about writing poetry
literature, I was reminded, is I think that a lot of Holocaust
Very, very minimalist. incredible spare.
been so corrupted and so It was as though language had
debased, that a lot of Holocaust misused, and beauty had been so
was sort of grotesque, sort of poets especially felt that it
beautiful means. vulgar to use language for
means in the Holocaust. IWe see that again, actuallyl
before that.
War I famously said that, you know the language had been so
corrupted that, after a certain point, only the names of certain
places and the dates of certain battles held any meaning at
all. Anyway, back to Falling Man.
In the Washington Post
Jonathan Yardley also skewered the novel
Falling Man . He quotes a vivid description by
DeLillo of a character who's
jumping off buildings head-first been going around New York
Then Yardley writes, "Sorry, as performance art.
Once again, DeLillo is merely piggybacking on September 11,
counting on those vivid images
give this novel the force he's cemented in our memories to
himself." And here we arrive at perhaps
the greatest challenge of all,
themselves were already such the possibility that the attacks
anything attempting to depict or devastating works of art that
lot like a pale derivation. After all, the real terrible and
disruptive power of 9/11 lay not
architectural destruction but in so much in the human or
its imagery , in the spectacle we
all witnessed as an audience. Because it must be said that
3,000 people die all the time,
Buildings fall. allPlanes crash.ld.
And life goes on; such tragedies
of news. merit only a few days or weeks
or apocalypses, as 9/11 They repeatedly has been.lysms
August 29th for example, the
know? Katrina is barely remembered.
The cataclysmic power of 9/11 stemmed from the audacity,
precision, and orchestration of the attacks, and from the
horrific images that played out in real time before our eyes.
All of this combined to reconfigure our sense of who we
are and how we are vulnerable.
the elements of the world we had The attacks brought us closer to
But this is another thing that not wanted to see.
The composer Karlheinz we are not supposed to say.
called 9/11 "the greatest work Stockhausen tried it when he
cosmos." of art imaginable for the whole
of course outrage ensued. THe attempted to clarify thatd
"great" did not equal "good" by renaming it "Lucifer's greatest
work of art." Yeah.
When that didn't suffice he offered a full apology.
"This whole situation is
if my remarks were misconstrued. regrettable and I'm deeply sorry
of the brutal terrorist attacks of New York City and Washington
D.C. and I will continue to keep the victims of this outrage
in my prayers." A year later, the artist Damien
Hirst tried to express this again.
He said to the BBC, "The thing
an artwork in its own right. about 9/11 is that it's kind of
devised in this way for this It was wicked, but it was
It was devised visually." He too was quickly badgered into
an apology. Ten years have passed.
Our fears are subsiding.
about 9/11 this week suggests that it's getting maybe a little
bit easier to find something, maybe the right thing, to say
about 9/11. Thank you.
[applause]
The artist's response to
visually and in spoken word. war is thought provoking, both
because music has been In music, it's interesting
very beginning. When you really think about the
integral role that music played.
formations or organizing, launching cavalry charges, bugle
calls, drumming, marching bands,
mourning loss, underlying celebraceremony.victory,
But I think the number of works where war is actually depicted
in music, you could probably
One of the early ones, and I count on two hands.
on composers, was Napoleon. That inspired Beethoven to write
"Wellington's Victory." Now, what's interesting is
that Beethoven was commissioned,
war. he was paid to write about that
fanfares, cannonades, themes Of course in that piece we have
The other obvious work that we from British patriotic songs.
has an aspect of war inside it, listis of course, the "1812which
Overture."
Napoleon, and that of course has Again, that is related to
and then a tradition of fireworks associated with it as
well. Haydn wrote his mass in a time
of war. That's distinguished with the
sort of militarists trumpet fanfares and timpani rolls that
are a part of the piece.
prayer for peace, as is Beethoven's Missa Solemnis, a
prayer for inner and
I think that often composers outer peace.
away from war. have a response to war by going
depict war. But by actually hoping that, you
know, never again.
in response to war was Britain's One for the great pieces written
It had poetry from Wilfred Owen, "War Requiem" in 1962.
the end of World War I. a BIn which he was quoted asfore
saying, "All a poet can do
Another very important work that is warn."
written effected by war, was I think depicts war, or at least
Symphony", the "Leningrad ShostakSymphony."eventh
Written in 1941, composed one month after the invasion by the
Nazis.
references to terror and slavery This work is filled with
This composition became the icon and oppression of the spirit.
hopes of the Russian people. of the resistance, suffering and
specifically in response to Thvictory or defense.ten
The end of this week we will be presenting John Adams'
commissioned again, asked to
9/11. He wrote it a year later, 2002.
It won the Pulitzer Prize.
souls. It is on the transmigration of
description on this piece, he calls it a memory space.
It's written for chorus of
massive orchestra, and a tape of adults and children and a
including sirens, people walking the city sounds of New York,
It's a very, very powerful and the names of victims.
the sounds of war. piece, and it also though, has
obvious audio component, and As I said before, war has an
What's interesting today to listen to CNN where CNN will say
now during the Arab Spring
listen to the sounds of war. they'll say let's just pause and
the volleys of gunshots. And we just pause and listen to
unique that we're doing that And I thought that was rather
and just listen to this horrific now, that we're supposed to sit
But the point is it is noise, and music, of course, is some
kind of noise, cultivated or
And it's interesting to see and to contemplate what effect war
has had on music in general.
careful because I think the Atrends in music happened note
necessarily parallel to war.
the 20th century, the end of I think what's happened after
19th century, more happened because of people like Freud and
movements in Paris and the world
paving the way, changing the of art and is also with --
rise of technology and machinery harmonic palette of music, the
with machinery. A lot of these things came into
the 20th century to influence where music went, not just the
fact that there was a world war,
So I think that we cannot, in itself, say that music was
affected, in general, by the
composers were both collectively world wars, but certainly
For example, Ravel served in the and individually influenced.
He wrote his "Left Hand Concerto" as a response to
someone who lost their
So there, for example, is a very arm in the war.
work. Vaughan Williams, incredibly
affected by the war, wrote both his symphonies number 4 and 6,
the war effect is quite audible in his music.
The music is much more
Some composers went the other dissonant, muway.ore intense.
Richard Strauss, who had given
Rosenkavalier" in 1910, but before that with "Salome
Elektra" was aiming towards a much more abrasive kind of
musical style, actually retreated after the
war, almost as though not wanting to have dissonance
because of the dissonance created in real life.
But I think as we got through to
century, we have to take a look at, in addition to not only
classical composers and their response to war, but Rock and
Roll as started with the people like Bill Haley & His Comets
progressed into something much
more serious and Rock took on connotations of serious art.
And I think that what has happened is we can go back to
the Civil War when we had songs like "Dixie" and "Yankee Doodle"
already associated with war, and
some of the songs in the '40s tthat were written while theat
second world war was going on,
antiwar protest song that developed as a result of the
Vietnam War.
songs associated with the first world war and the second world
war and then you look at the
Vietnam War, it's 15- 20-fold. songs written in response to the
And that has continued through It's unbelievable.
War on Terror. the Gulf War and the so-called
taken on a lot of the moral outrage and response to war, and
we find this much more depicted than before.
I think that there's few pieces of war that were sort of
pro-war, the Lincoln Portrait,
In the world of opera, we are able to depict war, or at least
set stories with war in the background.
So, for example, Verdi actually wrote an opera about Attila,
Attila the Hun, Attila in Italian.
Of course, Handel's Giulio
Otello is returning from Cesare, Julius Caesar, and
fight between the Venetians and the Moors, and so war becomes ae
backdrop. Tosca with
on Broadway. the Roman Republic
with that famous helicopter landing in Miss Saigon, Vietnam serveand, the backdrop
of course, the magnificent
South Pacific is set against
the backdrop of World War II. And in this most recent
production, the addition to the sounds of war through the scene
changes and the recent revival
even more urgent sensibility to in New Yothe work.brought an
Possibly one of the greatest
Beethoven's "Ode to Joy," as he contemplated the need for peace
and for the brotherhood of man. I think that this afternoon we
had in Overture Hall a very beautiful memorial service where
we sang pieces that oftentimes
we mourn and the way we mourn loss, and, as I said, a lot of
times we make an impassioned cry
and, of course, the "Barber Adagio" for Strings, which was
played this afternoon, and
performed piece associated with tragedy, national tragedy, loss,
than that work. When I was thinking about
commemorating 9/11, I don't want
easy road for me would be to to say that that would be the
and move on. play the "Adagio for Strings"
there were event specific works. But I was curious to find out if
large-scale event specific work that I could come up with was
the Adams' "On the
However, today in San Francisco by the wonderful composer
Christopher Theofanidis, who
here in Madison, his opera I've performed a couple of times
premiered by the San Francisco being
from Texas who was in New York Opera and is about the fireman
out of the towers. and pulled 2,000 people
later getting a major work of And so here art.re 10 years
And I think that sometimes you
to have an appropriate response hor want to depict something.e
And I think that was the point
so overwhelming, the event in mathe beginning, that to havet's
something to say about it or to sing about it or to play about
it is very, very difficult. So I think what John Adams has
done is a very difficult piece
only hearing the names of people to get through because of not
absolutely heartfelt responses but hearing the cliched but
chorus will sing through this. that people make and that the
explodes twice in this piece, and the brass do some sustained
playing that makes you feel a little bit like the sounds of an
airplane. And I'm sure John Adams would
deny it, but there is this
there is an electric keyboard, feeling of, and also the way
instruments playing these tinkly, almost as though there's
shattered glass, and in this
and that we're asked world that we're brought into
So I think that, just in to remember.
said, music has been associated conwith the army, has beenas I
associated with a war, armies,
with military. navy, all of them in general,
it, from parades to memorial Music has always been a part of
I do think that it's important services.
associate musical styles as directly resulting with war but
rather than larger forces going on, and at the same time
recognize those pieces which
as their response to the horrors composers were moved to give us
Thank you. and outrage of war.
Thank you, all, for taking time to be here with
us today. It's now your time to ask
questions.
have a conversation with these We have about 15-20 minutes to
today, and we ask that you wait spor raise your hand so there
microphone can be brought down
So please, Ronnie, I see a to you so that all may hear.
sure she'll get around to just couple of hands already, and I'm
Thanks so much. as many >> Thanks.she can.
Valerie, when you talked about
I'm curious about your thoughts howabout how much each of usar,
experience events now because of
None of us know what it was like the way they're so accessible.
A lot of us kind of have a sense to be in World War II.
and we were close to that. of the Kennedy assassination,
We all felt closer. We all have a very sort of
personal experience associated
And so much now we all see these with it.
never did in the past, and does that alter, do you think, our
ability to sort of allow others to share their takes of it and
take offense at?
access to documentary coverage >> Yeah, I think absolutely our
pervasive and easy. And, actually, Kakutani, in this
past week's New York Times was
most, what she considered the most successful books that came
after 9/11 or dealt with 9/11 were the non-fiction books, and
that there hasn't yet, in her opinion, been the great 9/11
novel.
that artists are competing with Andthat raw footage, and, A,eah,
there's only so much that an
against that backdrop, and, B, I artist can do or a writer can do
just my opinion, but it seems to think it does mean that, this is
ownership of those events that me that we all feel more
very eyes, particularly with we watched unfold before our
so many of us sort of turned on the TV and saw that second plane
hit the building. And so you really feel as though
you, you know you weren't there but you can remember where you
were and you saw it in real time
participated in some way that we and you felt like you
Vietnam or these other events dounless we were really there.or
And I think that's a tricky circumstance.
It means that more and more people, I guess maybe a larger
percentage of the population, feels that kind of ownership
that the victims feel.
inaccurate, a lot of people feel Whether that's accurate or
And so they have a stronger sense of whether the artist is
getting it right or not getting it right or doing it justice or
not doing it justice or being insensitive or insensitive.
Just a few comments and anecdotes.
Since you mentioned "Ode to Joy," I think that another
application of that song to peace is the fact that it's now
the national anthem of the
Let's see, and also regarding the question of selective memory
and how certain things are
sometimes is brought up now, forgotten, as we know or as
associations historically. 9/11 has other negative
Chile in 1973 that brought down It a democratically elected in
president to bring in a military
I believe it was in 1940, that coup, and it was also the date,
his more, I guess, racist or Charles Lindbergh made one of
non-interventionist addresses talking about the importance of
keeping the US out of the war in
So there's a lot of nefarious events associated with 9/11, and
also your comment in response to
of perspective and having personal memory of a given time,
I find that I'm almost in a minority now in that when I go
to panels and discussions on the
old-timer because I'm one of the Vietnam War, I'm practically an
memories of it and that contribute that way even though
I didn't fight there. I was never in the military, but
I still have very strong
front. memories of it from the home
that in that way one develops different perspectives depending
on what you lived through or
Thanks.
I actually have two questions.
One is, in the first panel today
participants of how the War on there was some discussion by the
events of 9/11, was different Tfrom other wars because theree
was not a nation state that had a standing army that was
involved, and I'm wondering if
coming out in terms music or you think that the art that is
is different because this was not a traditional war as we have
seen. And then my other question is we
don't have a representative here
that film is the quintessential frmedium for depicting war.me
And we've had, ever since we've had film, we've had films about
war.
something about that medium that And I'm thinking that there's
ways that, perhaps, the music or really is able to portray in
literature is not. the visual arts or the
music, one of my really striking But I must say, in terms of
conflict is there was an image memories of the Bosnian/Serbian
playing "Adagio for Strings" in anda very empty stadium.list
It was interesting that today,
that the musicians they chose to if you were watching the TV,
can't remember her name, a perform were Yo-Yo Ma and I
Paul Simon. flSo music, I think, is veryd
evocative. >> You know, Apocalypse Now is
one of the great war movies in
our time, and The Hurt Locker,
incredible in terms of the kind of realism that a movie can do.
But I think music, certainly art
way it congers up memories music is more abstract in the
visions, the visuals, where I insthink the movie sort of the
creates it for you. I do think we've seen, in
theater and in television,
various series now all of the sudden there might be a plot
about terrorism, Homeland Security.
That's permeating our culture in
of subject matter. the last several years in terms
Broadway. We've seen some plays where
terrorists have captured
And so the subject matter is someone.
I think, by the way, there have been quite a few chamber music
works created with 9/11.
was premiered in Houston by Jake And there was a work today that
There is, I think Richard Danielpour has written.
There's quite a few chamber works.
I just haven't noticed a huge amount of symphonic work
written specifically in response, and I think John Adams
was the big one.
Philharmonic, won the Pulitzer It was written for New York
specific to that event to create Prize, and is incredibly
But, you're right, film is, and of course music is always part
of film as well.
of films that deal with that, >> I think actually.e are a lot
And you think about even
sometlook like it does. wouldn't
It wouldn't look like it did now The one with Heath Ledger.
they're imagining the destruction of Gotham, which was
of course New York City.
minds, Godzilla and things like Ithat included that, but it'ss
totally different now.
films that imagine an apocalypse There are even more popular
after 9/11. t>> And I think you're right,
that film is the medium.
is adapted or suited for war It's interesting how well film
Because it's one of the things coverage.
challenging because we can't about literature about wars is
the fast pace doesn't quite come show the explosions so well and
So film is really the ideal, or may be in many ways ideal for
that. I do think that your comment at
the beginning about whether the fact that we weren't fighting a
nation complicates the
and literature and film. presentation of the war in art
easy enough to say in a TV movie And I think it does because it's
so we're supposed to kill him in or in a film he's a German and
German equals bad guy. this war.
after 9/11, it's been very With the 9/11, with the wars
ways to portray the enemy that difficult for people to find
Arabs or stereotyping Middle aren't sort of stereotyping
kind of find, I guess, either they have sort of stereotypedo
and it's made some people uncomfortable or the better
films have kind of found ways around that.
It's interesting to me that some
Vietnam films came out several of the better or more remembered
was sort of a spade of them in years after the war, and there
And it's a similar thing with tnovels and films about the war
now.
been about 9/11 or the wars in A lot of the films that have
done very well. And The Hurt Locker is one that ven't
has and I would argue it's the
novels, that the ones that deal very directly with the events,
like the Oliver Stone film, what
9/11 or Twin was it called?
title of this film by one of our remember the
That nobody wanted to see. major filmmakers?
the novels that dealt very And the novels, the same thing,
Falling Man is one of them, a lot of people didn't directly with the event, and
see, weren't ready for, but the stories that were sort a few
steps removed, like The Hurt
Audiences were more receptive to better.
And I would argue that's them.
They can't encompass the tragedy because they can't.
the destruction that happened, or the trauma or the grief or
own vomit, as Art Spiegelman and yet somehow we can eat our
We can deal with, if we set the perimeters correctly, as said.
Hurt Locker did, we can deal with that.
We can deal with these moments, these snippets or lightning
flashes, as Eudora Welty called them I think, we can't deal with
the whole thing.
It's way too big. I think in some sense Eudora was
right.
It's also fascinating to me that film doesn't have to be
politically correct, and
too to a certain extent. literature probably can do that
seems to be much more cautious Theater and live performance
But film, somehow that screen, about just how real they get.
politically risky positions, and you can say and depict
depict racism in film, the way yet somehow the way you can
issues. It's always fascinating to me
why we can do that in movies and
and accepting it in a live we have a hard time of doing it
And somehow, I don't know, maybe situation.
fact that it's so realistic that it's just that screen or the
about it. thIt's trying to be so true toc
life. >> I'm not sure whether it has
to do with realism over a similitude or if it just has to
do with the fact that,
works of art tend to be dialogic particularly longer narrative
They involve many voices coming together to create one truth,
but those voices can descend and
another. contradict and offend one
character who is stereotyping and discriminating against their
Muslim neighbor because they're shocked after 9/11, and another
character who argues with her that that's not the right thing
to do, and the audience can see many layers and not, if it's
done well, not assume that the
agrees with one character more author or director or producer
Whereas, I suppose I would than another.
music. imagine that's harder to do in
No, I'm thinking [INAUDIBLE]
Souls." It's not going after the outrage
of what happened as much as the feeling of loss and the people
left behind.
layered because you have, John But the music, certainly, is
have moments where his essential Adams was a minimalist, and you
very tonal, very beautiful minimalism comes through in a
chorus make about how they loved sounds of the children and the
apple of our eye, as I said, these people and he was the
and then at the same time, the cliched things that are so true,
and in gigantic volume and it's orchestraterroristic.ly erupts
And so I think he's making his
course, nothing in text that statement about that but, of
the perpetrators of this but will be offensive or go after
the memory of those who were more the people left behind and
So it's an interesting point. But I think you can, certainly
your imagination can go where it
music does to you. wants depending on what the
three of you, I think, because >> I have a question for all
and it's two-part. it's kind a stew of a question,
Nat Geo, I think, and it was Just recently I saw a special on
documentary was done because really interesting the way this
people who were in the buildings they were talking heads of
And it was, of course, a that got out.
about the smoke and horror and reenactment in the building
wall, the drywall, because they couldn't get the door open.
We've heard those stories, but
memory that I can think of, like, oh, that's what those
people looked like. And to your point, Valerie, I
feel like it did become so much about the architecture and the
ash and material flying through the air, but there wasn't this
real up-close connection to people.
And that also threaded through
of these two men that kept this documentary was the story
I think they were with the Port Authority and they kept going up
and going up and going up, and
coming out of the building, and she said I knew he wasn't coming
back and he didn't. And so that is this rhythm
that's tying this whole documentary together is going on
and on about these two men who
there were hundreds, if not wthousands, of heroes that day.h
They really chose to follow these two men that you only see
snapshots of with their kids and
both perish. their family because they did
this idea of the somatic And I think, I'm curious about
thing that happens when we see response that there's a somatic
happen when we see pictures of pictures of people that doesn't
And I think there's actually other things.
really close right now, like an actual physical location in the
brain that creates a somatic
images, of people, of touch. response when we see pictures,
porn works. It does some work, obviously it
does some work. So part 2 or B of this stew is,
I wonder with all the reality shows, and again I have a bad
time line in my head, but I don't remember reality shows
like I do these last 10 years,
stuff going on, but I wonder if there's, since 9/11, if there's
some way that we are
reframing reality to make it not unconsciously, consciously,
watches reality TV shows, whether it's the housewives of
wherever, we don't believe it as
medium that's broadcasting what we need to think about 9/11 that
came to us there. I don't know if there's any
connection. I don't think it's a conspiracy,
but I was just wondering if you can speak to the visual in that
way.
you in particular in terms of the way that that's working in
video, in fine art, and sort of the way we've seen the way
artists use the moving image and
It's kind of open-ended. video shift in the past decade.
know more of the back story, and >> I think ideally, ideally we
story, of course reality so if we know more of the back
We do have several outlets of tnews that do occasionally, if.
they do their job, give us the
response to something. back story which can govern our
TV I think that we know those things are doctored in this big
way.
with things that are not And so how do we deal, then,
And I think sometimes that's why doctored?
like the people actually falling we don't want to see things,
I think in many ways, at least out.
that hard. in art, we don't want it to bite
really tell us something truly There are very few works that
We don't necessarily want that awful.
I think what's interesting is that in my research thinking
about this relationship between composers and writing and
response to war and noticing
atonality, this was on it's way that,before World War I.alism,
-- was already beginning to establish so that certain things
were happening irrespective of
But I think that this idea of reality television, which has
become so prevalent in the last 10 years, is obviously a
response to the fact that we're able to witness events in a
different way than we could, you
the '40s if you went to the hmovies or something like that.n
You got caught up after the event.
Now we're being taken to these
happening, and I think that has created a world, it has lead to
this idea of reality experience,
it is an --, I think, of the way even if it's fake, the idea of
through the media. we perceive events in the world
been perceiving events. AndWasn't it interesting?ady
My wife and I were in California, turned on the TV and
you heard this, from more than
science fiction movie is this? one person, saying that, what
think what were you watching and When you first turned it on, you
It took me a long time, by the then all of the sudden.
piece of science fiction. wa>> Yeah, that's the response a
that I had heard over and over
this, so many people saying they again when I was reading up for
film when they saw the footage thought it was a bad fantasy
our only context for that sort of the towers because that was
films that exploited violence of imageand explosions.ollywood
And so, to see the reality of it
our sense of what reality could suddenly, Ilook like.did change
I'm also thinking back to what you were saying.
The only person who really dealt
level, was Spike Lee with with tKatrina.n on a filmic
Which was this awful thing to sit through it even is just
dramatic because it's four discs
It's nine hours worth of film. or something.
digestible. And about the Holocaust, there
was show which was equally as difficult to watch as Spike
Lee's show. >> But people will watch nine
straight hours of "The Real Housewives of New Jersey" or
something.
It's much easier. It's much easier.
There's not doubt that
entertainment is much more
things that are trying to get at easily digestible than these
And it may just be a what's worst about mankind.
our increasingly pervaded, our coincidence of timing that in
right now, and real time media, that our sense of what is real
or what's really happening right
We used to think of stars as is different.
months ago and that ended up in pa magazine and then we readew
about it a few months later.
so from "Real Housewives" have Now, it's like, well, did so and
We interact with those her baby yet?
second cousins or something, characters as if they are our
living in the same time continuum as we are, which, in a
way, they are.
months lag time. Although, I think it's several
that "Survivor" started just I think the coincidence also is
the same time, and was so much after 9/11 or soon after, around
any other reality show had been that everybody else said oh, myn
god, look at how much money we
At the very beginning of your comment, though, you had a note
about how few faces or actual human victims we have associated
with all of that footage, and it
guys were killed or disappeared stafterward, all we really hadd
were all those images of, and we
victims being pulled out very often, if they were they were
quite covered up, there became
of the firefighters and of the this sort of grand lionization
I don't know. In my lifetime I haven't seen
anything like that. And we didn't see that with the
first responders in Katrina.
absence of any other faces to Blook at, we looked at what wehe
could human-wise, and that was
It was way more complicated with Katrina because some of
them weren't so blatantly heroic.
I was very moved by the fact
our communications capabilities, that because of the immediacy of
degrees of separation, this event happened in New York and
yet the entire nation, well for obvious reasons the entire
nation would be affected by it, but across the country people
were directly, personally,
And I was scheduled to do a concert that week, an outdoor
concert, and I had a big
continue the concert or cancel decision to make whether to
raise money for the Red Cross. it, and I chose to do it and
romantic concert of the music of And since it was a very late
like "Va Pensiero" became, Verdi which dealt so much with,
anthem, and so much of Verdi's practically, Italy's national
political backdrop so it wasn't a flippant kind of concert to
do. But when I got to the rehearsal,
my cellist was deeply upset and I said, did you know someone?
And he said when I'm not playing
financial markets. the cello, I work in the
was working for, and he said so my colleagues were in the Worlde
Trade Center and we talk every
And he said it was just unbelievable.
He said this guy called me in tower two and says this plane
just struck tower one, and of course a little while later,
this person lost their life in
But the cell phone conversations the other tower.
kind of immediate, that could frohave never happened in theat
second world war or probably not
that this immediacy is able to even to the extent in Vietnam
various ways of communicating which changes so that people
felt connected in a way.
the question is, were we? >And I don't have answer fornd
that. Like, on the one hand, yes, of
course we must have been more connected because we felt we
were. But I also feel connected, some
people feel connected to "The Real Housewives of New Jersey"
and are they? [LAUGHTER]
It is this curious
situation. phenomenon of our current media
But isn't that one of the things that art does, that it
allows us to feel connected and to make connections.
To make connections.
the artist is not to make these >> connections but that's the of
wonderful thing about art is it allows those connections to be
made whether they were intended or not.
Last night here, there was a
who have exhibits and they were dsaying we weren't political.s
We were doing art that turned out to be sort of political, but
we did not have discussions about politics.
We were doing art.
thing about art and why it's so And I thinkpowerful.he wonderful
And I'm so sorry to have to kind of bring us to a close
here, but I think that leaves us
the connections that art brings in a very gooto us.e in terms of
And I just want to remind you again of a photography reception
downstairs at the Playhouse Gallery that is featuring the
work of three Wisconsin photographers that is reflecting
on 9/11 that will be, I think,
whatever. But if you have time and want to
stop by today, that would certainly work well.
Thank you, again, to our
afternoon of reflection and panelisremembrance.special
Thanks to the panelists from all
Downs, Louise Cainkar, Charles three sessions: John Hall, Don
DeMain, Valerie Laken, and Jane Cohen, AsifSimon.ishi, John
We really appreciate your taking
afternoon. the time to connect with us this
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