A Musical Response to Terrorism: Michael Gordon’s “The Sad Park”
Hieronymus Bosch, The Last Judgement (detail), 1480, Alte Pinakothek, Munich. Wikiart
There are no words that can fully encompass the enormity of evil. On Saturday, 7 October 2023, Hamas terrorists attacked Israeli communities and brutally slaughtered Jews of all ages, killing more than 1300 people, including also foreign nationals, Muslims, Buddhists and Christians. About 200 hostages were taken back to Gaza. French writer Victor Hugo, author of Les Misérables, once said: “Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.” But can you create a musical response to evil?
Michael Gordon: The Sad Park
On 11 September 2001, composer Michael Gordon dropped of his daughter at her kindergarten two blocks north of the World Trade Centre. It was a sunny morning, and Gordon was chatting to parents in the school yard when he noticed a very low flying plane. Seconds later, the plane had hit the first tower. He rushed into his daughter’s class, picked her up, and took her home.
Gordon had no intention to compose a piece of music dedicated to 9/11. He did not dare to approach this subject, convinced that he would not be able to do it justice. But he noticed that the 3- and 4-year-olds attending his son’s Lower Manhattan preschool after September 11 kept making comments about 9/11 in the middle of playing. He would walk into the room and see how they had rebuilt the twin towers. When he found out that the kids’ teacher had been taping the kids’ comments, he asked for a digital copy of the cassettes.
The cassettes sat on his desk for several years. Over time, Gordon realised that the kids’ sweet voices had an inherent, powerful musicality. Their short phrases about 9/11 had the melodious quality of a simple song. Gordon decided to use just four phrases, chosen for their musicality and their content: Part 1: Two evil planes broke in little pieces and fire came. Part 2: There was a big boom and then there was teeny fiery coming out. Part 3: I just heard that on the news that the buildings are crashing down. Part 4: And all the persons that were in the airplane died. Each sentence became the basis for a separate part. In parts 1 and 3, the recorded sentence is first played at normal speed and then slowed down until the words are blurred into an eery soundscape weaving into the music Gordon composed for the Kronos Quartet, a string quartet. In parts 2 and 4, Gordon used an electronic music technique called granular synthesis, which combines tiny “grains” of the original source with the sounds of the Kronos Quartet, to disturbing effect.
Gordon’s son gave the inspiration for the work’s title. Asked what the city should do with Ground Zero, he responded: “They should build two giant jungle gyms, so that the children can play there, and they should call it the sad park.” The Kronos Quartet premiered the piece on 11 September 2006 in San Francisco, California.