I have just put my final lecture to bed. This term has zoomed by. I can�t believe that tomorrow is the last day of class. It will be something of a marathon day, however. After class, I have office hours followed by a review session that will run until at least 6 p.m., after which two wonderful friends are having dinner with me if I�m still awake, a third friend will try attempt to inebriate me afterwards and I should roll home before the last train. I hope.

The last lecture for a course is always tricky. I�m always left feeling like there are a million more things to say, but of course all anyone really cares about at that point is not flunking the final. Because the class decided to take the final early and the fact that Monday is a holiday, we effectively lost a week of the course, so there are still composers and works to be covered. But I also need to feel like there is some closure.

Closure is tricky, as it can be problematic. History, of course, has no closure. You can�t wrap it up in a package �nice and neat,� as AJ likes to say (it is a phrase from a Curious George book that has infiltrated his everyday idioms). Although strangely, as I looked back to my first day of the course, I am actually back where I began. I started the course by playing some of Steve Reich�s early tape loop pieces, then some later composed phase music, and then on into �Different Trains,� written for string quartet and taped voices. It�s an interesting way of looking at the development of text into rhythm rhythm and pitch and speech into composed works. Their textbook ends with Reich�s Tehillim, to which I�m adding a recap of tape loops and some other minimalists, Philip Glass, John Adams.

As I was in the record store on Monday, surfing the perennially randomly arranged classical section for a recording of the Alban Berg violin concerto (I met with success behind a sign for Albinoni � perhaps they alphabetized by his first name? But no, right behind him was John Adams �On the Transmigration of Souls,� the one that one the Pulitzer Prize in 2003, the one that was commissioned to commemorate 9/11.

I love John Adams� Nixon in China and Harmonium. But I certainly don�t feel that way about all his music, and I had my doubts about Transmigration from what I�d read about it. I put on the headphones to listen for myself. I heard feet pounding on the sidewalk, traffic noises and then, a child�s voice: �Missing.� Then the reading of the names begins over a wash of choral sound. I found the work profoundly moving. I stood listening, transfixed by the simplicity of it all. It reminded me more than anything of Maya Lin�s Viet Nam memorial.

The thing is, I�m still not sure I really like it as a piece of music � structurally, formally, intellectually. But as an emotional gesture, it is very convincing. And really, why does music need to be intellectual and formal all the time? The music lends tremendous power to the simple reading of a name. It is so terribly clear that this is not a roll call.

Adams has chafed at the label �requiem� or �memorial� for this piece, preferring to call it a �memory space.� His term suggests a transience that the former terms do not, a moment of silence rather than an eternal flame. This is not a piece of text carved in marble. It is a piece made up of messages written on small pieces of paper taped to telephone poles, later destroyed by wind and rain. Its very materials are ephemera � were ephemera, rightly, as they are gone now.

Despite the ephemeral qualities, however, the recorded city noises that play at various points in the piece anchor it in a different way. They are, in a sense, the eternal urban. Grief, rather than confined to a memorial plaza is located in the many footsteps and in the cars passing by. It is as if the names and fragments � such as �a gold chain around his neck, a silver ring��, �it was a beautiful day� � �height: 5�11�, Eye color: hazel�� � are the collective memory of the city. Which is, it seems to me, an accurate assessment. Even those of us living elsewhere with no links to relatives poured over the NY Times �Portraits of Grief� until we could take no more.

I realize now that I have scarcely talked of the music itself. And perhaps that is its chief virtue � to allow the texts to speak. The texts are remarkable and unremarkable. They are powerful in their very ordinariness.

This is, then, the perfect piece to end the course with, because in its focus on texts and in its specific function as a memorial (or �memory space�), it has, perhaps, more in common aesthetically with the plainchant where the main part of the course began than with anything since. It also makes an interesting counterpoint to the challenging atonal composers like Ligeti and Xenakis that we�ll also be discussing. But most importantly, the seniors in my class arrived on campus just a few days after 9/11/01. The event has shaped their college experience. Perhaps knowing that it has shaped music too will have some resonance with them.

0 people said it like they meant it