Monthly Archive for February, 2010

A casual walk along lower Broadway in downtown Nashville will take you past Printer’s Alley, along the Ryman Auditorium (legendary home of the Grand Ole Opry) and smack dab in front of the talent boards of the tourist honky-tonks offering down home country music. You are not likely to see the name Krzysztof Penderecki anywhere here promoting the evening’s entertainment.

But just one block south and across the street from the Country Music Hall of Fame you will find the Schermerhorn Symphony Center, new home of the Nashville Symphony.

At the end of January, Krzysztof Penderecki from Krakow, Poland came to Nashville to conduct the orchestra in a concert of his own music, as well as the Sixth Symphony of Shostakovich. The obverse of such an unlikely convergence of musical cities might be Taylor Swift singing at the Bayreuth Festival in Germany.

But Nashville boasts a resident opera company, a ballet company and a symphony orchestra that, like the Louisville Symphony in the 50s and 60s, records contemporary cutting edge classical music, their contract being for the English Naxos label. The Nashville Symphony’s recording of Joan Tower’s “Made in America” was honored with three Grammys, including classical album of the year.

Naxos.com – Tower link

The orchestra has also recorded music by American centenarian Elliott Carter whose 101st birthday was one of my blog subjects last December.

Naxos.com – Carter link

“Happy Birthday, Mr. Carter: Centennial Plus One” blog link

Much like Hollywood, the world capital of movies, Nashville is the capital of country music. Sixteenth and Seventeenth Avenues South, familiarly called “Music Row,” boast more recording studios than Hollywood does soundstages. But this human-scaled city, dubbed the “Athens of the South,” is a true cultural nexus and it is somehow fitting that a maverick in the classical music world like Krzysztof Penderecki would be conducting the resident symphony orchestra.

The Nashville Symphony was founded in 1920. The longest serving music director was Kenneth Schermerhorn. He died in 2005 after leading that orchestra for 22 seasons; the new symphony hall is named after him. Schermerhorn did not live to conduct the inaugural concert; he died the year before.

Krzysztof Penderecki is the most prolific and controversial of the twentieth century Polish composers who constitute what is often called the “Polish Renaissance.” Not since Chopin in the nineteenth century has Poland occupied such a prominent place in the world of classical music. There have been many great Polish performing soloists this past century but major international recognition of its composers has been somewhat elusive.

Four composers who constitute this Renaissance are the subjects of a volume of Phaidon Press’ Twentieth Century Composers series:

Amazon.com A Polish Renaissance (20th-Century Composers) link

This well-illustrated book documents the individual lives and works as well as the creative intersections of four 20th century Polish masters: Andrzej Panufnik and Witold Lutoslawski were born within a year of each other just before WWI; they were teachers and mentors to the next generation of Penderecki and Henryk Gorecki, both born in 1933. These four men, different in style and thematic inclinations, share several traits that give their music a common visceral connection. Foremost of these is the strong centuries-old tradition of Polish folk music; a close second is the shared culture and musical traditions of their Catholic religious faith. And on a secular level, the tragic fate of Poland in twentieth century political upheavals has also imprinted common markers on these two generations of composers. Nazi occupation during the Second World War, followed by that of the Stalinist and post-Stalinist USSR, left Polish music with fragmented, erratic connections and influences in the realm of mid-twentieth century European modernism. But when a cultural thaw began in the late Fifties, Penderecki was ready to express in a creative torrent all the repressed and conflicting streams awash in mid-twentieth century music.

Krzysztof Penderecki shot to prominence when three of his pieces were submitted anonymously in 1959 to a young composers competition hosted by the League of Polish Composers—he won all three awards. Shortly after, a composition originally titled 8′ 37″ (an homage to John Cage’s notorious 4′33″) brought international recognition. In its revised title, Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, it became a concert house staple not only because of its dedicatory title, but for the ferocious new voice it introduced into staid concert halls, one that thrilled as much as it shocked. The piece, scored for 52 string instruments, has none of the lyricism one associates with the string section of the orchestra; it often sounds more like the “kitchen,” the percussionists who strike, rasp, and throttle their piercing instruments. The demands placed on the strings in this piece not only challenged the players’ skills but often placed the survival of the instruments themselves in jeopardy. Many musicians objected to tormenting their beloved instruments with this music, but such revolutionary sound soon became a barometer of just how modern an orchestra could be. Penderecki spoke of this search for new voicings on traditional instruments in a 2000 interview with Chicago musicologist Bruce Duffie:

You know, the problem for all composers, not only for me, is that we have to use instruments, which were built 300 years ago. The newest instrument in the orchestra, maybe, is the saxophone, but it’s over 100 years old now…. What can you expect after what we have done in the fifties and sixties with all the old instruments? Our experimenting with strings, using also some elements of electronics but not with electronic instruments, trying to transcribe the sound, which I heard in a studio and adapted for the instruments in Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. It doesn’t sound like a string orchestra, but it is a string orchestra. If you go one step farther, you will destroy the instrument, of course. I almost did. [Laughter.] I remember in the sixties many orchestras went on strike and refused to play my music because I developed new techniques.

Penderecki’s music employed none of the sometimes-acerbic serialism of Schönberg, Berg and Webern, but went off in a new direction entirely, dissonant but not rigid in ideology, passionate and ferocious, yet with moments of a harsh lyricism that seemed to burst forth out of nowhere. Here is a performance of this landmark piece, the video displaying photos of the Enola Gay and the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. While Penderecki never intended the music to be strictly programmatic, its painful wildness does eloquently reflect the tragedy of that terrible day. At 1:25 when the photo of “Little Boy” appears, there is a first hint of the percussive string sound that returns full force at 6:40. One minute after that, appears a photo of Penderecki:

The most extreme reaches of Penderecki’s early style, massed unison strings, tone clusters and microtones running amok in ferocious dissonant competition with an array of percussion devices, reaches its apex with the still early composition Polymorphia. Here is a YouTube video that captures the most disturbing dark suggestions of that music. The video artist Saki666Dark, whose other work on his own website you may not want to see, captures the heart of a haunted civilization awash in terror. After listening to this you are certain to recognize this composer’s work, even though you may not have previously known his name:

You may remember the unique sound of Penderecki’s music from film soundtracks as early as 2001: A Space Odyssey. The scene presented here from The Shining is just one of many where Stanley Kubrick used compositions of Penderecki, rather than original score:

Here is another scene from The Shining that features Penderecki’s “The Dream of Jacob,” a composition from 1974:

The Shining uses six separate Penderecki compositions. William Friedkin’s The Exorcist employs at least five. David Lynch for Wild at Heart and Inland Empire chose other pieces. One of the most recent filmmakers to use Penderecki’s music is Alfonso Cuaron in Children of Men; he chose the Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima. Penderecki has also composed original music for films, most notably Alain Resnais’ 1968 Je T’aime, Je T’aime. A review of his IMDB page will give you a more complete listing:

IMDB.com Krzysztof Penderecki link

In an old interview Penderecki expressed his avowed goal as a composer this way: “All I’m interested in is liberating sound beyond all tradition.” As an artist he has embraced no system or ideology. His music simply sounds like that of no other contemporary composer. Because he has avoided the tenets of the Second Viennese School, of Aleatory and Cagean composition, of electronic music, of the Minimalism of Riley, Glass and Reich, as well as the intellectual structures of Carter, Boulez and Wuorinen, he has been labeled with some validity, a maverick. And there is little doubt that the political and cultural isolation of Poland during and after WWII has enabled his entire generation to find their individual voices rather than adhering to an existing style. Here is a brief biography that will give you a sense of the political scene in Poland as Penderecki came of age:

musicianguide.com Penderecki biography link

It also provides one of the clearest explanations of Penderecki’s technical acumen:

Penderecki filled his works with dissonant threads, atonal melodies, microtones (quarter tones and three-quarter tones), and the quarter-tone cluster, in which notes are, grouped a quarter-step apart. He also juxtaposed highest and lowest possible notes and inserted moments of music with an indeterminate pitch. At times, the string section would emit eerie notes, produced by partial string vibrations that are known as whistling harmonics. Sirens, silences, and snapping fingers were also part of these early works.

But just a few years later there appeared the beginnings of a change in his compositions. A Stabat Mater that was later incorporated into his St. Luke Passion ended with a traditional major chord; it proved to be the start of an exploration of classical tonality. It was akin to an Indy race driver deciding to drive a Chevy off the showroom floor. This new direction became apparent when he began a parallel career as an orchestra conductor in 1971. Early on he concentrated mainly on his own works, but by 1974 he had included a broad range of compositions beyond his own. His concerts with international orchestras drew upon the standard, largely 19^th century repertory; this established canon must have had some influence on his evolving ideas of a still untapped potential within the tradition of classical tonality. Here is an excerpt of Penderecki conducting part of the first movement of Mendelssohn’s “Scottish Symphony.” At 75, his energy is remarkable. He conducts without a baton and uses his left hand as much as his right, a singular style:

Concurrent with this plunge into tonality was Penderecki’s embrace of then out of favor classical form works such as the symphony and concerto. His Second Symphony from 1980, though modern in sound, was the beginning of an ongoing inquiry into the value of the classical symphony. He has now composed eight symphonies, one number short of those left to us by Beethoven, Dvorak, Bruckner, and Mahler. He has not yet indicated whether he will write a ninth symphony, a dangerous bridge to approach for any composer susceptible to the “Beethoven Curse.” Always prolific, Penderecki has composed concertos for cello, violin, viola, flute, clarinet, horn and piano, a distinctly retrograde venture into another traditional genre, but one that has thrilled its many soloist dedicatees. One of the most famous of these is cellist/conductor Mstislav Rostropovich who played in the world premiere of Penderecki’s Sextet in June of 2002. Penderecki also has embraced chamber music in the last twenty years, and with considerable passion. Here is a rehearsal and discussion of the Sextet by its players, at the Musicverein Hall in Vienna. Penderecki is present, seen giving notes at the conclusion of the video:

Surprising to many listeners is that, in a sonic world that lends itself easily to dissonant scores in horror films, much of Penderecki’s music also reflects the deep convictions of faith of his Roman Catholicism. The history of post WWII Poland and its struggle for a return to democracy is inseparable from the role of the Catholic Church, even to the extent of their being a first Polish Pope. The Polish Requiem, completed in 1984 and commissioned by Solidarity and Lech Walesa, became a clarion for national identity and a testimony of the oppression and pain of the Polish people through most of the twentieth century. Here is an excerpt from the Dies Irae/Tuba Mirum section. It is from a 1988 television broadcast and both picture and sound quality are not first-rate. But it is amazing to see and hear what a stylistic transversal Penderecki has made from the early works.

Many of these choral works reflect Penderecki’s intense interest in vocal polyphony from the early sixteenth century. The first question Duffie asks him in the interview is: “What is it about the human voice that intrigues you?” Penderecki’s response is simple: “I think it’s the most beautiful instrument ever created.” In his constant search for “new instruments it is clear that Penderecki has found that the human voice with its extreme range and flexibility, especially as he merges it with traditional instruments, provides the most varied and complex sound imaginable, and it is always the “sound” that he seeks to discover.

The complete Duffie conversation with Penderecki can be found here:

Bruce Duffie interview with Penderecki link

Penderecki had long avoided composing a piano concerto as the shadows cast by Bartok, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich were long. He was working on a lighter piece, a Capriccio, when the World Trade Towers were struck. That same day he composed a deeply moving chorale theme and set about to revise the Capriccio. It grew into a profound lament on the tragedy, though he did not want it to be solely a threnody like his earlier work for the victims of Hiroshima. Here is what he has said about the origin of the work:

The conception of the concerto changed completely, I wrote a darker, more serious work. The title Resurrection should be understood in a wider, symbolic and universal context. It stems from the chorale that crowns the work and is a symbol of life’s victory over death, of faith bringing consolation. I composed the chorale straight after the tragedy in New York. It was a purely human move, and at the same time a gesture of protest against cruelty.

He has revised the concerto a number of times. It is the most recent incarnation of the work that he conducted in Nashville with long-time collaborator Douglas Barry at the piano. It is an intensely emotional piece and is written on a symphonic scale, the piano part being first among equals in the Brahms mode. Perhaps this is a closeted ninth symphony. Here is a performance of the opening minutes of an earlier version than the one performed in Nashville:

Not many critics speak of Penderecki’s orchestration and tonal colors with the same reverence that they do of Ravel’s and Bartok’s, but in its far-flung daring it goes beyond even them in originality and audacity.

But it is this later revisionist style that has won him many new listeners and has alienated just as many modernists. They feel he has all but abandoned his early promise by embracing a shopworn school of tonality, however imaginative. My own feeling is that this is the kind of criticism that is always dished out by so-called “purists,” literalists who don’t feel an artist is free to develop and change as he matures in whatever way he finds compelling. Anyone who listens closely to Penderecki’s music of the past 35 years will discern still the legacy of that early sonic revolution of the late 50s and early 60s; it was made by a young “Turk” intoxicated with sound itself and with the potential of what yet unexploited sounds could be made by instruments that had been the mainstay of the Western musical canon for centuries.

ONE

In early December this modest sized painting by contemporary German artist Gerhard Richter was hanging on the wall opposite the second floor escalator of New York’s Museum of Modern Art. It was donated to the institution by the artist and by collector John Hage.

Richter began to paint it in 2003, became frustrated at his inability to render what he wanted on the canvas, nearly destroyed it, finally found a breakthrough, and finished it in time for an exhibition of his work at the Marion Goodman Gallery on 57th St., Manhattan, in 2005. Two years later it became part of the museum’s extensive holdings of Richter’s work—holdings whose breadth had been confirmed by a 2002 catalog and retrospective curated by Robert Storr:

When I first looked at this painting I was inclined to put it within the context of his most recent work; much of that work has shown a figurative image that has been subsequently smeared over with a topical paint layer. Richter’s purely abstract paintings, on the other hand, portray a rich blending of colors alone, traces of the underlying paint layers appearing as a pentimento bleeding through to the surface. Some critics have likened this style to drawing a squeegee across a wet surface. Here are two paintings similar in technique to “September,” companion months in a suite: “November” and “December.”

A slideshow of these sensuous abstract works recently exhibited at his New York City gallery can be seen here:

Marian Goodman Gallery link

Richter often has begun his figurative paintings by projecting photographs culled from newspapers, magazines and found sources, then tracing and painting the image onto the primed canvas, letting it dry, then scraping much of it away. The exposed raw surface allows the texture and unevenness of the linen canvas to be visible through the paint. Here is a description of the technique from a Wikipedia article:

His hallmark “blur”—sometimes a softening by the light touch of a soft brush, sometimes a hard smear by an aggressive pull with his squeegee—has two effects: 1. It offers the image a photographic appearance, and 2. Paradoxically, it testifies the painter’s actions, both skilled and coarse, and the plastic nature of the paint itself. In some paintings blurs and smudges are severe enough to disrupt the image; it becomes hard to understand or believe. The subject is nullified. In these paintings, images and symbols (such as landscapes, portraits, and news photos) are rendered fragile illusions, fleeting conceptions in our constant reshaping of the world.

Richter has consistently displayed a very eclectic range of techniques and styles, moving freely throughout his career from figurative to abstract works, sometimes interspersed with more formal geometric, color scale works that are reminiscent of the Bauhaus instructor Johannes Itten, or of Piet Mondrian.

This broad scope has made it almost impossible to categorize or even to predict what he may attempt to do next. His Cologne studio and home are organized like a corporate office, his eclectic research carefully catalogued and filed, always ready as source material for any embryonic idea. A 1997 book called Atlas illustrates a small sample of the thousands of images he collects, saves and uses in his work.

There is a review from a 2003 exhibition of work from Atlas at London’s Whitechapel Gallery where after a discussion of this collected ephemera being a window into the artist’s visual musings, the writer seems disappointed that the source material is not of itself artistic enough. I wonder what reaction he would have on seeing Beethoven’s rough sketchbooks. You can see thumbnails of the ever-growing compendium of Atlas on Richter’s website:

Gerhard Richter.com link

TWO

But the essay this week is about the single painting, “September.” Here it is again:

The fact that I am familiar with Richter’s painting led me to read this work at first as a somewhat bucolic image. When I quickly realized what it truly represented I was so taken aback that I sent an email to about 25 friends asking what their “take” on it was. Here are some of the replies:

1. This is a very soothing image to me, reminding me of the gentle lapping of a deep lake with the sun reflecting and playing with the surface.

2.  Architectural, head of a column on a public building.  That’s not a reading—just a guess about the point of departure for the visual.

3.  My first impression is for the down side of Sept; it represents the ‘raw’ aspect of the month.  I do like its back-and-forth sense of movement and the feeling of reflection (actual and figuratively).  There is a sweep of wind and chill—maybe a little depression—which may be the reality of the season in his country.  It’s a ‘thumbs up’.  What are your other folks saying?  Is anyone else saying anything about a hit of ’shark fins’?

4.  For me it inspires ideas of the woods and the sea combined. I see trees and the texture of smooth trees, like birch. I also ‘see’ the ocean, and sea life like dolphins, swimming. Do you now think I’m crazy? Just joking. It’s lovely and peaceful.

5.  My reading of the “painting” is of a young man or woman facing away from a screen door damaged by a storm but is facing the unseen damage inside.

6.  Well, at first I thought it was an abstract reflection of a boat on the water.  But the longer I looked at it I began to feel something destructive and disturbing and began to imagine the debris exploding from the first impact into the twin tower.

7.  I admit that it took me a while to realize that this was not a reflection in water, as I initially thought. The colors seemed so familiar and the patterns looked like ripples on a lake. Soon I realized that I was looking at the first tower collapsing, on 9/11. The foreground “smudges” reminded me of a view from behind a window that is being washed, and we are waiting for the rubber blade to remove the soapy liquid so we can get a crystal-clear view. This is not meant to happen though… We are left with an image which is abstract enough to invite us to project our own memory of those images. Isn’t it funny that the more abstract the painting is, the more powerful our projection can be? Is it a smudged window? An obscured window to our soul, still trying to decipher why that happened? A trick to astonish us by how embedded these images are in our minds ?

Perhaps you read right away that the September of the title is, in fact, September 11, 2001 and, yes, the painting is a rendering from a photograph. It is the south tower of the World Trade Center, partly hidden in smoke from the already hit north tower, just as United Flight 175 struck it at 9:03 a.m. At that same moment Gerhard Richter and his wife, Sabine, were over the North Atlantic on Lufthansa flight 408 from Cologne, en route to New York City; he was scheduled to be at the opening of an exhibition of his new paintings at Marian Goodman Gallery two days later. When the FAA closed off air space over the United States, their flight, like dozens of others, landed in Halifax, Nova Scotia. They returned home the day of the postponed opening. Four years later Richter finally painted “September.”

Earlier this year, Richter’s friend, writer/curator Robert Storr, wrote a small book that took its title from the painting. Its four chapters document the events of that day, and the creation of the painting. In an intimate and deeply felt writing style, Storr moves beyond art criticism in describing his and his family’s shocked witness to the tragedy:

September 11, 2001, was the first day of fall classes for my two daughters. My wife walked them to school at seven forty-five. I remained at home. Twenty minutes later after I finished the New York Times and sat down to write, the windows next to my desk shuddered and I felt a distant concussion.

The part of Brooklyn near the Brooklyn Battery Tunnel where his family lived was downwind of the site, and soon debris and paper, falling like snow, covered their neighborhood. He and his wife hurried to their daughters’ school:

When we arrived, a number of students were running hysterically through the hallways. We found our daughters in the school’s lobby. Our nine year-old was distraught because the mother of her best friend was a senior staffer of the New York and New Jersey Port Authority that had built and still operated the WTC. “All there was, was smoke,” the youngest remembered. “People were taking pictures and they were just pictures of smoke.”

The personal family memory of this horrendous day, written by a prestigious critic of Manhattan’s art world, and presented here within the context of an essay of art criticism, resonates deeply for me. Too often, when in museums and galleries we “appreciate” art only in terms of its formal properties, when in fact what often deeply affects us is the way that art can reflect the turmoil and tribulation of the real world, even as it appeals to our aesthetic sense. This of course is readily apparent to us when we are looking at photography, an art that is a more immediate simulacrum of the “real world.” But think, conversely, of Picasso’s “Guernica,” a stylized painting that nonetheless shrieks its very human message of agony:

Later in the day, as smoke and ash cover his neighborhood, Robert Storr seals off the windows in his house; they remain sealed for six months. He walks out to the garden:

The ground was covered with airborne litter. Most of the bits and pieces of paper were from business manuals and spreadsheets. One that I picked up was a page from a history of the Civil War dealing with the Battle of Antietam.

Someone, one of the near 3000 dead across the river, had a scholar’s interest in the Civil War. I wonder if, of all the stories and news reports of that day heard by Richter, if his friend Storr told him about this single piece of paper.

THREE

The second chapter of Storr’s book discusses the historical, political and cultural consequences of that day and how alien the concept of terror and jihad is to the American experience. The last chapter of the book places the painting within the context of Richter’s other political work, such as the Baader-Meinhof paintings of the late 80s, which document the putative suicides on 18 October 1977, of three members of this German “Gang”. The Baader-Meinhof site has videos and historical background for anyone not acquainted with the social disruption in Germany at this time:

Baader-Meinhof.com link

Storr explains that ever since his childhood the presence of terror was true-life experience for Richter. He was born in Dresden and was witness to the horror show of the Allied bombing of the city near the end of WWII:

The inner city of Dresden was largely destroyed by 800 RAF and USAAF bombers that let loose 650,000 incendiaries and 8,000 lb high explosives and hundreds of 4,000 lb bombs in three waves of attacks—approximately one bomb for every two people. (Wikipedia)

Richter grew up in a postwar, devastated and slowly re-building East Germany, its grim skylines dominated by East-block Stalinist architecture; he escaped to the West only a few weeks before the building of the Berlin Wall. It is no wonder, given the chaos and uncertainty of his early life, that political and terror themes are found in so much of his figurative work. Perhaps, the purely abstract work is a refuge, a balm from the dark realities he found around him. So, even though he is not an American and does not live in New York City, it is easy to understand why he decided to make the painting “September,” and why its final realization four years after the event, was so difficult for him. Much of this history is presented in the final chapter of Storr’s book. This moving and insightful memoir is currently out of print (it was printed in a small run) but has been available directly through the Goodman Gallery.

A few days before the opening of the major MOMA retrospective in February of 2002, the New York Times Magazine ran a cover story on Richter, written by its art critic Michael Kimmelmann. If you are interested in more human insight into this often-enigmatic artist, here is the link:

The New York Times Magazine article link

For an artist who seems both in his person and in his work to be quite private, Richter has been most articulate in print about the role of the artist in the political and social chaos of our times. Many of his writings and interviews have been collected in a 600-page tome titled simply, Gerhard Richter: Writings (1961-2007):

Amazon.com Gerhard Richter: Writings link

In a 2005 Spiegel magazine interview included in the book, Richter addresses the difficulty of painting “September,” even after having made numerous studies and drawings:

These are only failed attempts. I couldn’t get this stereotypical image of the two towers, with the smoke billowing out of them across the deep blue sky, out of my mind. Finally, I tried to paint it, but it didn’t lead anywhere. Even while I was painting, this was the wrong approach.

He almost painted over and recycled the canvas as he had done before with work he found unsatisfactory. He did scrape it nearly clean, but found a solution when he painted over it, muting the yellow fireball, then applied a squeegeed layer of paint over the image of the towers. This painting was saved only when collector John Hage convinced Richter to let him buy half interest in it. Richter could not destroy the canvas without Hage’s permission. This anecdote embodies the personal ambivalence that must have stirred within Richter. How could one modest sized work, almost lost in the ongoing rush of this prolific artist’s works, presume to make a statement about so evil an act especially when most “historical” paintings have been larger in scale, grander in concept? Later in this same interview Richter addresses evil in the human psyche:

What fascinates me, and shocks me, of course, is that this ability to imagine, which has so much power, which can unleash such passion, and spur us on and motivate us to accomplish incredible things, can also lead to the most terrible crimes. But there’s one area where this fanaticism can be thoroughly expressed without harming anyone—the world of art.

FOUR

On Richter’s website there is a nineteen minute video of Robert Storr talking about “September” and how it “fits” in the greater body of “historical” painting, as well as in the scheme of Richter’s work. The interview was made in the offices of Richter’s Manhattan gallery.

Gerhard Richter.com video link

I want to end this reflection on one of the darkest moments in American history as rendered in a single painting by one of our most important art chroniclers, by linking to a video from September 11. This amateur video was posted on the event’s fifth anniversary, in 2006, by the couple who recorded it from the windows of their 36th floor apartment, located only 500 yards from the towers. The video is 26 minutes long and except for a few camera stops, it unfolds in real time with none of the editorial juxtapositions, voiceover commentary or music tracks that have turned this horrific event into another media document. It is the lived experience of two people, Bob and Bri, who decided after several years’ difficult consideration to make it public. Richter’s deliberation whether or not to finish and release “September” must pall in comparison to theirs. And the raw footage itself overwhelms any further discussion.

September 11, 2001: What We Saw… video link