Transcript String Quartet

String Quartet
• What instruments are in a string quartet?
• What other pieces of music have we heard
this week that incorporate spoken voices with
music?
• What was composer Michael Gordon doing
when the planes struck WTC on 9-11?
• Who helped him title his composition?
• A string quartet is a classical ensemble
consisting of 2 violins, a viola and a ‘cello.
Hear Michael Gordon Discuss 'The Sad Park'
• http://www.npr.org/blogs/deceptivecadence/
2011/09/03/140166621/9-11-in-childrensvoices-michael-gordons-the-sad-park
• Gordon also found inspiration in
what happened to him and his
family that sunny 9/11 morning.
After walking his daughter to
kindergarten at P.S. 234, two
blocks north of the World Trade
Center, he was startled by a jet.
• He recalls, "I was just hanging
out in the courtyard of the
school with the other parents,
and basically looked up and saw
this very low-flying plane. And
then, boom.
• Michael Gordon never planned to write a piece of
music based on the events of Sept. 11.
• "I wouldn't have known how to approach this
subject," he says. "I wouldn't have dared approach
this subject. It's huge and I don't think I could have
done it justice."
• But Gordon, one of the co-founders of the new
music collective Bang on a Can, eventually did write
a 9/11 piece, The Sad Park. He found inspiration
amid an unlikely group of commentators — the 3and 4-year-olds who attended a Lower Manhattan
preschool with his son after 9/11.
• "The children would be sitting
around doing what they
normally do, and then all of a
sudden one of them would
burst out something about
9/11, and the others would start
talking," Gordon says. "They
were in there building things. I
remember I would walk in and
they would have rebuilt the
twin towers."
• When Gordon learned his son's
teacher had been taping the
children's comments, he was
fascinated. Gordon made a
digital copy of one of the
cassettes, and proceeded to let
it sit on his desk for several
years. He says, "I used to look at
it, and I was like, 'What am I
going to do with this?'"
• Gradually, Gordon found that the short, song-like
phrases of the preschoolers packed immense power
and emotion. And that's when music started to take
shape in his head — he would manipulate the
children's voices and incorporate them into a piece
for the Kronos Quartet.
• "In the end, I wanted to keep it very simple," he
explains. "I thought, I'm only going to use four lines
that basically tell the story of that morning. The first
line, 'Two evil planes broke in little pieces and fire
came,' that little piece of tape is just slowly
stretched, and it's repeated again and again and
again. And every time it's repeated it's stretched
out. What I found was that as I stretched out the
audio, all this sound started to appear. It slowly
became this symphony of voices, and towards the
end it sounds like there are a thousand people
singing in this huge cry."
• Gordon also found inspiration in what happened to him
and his family that sunny 9/11 morning. After walking his
daughter to kindergarten at P.S. 234, two blocks north of
the World Trade Center, he was startled by a jet.
• He recalls, "I was just hanging out in the courtyard of the
school with the other parents, and basically looked up
and saw this very low-flying plane. And then, boom.
Someone yells out, 'The plane just hit the tower.' I walked
into my daughter's class, told the teacher and picked up
my daughter, and we left and walked north up Greenwich
Street to our house."
Gordon says that as the
composer, he needed to just
disappear when it came to
composing The Sad Park. He
wanted to let the emotion of
the children's voices have
room to breathe. He also
didn't want the music to
embody any big, universal
statement.
• "It's not political," Gordon
says. "This actually happened
to me and my family and my
child, and this in a sense was
just trying to grab on to a tiny
bit of that moment and leave
it as a document."
• And how did Gordon come
up with the work's title?
Another inspiration from a
child. When his son was
asked what the city should
do with Ground Zero, the boy
said: "They should build two
giant jungle gyms, so that
children can play there, and
they should call it the sad
park."
• What instruments are in a string quartet?
• What other pieces of music have we heard
this week that incorporate spoken voices with
music?
• What was composer Michael Gordon doing
when the planes struck WTC on 9-11?
• Who helped him title his composition?