“a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions”

On the Transmigration of Souls

When the New York Philharmonic asked John Adams to create a musical commemoration for the victims of the 9/11 attacks, to be premiered a year after the tragic events, it must have seemed one of the most challenging commissions in the history of music, whether in terms of subject, timescale or expectations. Adams responded with, On the Transmigration of Souls, a work that is neither an official public memorial, nor a personalised response, but rather what he describes as “a memory space – a place where you can go and be alone with your thoughts and emotions”.