Sorrow and Solace: How Classical Music Bridges the Generational Divide on 9/11
September 2, 2026
By Lawrence Toppman
As I sat in the sanctuary of St. Peter’s Episcopal Church Tuesday night, listening to the opening performance in the 7th Street Concerts season, I realized the terrorist attack of September 11, 2001 can have no personal meaning for anyone under 30.
For them, it has become a historical event as distant as the Korean War for me or World War I for my father: something that took place not long before their birth and is to be commemorated with respect but without emotional attachment. I’d guess many young people aren’t quite sure what year the assault known as “9/11” took place.
For those of us who lived through that time of destruction, panic and rage, however, the upcoming 25th anniversary brings a flood of memories. “The Day the Music Didn’t Stop” stirred those up, broke them down, then assuaged them.
The main job of revival went to Stuart Hoke, a retired Episcopal priest who was serving as executive assistant to the rector of Trinity Church Wall Street when the Twin Towers crumbled a third of a mile away. The chamber musicians who sang and played selections ranging in time from John Dowland to Steve Reich provided a different kind of contemplation.
If this sounds unconventional, that’s the point: This series, which darts around the globe and through many eras musically, has proved delightfully unusual, and not just because of the pre-concert receptions, free parking and chance to snack and converse with artists after the gigs.
I didn’t feel like noshing and chatting Tuesday, because I was processing everything that had bubbled up over the previous 75 minutes. Hoke made the chaos of 9/11 come alive, from the rush of passers-by to presumed safety inside Trinity – perhaps “sanctuary” is a better word – to the shaking of the church walls when the towers fell, creating the equivalent of an earthquake of 4.6 on the Richter scale.
He proudly recalled how these diverse visitors were bound together that day by faith, music and scripture, some of it reassuring and some provocative. They were consoled by the idea they had walked through the valley of the shadow of death, yet stunned to be reminded of Christ’s injunction to love your enemies and pray for those who persecute you. Could that mean the assailants who had just murdered nearly 3,000 people?
We were asked to contemplate the audacity of that idea during intervals of a concert that dealt with sorrow and solace. Reich, who lived four blocks from the towers, wrote a string quartet titled “WTC 9/11” a decade later, and we heard two of its movements. I zoned out during the second (this usually happens to me with Reich) but was moved by the first, which mingled snippets from air traffic and fire department transmissions – blessedly, mostly indecipherable – with string patterns that suggested the stabbing pulse of a disconnected phone or the wail of a distant siren.
No other piece hit the nervous system quite that way. Dowland’s “Lachrimae Antiquae” (“Old Tears”) wore its 17th-century heart on its sleeve, and short works by sisters Lili and Nadia Boulanger offered dreamy and delicate beauty from the second decade of the last century. (Lili’s death at 24 is one of the two greatest gone-too-young tragedies in classical music, the other being Juan Arriaga’s passing at 19.)
We heard the pastoral “Eclogue,” a posthumously published piece by Gerald Finzi for piano and strings, and the first movement from one of Bach’s greatest cantatas, “Ich Habe Genug.” The title means “I Have Enough,” and it refers to the singer’s belief that faith in God provides such fulfillment that he needs nothing more.
The next four movements look joyfully forward to death as a permanent union with the Lord, a blissful sleep for the weary, the letting go of earthly suffering and a release into eternal peace. Had we had time for all of the cantata Tuesday, that might have been a fitting sendoff for the souls who departed this life on 9/11.
