The third segment of Q2's 10-hour Requiem Project mix features suggestions from listeners, compositions explored by producers and WQXR host Annie Bergen, stories from volunteers and artists, and many other pieces that reflect on timeless and universal themes of loss and consolation.

The second segment of Q2's 10-hour Requiem Project mix features suggestions from listeners, compositions from contributing composers including Gavin Bryars and Toby Twining, stories from artists and relatives of 9/11 victims, and many other pieces that reflect on timeless and universal themes of loss and consolation.

The first two hours of Q2's 10-hour Requiem Project mix features suggestions from listeners, compositions from contributing composers Meredith Monk and Ingram Marshall, a work whose U.S. choral premiere took place in The Greene Space at WQXR, stories from writers and religious leaders, and many other pieces that reflect on timeless and universal themes of loss and consolation. 

In 1993 during the period of the AIDS crisis, my friend Tom Bogdan asked me to write a piece for him to sing. As I began working, I realized that this could be the requiem I had always wanted to write -- not with the Latin text, because I didn’t want it to be literally Christian, but a requiem nonetheless.

There are only a few, fleeting moments when one feels instantly thrust in to history. How does a seasoned artist react to such ephemera? In the video below, New York composer David Del Tredici shares Gotham Glory: Missing Towers, his musical mirage of the two ghosts of 9/11 that loom over Ground Zero.

In the process of archiving and digitizing analog tape loops from work I had done in 1982, I discovered some wonderful, sweeping pastoral pieces I had forgotten about. Beautiful, lush, cinematic, truly American pastoral landscapes swept before my ears and eyes. During the transfer process, as each of the loops played round and round on the tape deck, I soon realized the tape loops were disintegrating.

On September 11, 1992, my father wrote a letter to his friends and family, entered the waters of the Massachusetts Bay off Revere Beach and never emerged. Because no body was found, I was not told of this until shortly before September 11, 1999. The time delay both harshened and dulled the news, removing the immediacy while nevertheless leaving a void one can only gain from the loss of a parent. I was entering high school that year, which added to the internal chaos surrounding this, and was still making sense of the news two years later when the planes hit the towers. 

Eighteen years ago, with whole chunks of my address book gutted by AIDS, I attended the first Broadway production of Angels in America. I emerged from the Walter Kerr Theater, the closing scene still lingering in my mind, to face a bitterly cold February night and a sky brilliant with stars. For a moment, like Kushner’s lost housewife, I imagined every friend I had lost as a separate constellation, mapped for me, forever, in a private welkin.

In the days immediately after 9/11, our regular programming on WNYC 93.9 FM was suspended and we were doing wall-to-wall news coverage from NPR’s New York studio in midtown. I had been on the scene that Tuesday morning and was badly shaken by the events; and staying at home with nothing to do was definitely not helping me. So when NPR called to ask if I’d cover a live performance of the Requiem by Gabriel Fauré, and gather some sound from people at the church, I was relieved and grateful.

When Robert Ridgell (organist at Trinity Wall Street Church in New York) asked me for a new work to be commissioned by Trinity Wall Street and for his wonderful Trinity Youth Chorus, I said "Yes." Then Robert told me that this new work would be part of the 9/11 Anniversary and he would appreciate having a requiem.

As we take all the generous musical suggestions you've provided and strive to channel them into a cohesive, fluid stream of music for the 9/11 weekend, we acknowledge a complicated, but inevitable, decision. We have an idea how to proceed; however, we want to hear your thoughts as to the most appropriate, respectful course of action.

As part of Q2's Requiem Project, we're collecting stories from the  New York Public Radio archives to augment the music stream — voices that expand upon the themes in the music, and vice versa.  We recently wondered: what if we blended the two?  We've put together a little audio experiment and we'd like you to evaluate the results.

The requiem that stands out for me is the performance I heard of Brahms’s Ein Deutsches Requiem (A German Requiem) shortly after the attacks of September 11, 2001. The performance was by the New York Philharmonic under the direction of Kurt Masur at Avery Fisher Hall. A collective feeling of wounded angst could be felt as audience-goers entered the auditorium.

It is twelve years since I finished composing Chrysalid Requiem — a setting of the Latin funeral service, plus the "Libera me" and "In paradisum" from the burial service. Rather than the commemoration of someone’s death, I found other reasons for the project. The Latin words sing beautifully, cry for a wildly imaginative setting and resonate with layers of metaphor that suggest a complex musical fabric.

In the early 1960s, I was in summer residence at an “arts camp” called Indian Hill. I was already quite a serious pianist by then, and during those sparkling, sun-dappled days in Stockbridge Massachusetts, I stayed indoors. Day after beautiful day, I pulled down the shades in the piano practice room -- and practiced.  

Ten years ago on September 11, I was on the air here at WQXR from 7 p.m. until midnight. I had been called in at the last minute to cover for my colleague, June LeBell, who had been evacuated from Battery Park City to New Jersey earlier in the day. As I walked to the station that night, I remember how absolutely lost I felt. "What should I say? What should I do? How can we help?" It seemed so illogical to be playing music while television and radio stations all over the city were trying desperately to explain what had happened and to advise us about what to do next.

I last saw my friend and sound engineer Bill Cadman in Paris at the beginning of December 1988 when we had a drink together. On December 21st, Bill and his new girlfriend Sophie were killed in the Lockerbie air crash. I was very badly affected by his death and for some time I found it hard to sleep and had constant nightmares. I wrote an obituary for The Independent newspaper shortly after his death, which helped me quite a lot.

As part of Q2's Requiem Project, we've been searching the NYPR archives for voices that offer perspective on 9/11 and help us better understand the world in which we now live. The stories that immediately stood out to me were of the volunteers who for months helped feed, clothe and comfort the people working at the site. "We have to understand that their existence in millions for each evil act is what keeps us going," the late evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould told WNYC's Marianne McCune.

Musicians write requiems for all sorts of reasons. The Connecticut composer Ingram Marshall wrote his seminal tape piece Gradual Requiem in tribute to his father, who had recently died. He explains its significance.