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.

It takes about a full minute before you first hear Redhage sear into her instrument on the opening track, I Dreamed I Was Floating, which starts with an atmospheric ambient sound that carries the listener into a seamless 47 minutes of tracks commissioned and curated by Redhage, representing a cavalcade of bright young composers including Anna Clyne, Wil Smith and Derek Muro. For this week only, grab a free download of the song A Thousand Tongues by Missy Mazzoli.

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.

How exactly do you keep a composition for six 2'x4's from sounding stiff? Find out how Michael Gordon does just that, and get a free download from his new CD this week only.

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.