Speaker: Dr. Kip Pegley (School of Music, Queen’s University)

Samuel Barber’s Adagio for Strings (1936) is the most widely-performed musical work for public mourning in the Western art music repertoire. In this regard, the Adagio has an impressive history: it was played on radio after Roosevelt’s sudden death in '45, then at the funeral of Einstein in '55, during the radio report of J.F.K.’s assassination, and at the funeral of Princess Grace of Monaco, not to mention its performances after the Challenger explosion, the Oklahoma City bombing, and innumerable renditions worldwide after 9/11. Indeed, many listeners know the emotional import of this piece of music: in 2007, when BBC Radio asked its audience to nominate the “saddest piece of music ever written,” Barber’s Adagio received more votes than the other top four pieces combined. But this isn’t what listeners in the 1930s said about the work: reviewers of early Adagio recordings described the work as “dull” and suffering from “thinness of content”; over the 20th century, however, performances of the work and our relationship to it changed so drastically that after a performance by the BBC Orchestra in a Proms concert led by American conductor Leonard Slatkin on September 15, 2001, four days after the 9/11 attacks, one reviewer described the event as “the most emotional night I spent in a concert hall.” What happened to the Adagio that night? Why?

Jean-Luc Nancy describes mourning as the work that gives meaning to death; in doing so, he argues, mourning returns a community to a unified self-identity, separating insiders from outsiders, “us” from “them.” By examining three recordings of the Adagio (Toscanini, 1938; Stokowski, 1958 and Slatkin, 2001), I will explore how the work transformed over a period of seventy years to become, by 9/11, an emotionally-drenched, American anthem of mourning. I argue that when the Adagio was performed on September 15, 2001, the sonic codes sounded intelligible and familiar to modern ears, yet listeners likely were unaware how these grammars were shaped by societal influences that encouraged them to remember particular people in particular ways, resulting in a subtle yet powerful form of political violence.