9/11 Attacks – The Attacks That Affected My Life Well Away From New York

      I keenly call this event the worst terrorist attack ever in American history. Even worse than the famous Unibomber mail bomb attacks, and even worse than the bombing of the parking garage of the World Trade Center that happened in 1993, and still even worse than the  Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995.

       I can remember all of the news footage on TV from different channels from ABC, NBC, and CBS, honing in on the first tower that was hit on 9-11 – which was the North Tower, and saw big plumes of smoke  - more smoke than fire, but I can see some fires from the building itself.

       Then, I was shocked – as well as millions of Americans – when, about 10 minutes after the north tower of the World Trade Center was hit, was that I saw another plane – and as I saw that shape of the plane, I knew it was not a prop, because I did not see any propellers on that plane…..it had wide wings, and as soon as I saw those wings, I can see within those three seconds I saw that plane—from the time I saw the plane zooming into the screen to the time the plane hit the South Tower of the WTC---that it was a real jet. A REAL JET! And when I saw the massive explosions from that South Tower – I knew that it was not an accidental plane crash at all – it was a concerted attack on not just the Trade Center – not just Manhattan – not just all of New York – but ALL OF AMERICA!!!

        I can remember that I saw guerilla video footage of rare scenes in the midst of the two purposeful airline strikes on the towers.  For example, I saw millions of bits of paper sharpnel, fragments, and shards – fly like tickertape confetti in a massive parade as it cut through the normally innocent morning blue sky, as if Times Square was celebrating New Year’s Eve, but it was not on New Year’s Eve. The paper bits were from the fires ripping up countless pieces of paper from the towers and seem to fly around in the air in a slow freefall. It looked like a celebration – but it was just simply shear horror. And it was not funny at all.

        And more rare video footage just minutes after the towers struck showed even more horror.  I saw firebrands from the pieces of the towers that were superheated by the already-detonated jet fuel into nothing—and even worse---I saw a few or several real people—having no choice but to go on the edge of the deadly heights in the fires to gasp for air outside, and later on, as the heat and fires both got worse, had no choice but to jump about 1,000 feet or so to their deaths, and I knew these helpless people died, because they never had any emergency parachutes to save them.

      I also saw more rare footage of first responders—EMTs, police, and firefighters of New York, going into those crippled towers to try to save the lives of those who got affected by the two suicide plane hits at the Trade Center towers. Most of them who went inside the affected towers, or came close to them…did not know in the next 20-30 minutes that the extreme heat eating away at the trusses, I-beams, and supports of the top floors of the towers already burning, would cause most of them to end up causing them to either go to their graves or end up with massive amounts of dust and soot trying to get away from the doomed towers.

      Then, I got word from the FAA that LaGuardia and Newark international airports got a taste of what Operation SCATANA will do to air space affected by the terrorist attacks – I found out that those two airports had to stop landing and take-off operations immediately, shutting down both airports for good. (I also had a hunch that JFK International Airport also had to lock down operations too.) Eventually, orders came to eventually shut down air space operations at Cleveland and Boston at its airports, so this also affected Logan International Airport in Boston, where American Airlines flight 11 took off and slammed into one of the towers in a suicide attack. Then, I found out that Operation Archangel was launched in Manhattan, causing a massive metro-evacuation of personnel at such governmental facilites as New York’s City Hall and the United Nations, fearing that such buildings could be future targets of suicide attacks from planes like that of American 11 and United Airlines 175.

     At the 9:27 am point, I saw that the smoke plume went up and then horizontally for as long as 2 miles…all the way to the Hudson River. That is the type of enormity that I saw with the attacks on the towers that were already done by brazen terrorists who made us paid the price for what we did to them, although I did not know why in the first minutes of the attacks.

     Then, later on, after realizing that the towers and the Pentagon were attacked, I and other Americans witnessed our former president, George Bush, came to the podium at a Florida School, at about 9:30 a.m. He said to us that America is now saddened and shocked by the brazen concerted attacks on the World Trade Center. “Terrorism against our nation will not stand…and now will you join me in a moment of silence….May God their victims, their families, and America…Thank you very much.”

      Then, about 15 minutes into the attacks, I got new breaking news that another plane – American 77 – struck one part of America’s military headquarters in Washington D.C. – known mainly as The Pentagon. Now I realized – after I heard this happen – that this is a definite attack on America – not just on Manhattan, not just on New York – it was an attack on us Americans!!  When I saw that gaping hole and big plumes of black smoke from the Pentagon, I am trying to say to myself, “Now which other American building or buildings could become the next target? Could it be our Sears Tower in Chicago? Or the Cinderella Castle at Walt Disney World in Florida? Or maybe even part of the buildings covering the Bourbon St. strip in New Orleans that was famous during the Mardi Gras celebrations?” The FAA did not yet close down our entire American air space yet at that point (they only had an order for no more takeoffs/departures for just the New York, Boston, and Cleveland airports), so until I heard that they would completely close down that air space and force all civilian aircraft not affected by the hijackings to land at the nearest airport, I was scared that the Sears Tower, or Hancock Building, or maybe even the Chicago Board of Exchange or CNA Plaza building – could all be primary targets. So I decided not to go to downtown for 1 or 2 hours…but I was holding my breath, because I was afraid that more planes could crash into other major buildings all over other U.S. cities. I was so scared at that point—especially at the 9:15 am to 9:55 am mark where tensions due to the attacks were at its very highest!!! I loved Chicago, but I was still too young to die at the hands of brazen suicide terrorists hijacking planes and crashing them into buildings!!!

      Then, I got word from the FAA that about a few minutes after the Pentagon was hit by American Airlines 77, a nation-wide emergency ground stop was now in effect—every civilian plane—whether or not it was hijacked, was now forced to land at the nearest airport—regardless of the destination they were intending to go to. And with that order, in addition to the no-more-departures order already in place, I knew that it was absolutely all over for civilian planes in American air space, and I breathed just merely a very slight sigh of relief—I took two or three breaths now realizing that I will never see any civilian aircraft flying in our Chicago skies for an indefinite period, but I was afraid that there will be more military jets flying over our city to enforce the temporary no-fly-zone over our country, just in case any civilian plane who refuses to land violated that air space. But I was now happy that I would not see any civilian jet try to crash into any more buildings for as long as that air space closing order stayed in place. And I am glad that the air space is now locked down everywhere in the country – so now, I can go downtown whenever I wish and not have to worry about jets flying into buildings for at least the next week or so……

 

The Chicago Sinfonietta’s 2020 Annual Martin Luther King Concert – A Musical Blend of The Old and The New in an Event Designed to Bring All Of The People Together to Unity In The Fight Against Racism, Bigotry and Segregation

It has been roughly over 50 years – particularly, 52 years since the time Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was a victim of a fatal hit on his life while protesting and leading a strike with sanitation workers in Memphis, Tennessee on April 4, 1968, by alleged mastermind, James Earl Ray.

King was known in the tapestry of American history for trying to appease the civil upheavals, turmoils, riots, and overall anarchy as he fought for civil rights and the eventual end of the Jim Crow segregation in the South that actually sparked with Rosa Parks’ refusal to move to the back of a city bus in Montgomery, Alabama in her so-famous civil disobedience display, getting her arrested in the process and helped King launch a massive city-wide Montgomery Bus Boycott. King used his Christian leadership and Gandhi’s points and tenets of using nonviolence to stop this so-called Goliath in American sociology called segregation (where King, for instance, went into Chicago to speak out against the discriminatory technique of red-lining in the slums of that city to discourage Blacks from getting rental housing), and as a result of that, we all African-Americans now enjoy the freedoms that were once limited. There are no more “colored” bathrooms or “colored” hotels now. And the biggest achievement was that we had our first African-American President of the United States, Barack Obama, in 2008.

Still, today, it is a bit sad that we have seen backlashes to these achievements even in recent years, upending King’s need for us to be nonviolent, years after he was gunned down in the aforementioned assassination. We had saw that in the senseless police shootings and vigilante killings that made such innocent Black people as Trayvon Williams die in the hands of a White vigilante with that “stand your ground” excuse unneeded, or Michael Brown end up fatally shot by a White police officer and caused explosive violence of rioting and pillaging in Ferguson, MA in 2014 that created re-livings of the nationwide race riots that happened after the Voting Rights Act happened in 1964, or Eric Garner ending up being choked to death by another White officer in New York, with his last words being “Can’t Breathe”, which caused me to feel his death right in his heart, because you need air in order to survive. Even though I was glad not to face the Goliath of racially-motivated police violence against me ever in my life, the risk that I could end up like Williams, or Brown, or Garner in the future, even though I am now 49 years young, motivated me to attend the Martin Luther King Concert at the Symphony Center in Chicago IL.

A large crowd braved the rather bitter cold to go through the music building's gates to see what they wanted to see inside the iconic auditorium of red seats and ornate walls and the famous stage where the Chicago Sinfonietta would be front-and-center for this concert. Mei-Ann Chen was at the helm this year in 2020 as the main music director of the Sinfonietta.  I saw this Chinese-American conductor before in past MLK concerts with this orchestra (probably a few times)  – and Mei-Ann was as inspirational and fiery as before – probably a little bit more than that this year, because of two probable reasons – the ongoing Shen Yun spectacles in Chicago (To me, she is a little bit like a “Shen Yun” in his conducting style – wide-out, greatly flowing, and really highly intricate in her baton work, just like a Shen Yun Chinese dancer would do), and the fact that this is the start of Chinese New Year – the Year of the Rat. I will never know if she is in the zodiac of the rat; nevertheless, these two happenings meant good luck for this conductor throughout the event – and the audience loved it.

I already mentioned some of the innocent Blacks who were killed, and that was the basis for composer Joel Thompson to pay homage to a list of 6 African-Americans who were unjustly killed in the hands of police or vigilantes due to their race, in the orchestral-choral version of Seven Last Words of the Unarmed, that marked the first part of the concert.  The premiere performance gave me a quick mindset that this was inspired by “The Seven Last Words of Christ”, an oratorio composed by Theodore DuBois, which featured an introduction and 7 movements for each “last word”. Of course, the Seven Last Words is depicted in the Holy Bible’s Four Gospels that cover the account of Jesus’s crucifixion as he was hung in Golgotha for hours to die a slow, but very painful death, dying with this final of the 7 words – “within my hands, I commend my Spirit.” So with this, as I saw the composer on stage speaking about this composition, he mentions some of the Blacks who were killed and said that this Seven Last Words of the Unarmed was something like an inspirational “meditation” on the oppression, racism, and injustice related to the six Blacks who were killed unjustly. The music itself, with help of guest Black conductor Kendrick Armstrong and the Adrian Dunn Singers, is described as something as post-classical, with a mixture of a blend of composers that I heard before: George Walker, Bela Bartok, Edgard Varese, and even bits of Igor Stravinsky (who was known for the violent “Rite of Spring” ballet). So with the final meditation – the 7^th part involving the paying homage to Eric Garner (already mentioned), the “can’t breathe” lyrics were striking, as I hear an orchestral bass drum representing two musical characteristic leading motives – the first one, with occasional rhythmic blows, represented Garner’s last heartbeats as he was choked and crushed by senseless NYPD officers to his death; the second one, even louder than the first, represented the officer’s deadly chokehold on Garner.

But before Joel’s work, two mainstay songs opened the concert. The first one was Up To The Mountain, a folk song that was originally by Patty J. Griffin. With the help of the assistant conductor of the Sinfonietta, Jonathan Rush, and singer Kimberli Joye, the arrangement of the song by Michelle Issac, was in a style reminiscent of the laid-back 12/8-meter soul ballads commonly seen from some of the songs by Ray Charles or Sam Cooke (known for his rendition of “A Change Is Gonna Come”). It was first released in the year 2006 and the height of the song was when the Boston Children’s Chorus took up the song and did their arrangement in 2013. Following that number, came another number – a famous spiritual, Deep River, in an arrangement by Carrie Lane Giselle, in the key of Eb major. The song first came out in 1876 and made more famous in 1916, when Harry T. Burleigh made probably the first music publication arrangement of the piece for piano and voice. However, in that Deep River number by the Sinfonietta - There were no voices or chorus in that number – it was for strings only, which was good enough. There were some slight alterations in the arrangement musically, but the rest of that number was as straightforward as you hear it so many times for years.

To close out the first half of the concert, conductor Armstrong did a version of Glory from the 2014 soundtrack of the movie, Selma. This movie re-enacted one of the major civil rights events in Selma, Alabama, where over 500-plus Black marchers, led by now-congressman Joe Lewis, went across the Rolund Pettis Bridge in their fight against segregation, planning to go through the bridge en route to  Montgomery, Alabama, home of the aforementioned bus boycott and the Rosa Parks incident. Their first march attempt was ruined by a big wall White officers at the other end of the bridge who first told them to turn back, but as the marchers decided not to disperse and not fight back in the name of nonviolence, they were hounded upon and jumped upon by officers with tear gas, billy clubs, and even bullwhips, leaving scores of marchers injured and a few killed. This led to the 2^nd attempt of the march where the troops did retreat but the marchers retreated in turn in confusion, and then finally, with the help of Martin Luther King and Lyndon Baines Johnson, most of the marchers on the 3^rd attempt did go past the end of that bridge without incident, all the way to Montgomery, Alabama, the endpoint of the march, and MLK did his rallying speech there afterward.

So for this Glory, the music was by John Legend, with the added rap of Common, and regrettably, probably because of copyright issues or other music contractual issues (only speculating), the so-called rap that I was supposed to hear in the middle of the song – and all of you – did not happen. I did not hear the “hip-hop” drums or the hip-hop rap, which was a bit disappointing, because I was expecting it because I heard that original song with the choral singers and the rap by Common a few years prior, in 2014, as soon as the movie was released. So there was no guest rapper doing the song with Sinfonietta, which disappointed me, as well as the audience members. The only solo voice that did come in the song was Kymberli Joye, an African-American singer who was a great contestant in “The Voice”, who did the lead-in words that looped and looped, saying in the lyrics “The war is not over…victory is won… we will fight to the finish, when all is said and done.” The Adrian Dunn Singers helped with the choral lines which worked well with Kymberli’s solo works and improvs, and every time I heard them sing out “Glory” en masse as they iterated, I can remember that John Legend used a part of James Weldon Johnson’s Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing hymn, the African-American National Anthem that ends on the words “Let us march on, till victory is won”. Moreover, Legend’s “the war is not over” is correct, because of some of the racial oppressions that Martin Luther King Jr. supposed to stop that plighted Blacks for over 500 years are still continuing, even though old Jim Crow seemed to have ended.

After intermission, I saw that the orchestra had the biggest forces since I had witnessed when I saw a past Sinfonietta concert involving the Tschaikovsky’s 1812 Overture in a past MLK Concert. But they weren’t doing Tschaikovsky. They were doing a part of Gustav Mahler’s biggest magnum opus orchestral work in his musical career, as soprano Summer Hassan, and mezzo-soprano Leah Dexter, along with the North Central College Concert Choir, and the much larger personnel number of Sinfonietta under conductor Chen (including a larger brass section and larger battery personnel) performed the iconic last movement of his Auferstehungssymphonie (or “Resurrection Symphony” in German)—Mahler’s Symphony no. 2.  I can remember seeing a past Sinfonietta concert where they performed the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven with the famous chorus-finale. Mahler’s “Resurrection” finale movement – as I found out – would be much different than Beethoven’s in musicality, expression, and style. The opening notes, punctuated by a bass drum explosion and cymbal crashes, reminded me of chaos and doom, and then as the movement progresses, after the mood of chaos goes into the inner spirit. I hear a C major key center with new motives that I recognize – focusing on feelings of a  passage of redemption – probably one of the most important parts of the symphony that I experienced years ago through hearing it in television commercials and a few television documentaries. Then as the piece continues, I am thrown into forced guessing of the accelerandos, slowdowns, and wide use of pitches and angular jumps and scalar motives – guessing I am recalling bits of Richard Strauss’s “Ein Heldenleben” (Hero’s life, one of his tone poems) and Don Juan (another of Strauss’s tone poems). It sounded like a tone poem that is worthy of what Richard Wagner would do in his mature operas. Then, as the solos started their “Aufersteh’n” (or “rise up”), I was taken into a whirlwind journey of a conflict between good and bad, and as the chorus picked up later on as the piece wreaked out its last of Mahler’s orchestral unpredictabilities into the rousing, majestic Eb major section, the chorus and solos announce a sort of what I call in German a “Gesamtverklaerung”, or a total transformation, that one would feel after the human life departs. And even if the audience never even understood a word of German in the text by Freidrich Gottlieb Klopstock (likely he was something like a secondary Heinrich Schiller) because there were no supertitles to translate above the orchestra and chorus and singers, I was on my own to bask into Mahler’s unique post-Romantic music. As the Eb chord in the tutti orchestra that concluded the movement chimed in something like the ending to Pictures at an Exhibition by Mussorgsky, it seemed to me that my transformation was complete. Our transformation to help us deal with the Black oppressions that you thought were gone in the past – but still, regrettably, happen to people like me, today. Mahler wasn’t exactly like Beethoven, but since I had played some Mahler works as a piano accompanist, I realized I had to respect this modern romantic orchestrator – and he was with that part of that symphony. The crowd liked it with big applause. And after some doubt, I had to stand up and applaud to those musical forces who conquered a part of the Goliath called the Resurrection Symphony finale.

And you think the concert was over after we got our musical bite of a big Mahler orchestral work? – no – not yet. Conductor Mei-Ann decided to mark, like in past MLK Sinfonietta concerts, a post-concert tradition that was set by Paul Freedman, who was the first conductor of the Chicago Sinfonietta. He invited the audience to first do a “passing of the peace in place” like a lot of United Methodist Churches do in their services, and then, the big mainstay musical finale that was a tradition – using the most traditional of songs that was used a lot during the King era – “We Shall Overcome”.  She asked the audience to hold hands (something like in the style of the “Hands Across America” events), and as the “We Shall Overcome” song blared with the help of the Sinfonietta Orchestra and the guest singers and the two guest choruses, I saw that there were a sea of hands and arms, that swayed left and right like you see boats do on bodies of water.

So when it was all over, in review, we got what we wanted in honoring King with a symphonic concert. There was a mixture of the old and the new; there was a little bit of a “pops orchestra” thing with the Up To The Mountain, and the mighty symphonic forces of a bit of Mahler’s “Resurrection Symphony”. I walked out of Symphony Hall proud, as well as a 2,000-plus audience, and I think if Paul Freedman, the architect of the Sinfonietta – were to be here tonight for this occasion – he would have loved every minute of that concert as well.