As this book was being completed, I learned again the power of music to provide insight, solace, and healing. On September 11, 2001, I was writing the chapter about Mahler's second symphony, the Resurrection, at my home in Manhattan, when terrorist attacks were launched on my city and nation, destroying the World Trade Center and killing thousands of people from many countries. Of course, all television stations, except for children's channels, interrupted their programming to cover the emergency. So did every radio station, except for one. The management of WQXR, New York's oldest and foremost classical music station, elected to continuously play its regularly scheduled programming. This was clearly intended to provide solace and comfort, and importantly, to be an alternative to the endless barrage of sad and tragic news that would dominate the city for days and months to come. Music became a refuge when other aspects of life were intolerable. The gesture by WQXR brought to mind something Leonard Bernstein said in 1963 that greatly influenced my world view. He said, "This will be our reply to violence: to make music more intensely, more beautifully, more devotedly than ever before."
In the days and weeks after the disaster, I made it a point to go to musical performances all over the city as frequently as possible. This was not only to find comfort for myself, but to show solidarity with and appreciation for orchestras that travelled from Chicago, Berlin, Helsinki, and elsewhere, to bring music to New York when travel was still quite perilous and fears were real. The New York City Opera, and then the Metropolitan Opera, bravely re-lit their theatres soon after the attacks, though both companies lost many loved ones at Ground Zero. The New York Philharmonic gave a powerfully moving performance of Brahms' German Requiem, a work of great universality. One of the most beautiful events was a concert of remembrance at Carnegie Hall, that featured Yo-Yo Ma, James Levine, and, extraordinarily, Leontyne Price, who came out of retirement to lend her voice to the efforts all New Yorkers were making to heal. It can sometimes sound trite to speak of the redemptive and healing properties of music. I had heard this assertion often and understood it only in the most general and benign way. I can assure you now that those feelings are very real, and the power of music is greater than even I, with life in music stretching back 45 years, could ever imagine. It was a blessing to be writing this book during that time, and it was a reaffirmation and source of great pride, that music was one of the chief weapons my city used to address both barbarism and grief.
—Fred Plotkin, Classical Music 101: A Complete Guide to Learning and Loving Classical Music
I'll add that in the audio version of this excerpt, towards the end, Plotkin is barely able to get the words out for all his emotion. He seems to prove his own theory that deep involvement with music makes us more human.
