September 30, 2007

From Barbara Blackburn Tuttle, Hoboken, N.J….

"I first read about your book, and your story, in my Amherst magazine--the book is just amazing. I wanted to tell you about another extraordinary 9/11 project that I thought might interest you, Music From Ground Zero.

"My husband, Tim, is one of those wildly musical people who didn't go into music; because he became, instead, an energy broker, he was directly across the street from the WTC (where he had worked for several years) on 9/11. What he saw that day (which he still can't really talk about), and the friends he lost, broke his heart, and caused the music that had been inside him all his life to come out. The music eventually became Music From Ground Zero and every year he has done a truly stunning musical memorial. (It [was] performed this year at The Knitting Factory on September 11th.)

"The music is AMAZING, gorgeous and anthemic and incredibly soulful. (Perhaps not randomly, his cousin is Richard Tuttle, the minimalist; I think there is a wild creative streak in their Scottish-Germanic blood--though Tim's is way more motional work.)

"Many people have felt there is a rock opera in this music waiting to be born. I think that would be an impossible thing to sit down and compose--but the music never started that way. Writing this music was how Tim dealt with what he could not deal with: in one of the first songs he wrote 'I think I saw the unthinkable...' It was how he slowly healed and how he found a way to remember friends he had waved to that morning who had vanished into the air.

"That was the section of your book [pages 36-48] that crushed me the most -- the part about the 'Missing' posters. I remember them so vividly (one, on the wall at Bellevue [Hospital], was for a young man who needed medication; it was taped up with 'Fragile' tape from the post office.) I was struck, as you were, by the nature of the photographs--wedding pictures, men holding up their children, family gatherings. Humanity at its best. They seemed to be both beseeching the fates and addressing the dark, at that time still nameless force that had wrought the tragedy: surely you were not aiming at this. You meant to strike some abstract symbol of corporate greed--not this vast, lovestruck, beating, breaking heart under the glass and steel and the suits.

"Thank you so much for your time, and for being someone, like Tim, who insists that this must never be forgotten."

(A follow-up e-mail from Barbara…)

Dear David,

"The music is extraordinary, and some really lovely circles have already gone out from it. Tim is rabidly against this war, but like everyone wanted to do something for the troops. Because so many of the songs deal with losing friends, and finding hope beyond grief, he got the idea of sending CD's to Iraq. He got some amazing emails, and then last year a soldier on leave appeared at the 9/11 show at The Knitting Factory. He was a Black Hawk helicopter pilot, very polite, quite shy, who had come to New York that night to give Tim the flag he and many other soldiers had signed in a gesture of thanks for the music. He made it back again this year.

"Then last year, on September 12, Tim got an email from a middle school teacher in (very) rural Georgia, who had come on his website in an effort to find some way to connect her students to 9/11. She had had them listen to the music and then write (or draw) about their memories and thoughts about that day. She sent the papers to Tim, and they are so touching, in that way that only kids can be. ('Dear Tim, I am very sorry for your friends. But you and I both know they are in a better place. Your friend, Justin.' There is a crayon drawing of a skyline with no towers; below it, like a reflection and colored in blue, is a skyline with the towers still standing...)

"Tim and the kids wrote back and forth all year, about 9/11, and all kinds of things-- music, life, fishing, football. When one of the kids was tragically killed in an accident, they played Tim's song at the memorial. Tim flew the teacher and her daughter up for this years's show, and is planning to go down to visit them all later this fall.

"I am a great believer in the healing power of music. (I loved, loved the Vanity Fair piece on music in Mali. And then did you see the CNN piece on the prison in Indonesia where the prisoners have several hours a day of mandatory dance practice? Violence is way down and they're getting ready to put on 'Thriller.' Amazing.)

"I hope you enjoy the music. And thank you again for what you have done with the book and your website."