Reich bows to protest of 9/11 CD cover art

(TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images/AFP/GETTY IMAGES) - Tokyo, JAPAN: A pioner of minimal music, Steve Reich of the US speaks during the press conference in Tokyo, 17 October 2006. Reich won the Music section of the 18th Praemium Imperiale and is here to attend the awarding ceremony with other winners on October 18. AFP PHOTO / TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA (Photo by TOSHIFUMI KITAMURA/AFP/Getty Images)

The thing about “WTC 9/11” is that Reich — who lived in downtown Manhattan when the towers fell — has written a piece of music that is about the process of dealing with tragedy: the way people gradually work the overwhelming reality of what happened to them on that day into a story that can be told and made their own. ( I reviewed this piece when the Kronos Quartet played it at the University of Maryland in the spring.) To my eye, the original image on the cover, which was selected with input from the composer, clearly reflects the content of the album. It takes the original photograph, by Masatomo Kuriya , and gives it a memorializing patina, as if setting it in bronze, or tinging it with a sepia that moves it from the arena of reportage into history.

I’m surprised, and I’m sure Reich was surprised, at the reaction. After all, this is a kind of image we were inundated with for weeks, months, even years after the event: Newspapers and magazines and television screens and the covers of books were flooded with pictures of towers being hit, towers burning, towers falling, rescue workers with red-rimmed eyes standing numbly amid the rubble of the towers. The glut of images was part of the initial phase of processing what had happened: Every morning, the front page of the paper or the TV screen was there to remind you: Yes, it really did. It really did.

So why, 10 years later, is this CD cover, in the words of the composer Phil Kline, “the first truly despicable classical album cover that I have ever seen”? Why is it exploitation to present an image that is achingly painful but eminently germane to the piece of music that accompanies it?

It seems to me that the pain of the experience bleeds over into our response to the image: This picture evokes a strong reaction, so it must be bad. I even wonder whether some boundary confusion has taken place between art and journalism. We know it’s wrong when a newspaper doctors a photo of a real event; so to alter a news image for a CD cover seems to some people equally inauthentic. We know it’s wrong to merchandise certain images for profit — putting, for instance, a picture from Haiti or Somalia or Afghanistan on a mug or T-shirt — so to mass-produce an image on a CD cover, a form of entertainment, seems to some people inherently base.

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I was named after dirty Harry, yet I am nothing like the famed tough man. I am dirty in a depraved, spiritual sort of way and hairy in the more obvious since of the word but I am not the gun slinging hero that my mother thought of when she named me. I am a follower of Jesus a husband and a dad. I have talented passionate wife who I have known for approximately the same amount of time that I have been able to tie my shoes. I also have four kids; Noah who is loyal, Ruthe who is joyful, Isaiah who is hilarious and Moses who is too young to classify. I am the pastor Pillar Church in the suburbs of Washington DC.

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