As NPR covered the events of Sept. 11, 2001, it was music that gave listeners time to reflect; to digest the images and the impact. So many letters came to NPR telling us how comforted they were by the music. A few days later, we put together some of those songs for an episode of All Songs Considered, in part to answer some of those letters wondering what we'd played (precise record keeping was impossible), and also to create an aural snapshot that in some small way tried to capture the tone of a nation shaken and changed.
At the time, All Songs Considered was a very young show and looked and sounded very different from now. For one thing, we used to do a lot of slideshows with music and text. This was in the day of dial-up connections, so the quality of the images and audio was pretty rough by today's standards, but hopefully no less affecting.
This is the little slideshow we did after Sept. 11, followed by some of the songs that were played during the live coverage.
Select songs from NPR's Sept. 11 coverage
- Richard Stoltzman: "Begin Sweet World"
- Philip Glass: "Opening"
- Caleb Sampson: "Eternal Future"
- Edgar Meyer: "Smiles and Tears"
- Michael Nyman: "Broken Glass"
- George Pelecis: "Music From Behind the Wall"
- Tunde Jegede: "Hill of Solitude — Valley of Festivity"
- Edgar Meyer: "Without Expression"
- Harold Budd: "Boy Abou 10"
- Alex Grant: "The Tulip and the Acorn"
- James Horner: "Carbon Dioxide"
- Craig Urquhart: "Waves"
- Michael Nyman: "Outside Looking In"
- Howard Shore: "Yardmaster"
- John Williams: "Revisiting Normandy"
- Pierre Bensusan: "Silent Passenger"
- John Adorney: "The Gathering"
- Michael Nyman: "Diary of Hate"
- Michael Nyman: "Love Forever"
- Bill Frisell: "Shenandoah"
- Ralph Towner: "Four Comets (1)"
- Ben Harper: "Three of Us"
- The American Analog Set: "Don't Wake Me"
- Dolly Parton: "Little Sparrow"
- Michael Hedges: "The Naked Stalk"
- Mark Isham: "The Times of Harvey Milk"
- Richard Hartshorne: "Cello Suite No. 1 in G Major" (J.S. Bach)
- Terrence Blanchard: "Romantic Processional"
- Ahn Trio: "The Diamond World"
- Robin Holcomb: "Little Three"
- Pierre Bensusan: "Kadourimdou"
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