Jimi Hendrix — The Star-Spangled Banner (Woodstock, 1969)

On August 18, 1969, Jimi Hendrix took the stage at Woodstock—not as the closing act under the Sunday night spotlight, as originally planned, but early on Monday morning, when most of the half-million festival-goers had already departed. What followed became one of the most iconic moments in music history.

Backed by his new, short-lived ensemble Gypsy Sun and Rainbows, Hendrix launched into a two-hour set. But it was his unannounced, unrehearsed rendition of The Star-Spangled Banner that would resonate through generations. Rather than offering a traditional tribute, Hendrix transformed the national anthem into a visceral soundscape. Through amplified feedback, distortion, and masterful use of the whammy bar, he evoked the sonic imagery of war—explosions, rockets, sirens, gunfire, and human cries.

Interwoven into the anthem were fragments of other musical symbols of American life: the funeral bugle call Taps, the patriotic hymn America the Beautiful, and gestures reminiscent of his own anti-war piece Machine Gun. The Vietnam War was still raging; American society was deeply divided. In this context, Hendrix’s anthem was both patriotic and unsettling, a reflection of a nation in conflict.

Some listeners considered the performance disrespectful. Hendrix, appearing days later on The Dick Cavett Show, dismissed the criticism with characteristic simplicity: “I’m American, so I played it… Unorthodox? I thought it was beautiful.”

Captured in the Woodstock documentary, the performance has come to symbolize rebellion, protest, virtuosity, and the raw emotional spirit of the 1960s. More than a musical interpretation, it was a powerful statement—at once celebration and critique, homage and protest. It showcased Hendrix’s technical brilliance, creative audacity, and profound emotional intensity.

This performance reimagines Hendrix’s iconic rendition on a purely acoustic cello, inspired by the arrangement by cellist Matt Haimovitz.

Steve Reich — WTC 9/11 (or WTC 11.09) (2010)

Written for the Kronos Quartet, WTC 9/11 is in three movements (though the tempo remains unchanged throughout):

9/11
2010
WTC

The piece begins and ends with the first violin doubling the loud warning beep (actually an F) a phone makes when it is left off the hook. In the first movement there are archive voices from NORAD air traffic controllers, alarmed that American flight 11 was off course. This was the first plane to deliberately crash into the World Trade Center. The movement then shifts to the New York City Fire Department archives of that day telling what happened on the ground.

The second movement uses recordings Reich made in 2010 of neighborhood residents, an officer of the Fire Department and the first ambulance driver (from Hatzalah volunteers) to arrive at the scene, remembering what happened nine years earlier.

The third and last movement uses the voices of a neighborhood resident, two volunteers who took shifts sitting near the bodies, and a cellist/singer and cantor.

Throughout WTC 9/11 the strings double and harmonize the speech melodies and prolonged vowels or consonants of the recorded voices. There is a total of three string quartets, one live, and two pre-recorded. The piece can also be played by three live quartets and pre-recorded voices.

WTC is also an abbreviation for World to Come. After September 11th, the bodies and parts of bodies were taken to the Medical Examiner’s office on the East Side of Manhattan. In Jewish tradition there is an obligation to guard the body from the time of death until burial. The practice, called Shmira, consists of sitting near the body and reciting Psalms or Biblical passages. The roots of the practice are, on one level, to protect the body from animals or insects, and on another, to keep the neshama (soul) company while it hovers over the body until burial. Because of the difficulties in DNA identification, this went on for seven months, 24/7. Two of the women who sat and recited Psalms are heard in the third movement. You will also hear a cellist (who has sat Shmira elsewhere) and a cantor from a major New York City synagogue sing parts of Psalms and the Torah.

George Crumb — Black Angels (Thirteen Images from the Dark Land) (1970)

Composed in 1970, at the height of the turmoil surrounding the Vietnam War, Black Angels bears the inscription “Friday the Thirteenth, March 1970 (in tempore belli)” — Latin for “in time of war.” What began as a standard commission for a string quartet evolved into a deeply personal meditation on global conflict, uncertainty, and spiritual crisis.

Crumb described the work himself as “a kind of parable on our troubled contemporary world.” The title invokes the image of the “black angel,” a motif historically used by painters to symbolize a fallen angel — a being torn between heaven and hell, divine and diabolical.

Black Angels is built upon a meticulously designed architecture of sound and symbolism. The piece unfolds through 13 movements, grouped into three larger sections — Departure, Absence, and Return — which together trace a kind of soul’s journey: a fall from grace, a state of desolation, and, finally, redemption.

The number 7 and the number 13 recur throughout the work — in pitch relationships, repetitions, durations, even in structural placements — reflecting Crumb’s fascination with numerology and cosmic symbolism. The first, central, and final movements are all “Threnodies” (laments), framing the piece with ritualistic mourning.

Movements symmetrically oppose one another: for instance, the “Devil-music” movement and the “God-music” movement are placed as conceptual and structural counterpoints.

Although nominally scored for string quartet — two violins, viola, and cello — Crumb designates it as an “electric string quartet.” The instruments are amplified (often via pickups or contact microphones), transforming their timbres and enabling a vast palette of extended techniques that conventional quartet repertoire does not anticipate.

Performers must not only bow and pluck their strings, but also tap with metal thimbles, bow behind the fingerboard, strike tam-tams, play water-tuned crystal goblets with glass rods, shake maracas, whisper, chant, whistle — even speak or shout — sometimes in several languages. The result is a haunting, spectral soundscape, oscillating between extreme dissonance and fragile lyricism.

The sonic extremes — at times violent, at times translucent — serve as a metaphor for inner turmoil, conflict, suffering, but also hope and transcendence. Many listeners experience the piece as a journey beyond comfort, toward a confrontation with human fragility, despair, and longing.

Though Crumb did not initially set out to write a political statement, he later recognized how the “dark currents” of war, unrest, and anxiety had seeped into his work — so much that by its completion he felt compelled to inscribe “in tempore belli.”

Black Angels is not a literal depiction of war, but rather an allegorical, spiritual reflection on human suffering, moral extremity, and redemption. The duality of “God-music” vs. “Devil-music,” the cyclical structure of death and rebirth, the invocation of ancestral laments — all these point toward a metaphysical struggle, a soul’s odyssey through darkness toward light.

Great composers have a special gift, allowing us to receive their inner thoughts through visceral sounds rather than words. With current rising global tensions and active war zones in Europe and the Middle East, it seems that Crumb’s original message reflecting the horrors of the Vietnam War continues to resonate more powerfully than ever. As it courses through its extreme range, extended techniques, and eerie melodies, Black Angels reminds us of music’s timelessness. We hear Crumb’s electric insects on today’s battlefields while the harsh beat of the tam-tam evokes bombs dropping from the heavens. The screams of innocent lives are heard in the extreme range of the string quartet, pushed to its absolute technical limits. Crumb’s message is clear: war is a devastating tragedy, one that pushes humanity to its limits both in empathy and in action. Black Angels, written during wartime in 1970, is, unfortunately, equally relevant in 2025. If we listen closely, we may hear not only music but also new ways of understanding each other.

Mieczysław Weinberg — String Quartet No. 8 (1959)

Born in Warsaw, as a youth he was pianist and ensemble leader for his father's Jewish theatre. Weinberg entered the Warsaw conservatory at the age of 12 where his talents as pianist earned him a potential opportunity to study in America, but WWII interceded. When the Germans invaded Poland in 1941, Weinberg fled to Minsk while his parents and sister, left behind, were murdered. In Minsk, he began formal studies in composition but within just a few years, when the Germans pressed on into Russia, Weinberg fled again, this time to Tashkent, Uzbekistan where Weinberg would meet his future wife, work for the local opera and submit the score of his first symphony to Shostakovich. 13 years his senior, Shostakovich was so impressed that he arranged for Weinberg to move to Moscow where he would live for the rest of his life in close proximity to Shostakovich, who became his mentor, colleague and friend. In 1953, Weinberg was imprisoned due to connections with an in-law who Stalin accused of being involved with the "Kremlin Doctors' Plot." Shostakovich daringly wrote a letter to the head of the KGB pleading for his release. Weinberg was eventually freed after the death of Stalin.

Weinberg composed his eighth string quartet in 1959, about half way through his total oeuvre for the genre. Although it is in one movement, the music is clearly demarcated into several sections easily suggesting a narrative. It begins with an Adagio introduction that will reappear in the middle and at the end of the quartet as a framing device and it debuts one of several recurrent motifs. The first extended section, Poco andante, is a Klezmer-inspired melody in the first violin with sparse pizzicato accompaniment. Slowly, beautifully, the folk-like Klezmer theme transforms into lush, late-Romanticism tinged with an urgent melancholy. The Adagio introduction reappears signaling a scene change. The second extended section features a new Klezmer theme, more animated with a march-like dance to a livelier Allegretto. The march impulse grows ominous with suggestions of war as the music suddenly accelerates into an Allegro. A crisis of collision brings the drama to a climax with a rich tangle of simultaneous themes. The Adagio returns to finish the narrative, now almost like a ghostly memory. The suggestive musical program is reinforced by Weinberg's own remarks: "Many of my works are related to the theme of war. This, alas, was not my own choice. It was dictated by my fate, by the tragic fate of my relatives. I regard it as my moral duty to write about the war, about the horrors that befell mankind in our country."

Ludwig van Beethoven — String Quartet No. 11 in f minor “Serioso” (1810)

Written around the time when Beethoven condemned Napoleon for bombing Vienna with his canons in 1809, this quartet reflects Beethoven’s angry mood like none other. Right from the beginning of the first movement, Beethoven challenges the listener with a terse theme played in unison, followed by a spiky, angry motivic jumps in the first violin. The nickname “Serioso” comes from the tempo marking in the third movement. Usually a scherzo (a joke) as the third movement of a quartet, the word “Serioso” seems deliberately put for the musicians to not take this movement lightly.

Beethoven later wrote in 1815, “the Quartet is written for a small circle of connoisseurs and is never to be performed in public.” Furthermore, the musicologist Joseph Kerman remarks that “the F minor is a ‘serious’ quartet: not a ‘pretty’ piece, but it is terribly strong - and perhaps rather terrible... Everything unessential falls victim, leaving a residue of extreme concentration, in dangerously high tension.” The serioso quartet is an isolated bridge between the middle quartets (Rasumovsky quartets and Op 74 “Harp”) of the 1800s, and the final set of late quartets from 1825.

The angry first movement is so terse that it only lasts for four and a half minutes. The next movement, subtitled as an “allegretto” inverts the threatening, ascending scales of the first movement to a gentle stepping descent from the cello, introducing a calm theme related to that of the first movement. The viola then introduces a new theme, which is taken up as a fugue. The second movement immediately leads into the third movement, “serioso.”

The third movement, based on the Scherzo form, starts, like the first, with an abrupt, angry challenge, just one bar and a pause; it is repeated, more demandingly, followed by a descending scale in dotted rhythm on a sinister crescendo.

This angry section is developed and repeated, but then dissolves into a tranquil slow melody from the second violin, caressed by first violin arpeggios, initially in the minor, then the major. The contrast is repeated, but finally anger, at a faster tempo, slams the door on the movement.

All seems well with the world in the expressive slow introduction to the last movement. But this optimism is threatened by the worried agitation of the violins. The threat level ratchets up on subsequent returns of this figure with an increasingly agitated accompaniment, and terrified octave and tenth leaps in the first violin. For such a “serious” piece, the coda is a bit of a surprise. The tempo increases to Allegro, the key shifts to the major and the threat is forgotten, as if the whole thing was a joke. I always have found the Rossini-like ending quite ironic, and I believe it’s Beethoven’s way of saying "don’t take yourself (or anything) too seriously."