If you wanted any further proof that music can preserve the things history so often reduces to dates, statistics and headlines, you find it in Rose Wollman and her powerful new work “Alabanza”. Written by Mexican composer Francisco Cortés-Álvarez, with Maria Brea on soprano and Dror Baitel on piano, it takes Martín Espada’s Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100 and transforms it into something both deeply human and musically compelling, a piece about ordinary lives caught within extraordinary history.

The subject is September 11, 2001. We hear the rhythms of an ordinary kitchen, the movement of people at work, the repetition of familiar tasks. The piano provides a restless momentum while the viola and soprano weave around it, creating a picture of people simply going about their day, perhaps thinking about the families waiting for them at home.

There is something incredibly powerful about this choice, because we already know what is coming. The tragedy is not announced; it arrives in the middle of life.

Cortés-Álvarez gradually unsettles the rhythmic certainty of the opening. Familiar patterns fragment, the music becomes increasingly disorientating and eventually everything collapses into an eerie stillness. He makes us feel what happens when the familiar world suddenly stops making sense.

Wollman has described the music as crumbling “from the driving, rhythmic, controlled chaos of the kitchen into a murky, eerie stillness when the ‘thunder’ strikes”. It is an extraordinary transformation, with the silence that follows somehow feeling louder than anything that came before it.

From there, the piece moves into stranger territory. The piano becomes a source of texture and atmosphere, while Wollman’s viola discovers an entirely different vocabulary, shifting between lyrical warmth, abrasive gestures and sounds that seem to hover somewhere between the human voice and pure sonic texture. Brea’s soprano becomes another instrument within this unsettled world, sometimes delivering the words directly, sometimes floating above the ensemble.

Every unusual sound seems to have a purpose, and the three performers create something far more intimate than a conventional musical retelling of a historical event.

What makes “Alabanza” so moving is its insistence that the workers at the centre of Espada’s poem be remembered as people, not anonymous figures within a terrible headline. People who cooked food, went to work, thought about their families and made plans for the rest of their day. Their lives contained all the small details that make human existence meaningful, even if those details are so often lost in the grand narratives of history.

The piece also takes on another dimension when considered alongside Wollman’s forthcoming album, Becoming America, which explores the distance between the ideals America presents to the world and the lived experiences of many of its citizens and residents. The American Dream, the melting pot, the land of the free: these are powerful ideas, but they do not describe everyone’s reality.

Through five newly commissioned works by composers from communities that continue to experience marginalisation, Wollman opens up a conversation about identity, immigration, family and belonging. She does not claim that a handful of compositions can represent an entire country but offers individual stories and different ways of understanding what it means to belong.

In “Alabanza”, the rhythm that dominates the opening eventually returns in a darker form, transformed into something resembling a drumbeat of war. The rhythm of work has become the rhythm of conflict, the everyday machinery of life turned into something ominous and relentless. It leaves us with memory, atmosphere and the uncomfortable knowledge that an ordinary life can disappear into history in an instant.

Viola, piano and soprano might seem like a small ensemble with which to approach such an enormous subject, but that intimacy is precisely what makes it work. Every gesture feels close, every silence matters, and Wollman’s viola moves between voice and instrument, sometimes sounding like another human presence within the story and sometimes like the memory of one.

Rose Wollman and Francisco Cortés-Álvarez have turned those fragments into something enduring, allowing the people within Espada’s poem to exist beyond the event that claimed them. This is a work about September 11, certainly, but also about immigration, family, displacement and the fragile line between the ordinary and the historic.

In “Alabanza”, Wollman and Cortés-Álvarez have found a beautiful and very unsettling way to begin that conversation. The past is still here and it is simply waiting for someone to listen.

Find out more about Rose Wollman on her Website

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