One Sweet Morning

The New York Philharmonic had once before approached Corigliano to compose a 9/11 tribute on the 1st anniversary of the attacks. The composer, believing the shock of the event to be too fresh, turned the commission down. The orchestra then approached the composer John Adams, whose piece On the Transmigration of Souls later won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for Music.^[4][5]

Corigliano described the challenge of composing a 9/11 commemoration in the score program notes, writing:

...if I wrote a work that had meditative sections, but also dramatic and extroverted sections, then I would fall into a terrible trap. So many in the audience of this piece will have images of the frightful day itself—jet liners crashing into the World Trade Center, people jumping to their deaths from the top of the buildings, and the final collapse of the towers themselves—burned into their retinas. How can one hear music of any dramatic surges without imagining these events accompanying the music—or vice versa? Inevitably, the piece would become a tone poem of that unimaginable day – something I never intended and did not want. Yet how could I instruct the audience to ignore their own memories?

He continued:

Obviously, then, I needed to write a piece with words. I needed other images both to refute and complement the all-too-vivid ones we'd bring with us into the concert hall. But which images: and how would they pertain to the subject, as well as each other? The answer was as obvious as it was dispiriting. Ten years later, that day is more calmly remembered as just one in a continuum of terrible days. September 11th, 2001 was discrete and specific: but war and its anguishes have been with us forever. I needed a cycle of songs that would embed 9/11 into that larger story. So I chose four poems (one of them part of an epic poem) from different ages and countries.^[1]

One Sweet Morning has a duration of roughly 28 minutes and is composed in four movements:

1. A Song on the End of the World
2. Patroclus
3. War South of the Great Wall
4. One Sweet Morning

The first movement is set to the poem "A Song on the End of the World" by the Polish poet Czesław Miłosz. The second movement is set to a portion of Homer's Iliad detailing a massacre led by the Greek prince Patroclus. The third movement is set to the poem "War South of the Great Wall" by the 8th-century poet Li Po. The fourth and final movement is set to the eponymous anti-war poem "One Sweet Morning" by the American lyricist and poet E. Y. "Yip" Harburg.^[1]

The work is scored for a solo mezzo-soprano and a large orchestra comprising three flutes (third doubling piccolo), three oboes, three clarinets (first and second doubling clarinet in A; third doubling bass clarinet and E-flat clarinet), three bassoons (third doubling contrabassoon), four horns, three trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, four percussionists, piano (doubling celesta), harp, and strings.^[1]