TWENTY YEARS

I don’t remember what I did on the evening of September 10, 2001. Whatever it was, I was so tired that I recall blearily resolving to skip my early dance class at the Manhattan School of Music on the morning of the 11th, just days into the fall semester. As I was laying on my futon, annoyed that my curtains weren’t blocking out more sunlight so I could fall back asleep, my new roommate knocked and cracked open the door. “Nick, you should get up. Something crazy is happening,” she said. “A plane just crashed into one of the World Trade Center towers.”

I pulled myself out of bed and joined my roommate in our living room, where we watched the events of the rest of the morning unfold on our television over the course of the next couple of hours. In shock and unsure of what to do, we sat on our couch trying to reach our loved ones on our cell phones, keeping track of the horror happening just a few miles down the island through the TV, which remained on in the background.

Fast forward to last winter, a few days after we began our pandemic lockdown, I was on the phone with one of those loved ones to whom I reached out on September 11th, and she said the same thing she said to me twenty years ago: “This is a watershed moment. The world will never be the same after this.”

Looking back on the last twenty years, thinking about the coordinated act of terrorism that mutated our world into what it is today, I wonder (as many of us do) who really “won” the “war on terror”. While the US may have hunted down and killed many of the masterminds of that terrible day, the cost to our collective human soul seems to have been too steep. The price has included not just countless lives lost in our efforts to combat “terror”, but also a crippling compromise of our ethics around basic human rights to life, the presumption of innocence until proven otherwise, privacy, and well-being. In the immediate aftermath of the attacks, sanity was lost at the top levels of government as officials reeled and reacted, giving in to their abject terror as they vowed to never let another incident like this happen again. As some regained their senses, and people began to question the narratives and actions taken in the wake of September 11th, 2001, our society began to polarize and fracture. We are increasingly divided along a false binary. Our trust in our government, our news sources, and our fellow humans has eroded exponentially. It’s impossible to look back on that day and ignore the direct corollaries to our present state.

While it is mind-boggling and depressing to think about the quick and gargantuan changes on geo-political, cultural, and societal levels, that time was also radically transformational on a personal plane. In 2001, I graduated from the University of Michigan and left Ann Arbor, the only home I had known since I was 2 years old. I attended my first professional young artist program that summer, where I sang in the chorus and covered a small role at what was then known as the Glimmerglass Opera. On my days off, I managed to find a place to live in New York City, where I began a master’s degree program at the Manhattan School of Music just two weeks before that tragic and catastrophic morning the world changed. Less than 8 months after September 11th, I found myself making my professional debut floating high C’s while singing the role of Iopas with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and Zubin Mehta in a set of concert performances of Berlioz’ epic opera, Les Troyens. A few months later, I joined the Houston Grand Opera Studio, where I found myself singing alongside operatic-superstar heroes and attending donor dinner parties in homes that all contained multiple pictures of our hosts posing with George W. and Laura Bush. The senior Bushes were semi-regular guests at opera performances, and it was not unusual to see their secret service security detail escorting them down the aisles to their seats at various times during the season. At one point early on in my time in Houston, I found myself performing at an event honoring Condoleeza Rice, shaking hands with her and hearing about her love of classical music after I sang. I was bewildered by these bizarre brushes where music met politics, and they were a constant reminder of the fraught, violent backdrop against which I was learning to make my art.

A decade and a half later, I was preparing to leave for a recital in Istanbul, Turkey when a suicide bomber blew themselves up not far from where I would be performing. It was the fourth suicide bombing in Turkey that year alone, and it was only mid-March. Scheduled to depart just days later, my colleagues and I found ourselves faced with the decision about whether or not to proceed with the concert. In the end, we unanimously decided to go on, resolving to resist fear and keep the music going. Because our audience was perhaps one of the smallest ones I’ve ever performed for in a concert hall, we were to meet with everyone who attended the concert afterwards. As we chatted and greeted the audience after the performance, we all bonded over the sentiment that we could not let terror keep us from the beauty in our world. We also all laughed that the only reason our concert was delayed after all the events of the week was due to one of Istanbul’s famous feral cats, who had decided it liked the warmth of the stage lights and parked itself center stage at the beginning of the performance, preventing us from making our first entrance.

When I think back on the last twenty years and how they have been shaped by terror, I also marvel. In 2001, I moved to New York City to pursue a dream. Less than two weeks after taking that leap of faith, I woke up in a living nightmare. In spite of that, I have seen so many dreams come to fruition over those two decades, as have many of my colleagues and friends with whom I spent that day. That roommate who woke me up that morning went on to enjoy a wonderful international singing career and has now moved back to the US, where she serves as the Director of Artistic Administration for the Opera Theater of St. Louis. My roommate and I spent part of September 11th standing on the roof of our apartment building with another friend and fellow young artist who was also a neighbor in the building. Together, we watched fighter jets circle Manhattan and gazed down as the dust-covered survivors of that morning finally made their way back to their homes in our uptown neighborhood. She is now the Artistic Director of the San Francisco Opera Center.

Thinking on these personal narratives of the last two decades, I marvel at the triumph of hope over fear. The victory of love over terror. For all three of us who were living in that building that day, music was the thing we clung to, and not any of us have let fear of any kind daunt us as we have navigated the treacherous pitfalls of our the professional, artistic, and personal paths in our lives.

There are countless similar stories of people forging ahead, pursuing their dreams, and I think that, in some ways, that is the best we can do to vanquish terror on an individual level. To dare to dream, risk hope, and be ever-vigilant in our pursuit of peace, love, and beauty in all their forms.