Barber's Adagio for Strings

As an organist, I played an arrangement of Barber's Adagio for a funeral Mass for one of the people killed on 9/11. I've never known such intense listening, or holding onto every note. It was as though this one performance, this one piece would see them through this terrible tragedy.

I choose it because I wanted American music to lend support as well as meaning to what had happened. I wanted everyone to known that American composers were capable of writing such music.

David Adam Smtih