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Overlooking the Pan American Flight 103 nose cone crash site in Lockerbie, Scotland, sits three historical buildings: the Tundergarth Church, the ruins of a Celtic Kirk and the Pan Am 103 Memorial Room. Students in Syracuse University’s Wind Ensemble visited this site during their Remembrance Tour in the United Kingdom last spring.

“I think about it almost every time I play my saxophone now,” said Aisling Casey, a junior music industry major and saxophone player in the SU Wind Ensemble.

The SU Wind Ensemble released an album on Aug. 16, 2024, “Angels Rising: Music of Remembrance and Light,” to pay homage to the 270 lives lost in the tragedy, including 35 SU students, on Dec. 21, 1988.

Milton Rubén Laufer, the Director of the Setnor School of Music, was inspired to record the album after the Wind Ensemble’s concert tour in the U.K. for the tragedy’s 35th anniversary. The musicians performed in venues across London and Scotland, including the Lockerbie Town Hall and the St. Giles Cathedral in Edinburgh.

“The music is high-quality, and the students did a great job performing it. It wasn’t just notes on a page, they made it come to life,” Laufer said. “It was worthy of being memorialized in an album.”

The album was years in the making and began with creating a setlist for the performance tour. In fall 2022, Natalie Draper began composing a piece for students to take across the seas to Lockerbie. She wanted it to abstractly reflect the two components of the victim’s lives – energy and light.

The piece opens with a commotion of sound, then fades into softer moments of “sparkles.” The end becomes more representative of the loss of life.

Draper used shooting stars as a metaphor for the meaning of the piece.

“You have this burst of light – this skittering through the cosmos and trails of echoey light from that star – and then eventually, it disappears and it’s gone,” she said.

While the tragedy of Pan Am 103 hung heavy on the hearts of the Wind Ensemble, musicians and composers found comfort and support in one another during extensive recording sessions in October 2023 and February 2024.

“The students were recording for a whole day, which requires a lot of focus,” Draper said. “Not all students go through that at this point in their musical career, so it really asks them to be professionals. They all rose to the occasion.”

Casey was a first-year student when the Wind Ensemble began learning songs for the album, and a sophomore during the recording. She felt emotional learning about the hundreds of lives lost and struggled to strike a balance between her emotions and musicianship.

Experiencing the Remembrance Tour with her bandmates and professors gave Casey the support she needed to perform. Casey deepened her friendships as she worked with other students in the Setnor School.

“Working in a community with people you trust and love goes a long way,” she said. “I got closer with so many people from that trip because of how emotional and important it was and how we were all there together.”

“Angels Rising: Music of Remembrance and Light” is the first time the Setnor School of Music has released an album with world premiere recordings. Although packing dozens of musicians and their instruments into the Goldstein Auditorium to record hours of music was a hefty undertaking, Laufer and Draper were impressed with the Wind Ensemble’s professionalism.

“It’s unusual for a school to be taking on this kind of high-profile professional project,” Draper said. “It’s a testament to what Setnor is capable of, and I’m really proud of and grateful to everybody involved.”

Laufer is planning similar recording opportunities for students in the future. Setnor faculty members strive to prepare students for the workforce, and album credits are an impressive addition to their resumés, he said.

“I hope no one took it for granted because it was not a situation to be taken for granted,” Casey said. “It was so fulfilling. I want to do it again.”

Published on August 27, 2024 at 11:22 pm

Contact: Jepryor@syr.edu