Fence, Photograph, Pandemic, Piano: A conversation between composer Kevin Malone and pianist Adam Swayne about Sudden Memorials, which was composed, premiered and recorded in 2021.

This paper will detail Sudden Memorial's method and impact, including audio excerpts and images of the 9/11 photograph and the makeshift mosaic approach. Anglo-American composer Kevin Malone became immersed in the events of 9/11 since his first orchestral memorialisation was premiered in Kyiv, Ukraine in 2002. Subsequent 9/11 works explored documentary techniques, autoethnography and community expression, using recordings of air traffic controllers and his recorded site-specific sounds and interviews with witnesses and first responders. In 2006 he spent three weeks in Shanksville, Pennsylvania, the site where passengers of United Airlines Flight 93 crashed their aircraft to thwart hijackers, and which gave rise to a makeshift memorial to the victims. The site and memorial kindled further music: a children's song (Gently Tread, 2006) about the crash site's hallowed land; an orchestral work (Angels and Fireflies, 2011) about night descending at the memorial; an orchestral tone-poem (E pluribus unum, 2011) about the memorial's land and community; a trio (Tacet al fine, 2013) about a victim memorialised in an anonymous child's letter left at the 9/11 Memorial Chapel.

During April 2021's pandemic lockdown, a video conversation with concert pianist Adam Swayne drifted to Malone's 2006 photograph of the makeshift memorial: a wire fence on which visitors could spontaneously (or with predetermination) attach items of remembrance. This prompted a substantial work for just solo pianist due to the pandemic, closely following the processes by which such memorials arise and evolve. Sudden Memorials (May 2021) was performed in lockdown conditions in London, Oxford, NYC, Brighton and Manchester. It is the central work on Coviello CD 9:11:20. The photograph of the memorial reveals: temporary fencing; spontaneously offered objects; predetermined self-made objects; predetermined store-bought objects; predetermined specialist memorial objects; perishable objects; objects with socio-political messages or personal stances. Malone's unique compositional method had to reflect how visitors reacted with these diverse types of objects. To ensure poetic fidelity:
• a six-week deadline was set to spontaneously compose, structure, edit, finalise, typeset and record in a studio 30 minutes of original piano music; Malone closely focused (often to the point of weeping) on 20 diverse objects to compose depictions of their likely direct and indirect impact on visitors;
• the depictions became mosaic tiles – “objects” – to be arranged into a non-narrative, quirkily juxtaposed psycho-emotional experience, without linear teleology, such as a memorial visitor would experience;
• Malone worked with Swayne on theatrical gestures to discover “objects” in, on and around the piano while playing, evoking a visitor's impromptu movements, sensations, memories and interpretations at the mosaicked fence memorial, keeping a sense of internal isolation;
• the photograph became part of the performance, with the pianist spontaneously improvising while looking at objects in the photograph.