George Botkin emerges, and the audience applauds. He bows to the concertmaster and then faces the orchestra, baton raised. Then he turns around and smiles at his wife and baby daughter seated directly behind him. He lifts his left hand in a little wave at his daughter, and her happy chirp causes a chuckle to ripple through the first rows. He faces the orchestra again. His baton comes down, and the 146-piece orchestra blares into life with driving blue notes and syncopations as the machinery of the Triangle Waist factory slowly picks up speed and another relentless workday has begun. The machinery charges and pounds and the chorus comes in and the workers cut and sew and stitch and the bosses demand more, and the machines crank and roar and beat on, the tempo increases, the timpani roll, the workers cut and sew and stitch faster and faster, the orchestra shouts, the chorus is chanting, the presser, the cutter, the wringer, the mangle, the needle, the union, the treadle, the bobbin, the bosses, and now the whistle is whistling, the workday is ending, and now the machines are beginning to slow.

The baton jabs the air, the chorus is chanting, the machines all fall silent, the clink of money is heard as the bosses circulate among the workers, doling out the week’s pay packets, but something is there, something terrible, surging in a powerful undercurrent—a harsh, dissonant, charging, insistent, consuming, growing note, a sustained dissonance, and the tempo increases as it grows, feeding, sforzando, looming as the insistent, insatiable presence that it is, accelerando, and now with a boom! the fire has arrived, and the chorus is chanting Flames! Fire! Fire in the factory! Sreyfe! Incendio! Ognisko! Szenvedély! Jujym! Fogo! Sreyfe! Fire! And telephones are ringing and ringing, the orchestra beats on relentlessly in dissonant, oppositional waves of sound, and men are shouting and women are crying in Yiddish and Italian and in Polish and in Russian and there are thundering footsteps and the desperate voices are raised and raised and raised, again, impossibly, and now the orchestra takes off and goes into a gliding orbit around the voices. At once the chorus of 146 voices rages and begs and pleads and rages again, and the glorious, terrible, destroying music soars around them and lifts them up, and the chorus pulls the music down, and down, and down, and the timpani and the untuned bass drums crash together with a boom, boom, boom, for each body as it falls, and the bodies fall, down and down and down, and the despairing music darkens the Stern Auditorium, it darkens the very air (many who were there that night would insist all their lives that there had been special light effects, but there were none), and the rolling clouds of black music thicken the air and make it unbreathable and hot, while the chorus gasps and chokes and pleads, and most of the audience grow uneasy and squirm in their seats, and some twist around searching to identify the fire exits, just in case, and then the children’s choir joins the noise and adds to the panic, and now come the terrible cries of the violins as the voices of the children and the sopranos in the chorus join in a pure scream of fear and anguish and terror and sorrow, the orchestra is momentarily silent, and a baritone violin tuned an octave low joins the other violins in a double-stopped glissando that builds and rises as fire sirens over the chorus, and then a lone mezzo-soprano rides up the octave with a matching glissando wail, and they ride up and down the siren octave again as the fire trucks arrive, and now the children are silent, snuffed out, invisible, with no more voices, but they stand there mute, moving their mouths, singing rest note after rest note, singing the silences, present in their absence, and the desperate murmur of the helpless onlookers buzzes from the back of the chorus, the full orchestra returns, and the fire rages and the firemen rage, and onlookers mill in the streets, and underneath the noise of it all is the relentless boom, boom, boom, of the bodies hitting the pavement one by one, the terrible stopping short of a life is there in the dull weight of each impact, it repeats and repeats, the swoop of the falling bodies and then the finality of that resonant impact, the terrible stillness that ends each fall, again, and again, and yet again, the crashing bodies hit the ground, the overloaded fire escape tears away from the wall, the locked doors hold captive the last of the burning girls. The fire burns in diminishing ripples now, with nothing left to consume, no more lives to be lost, Asch Building to ashes, dust to dust, there is nothing now but the looking back and the remembering, the sifting of ashes that will continue for decades, this is what happened, this is what happened, this is what happened.