There are times when words are utterly inadequate, clumsy things that fail to be of any use. Today is one of those days. Seven years after three planes crashed in New York City, Washington D.C., and Shanksville, Pennsylvania, nothing said here will properly honor and mourn those who died on a clear, bright September morning.

So no words. Instead, following a New Orleans tradition, music. Four days after the September 11 attacks, the BBC Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, performed Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings.”

The second selection is from the alpha and omega of American music, Louis Armstrong. Pops, as he was affectionately called, is singing about a woman named Dinah, expressing the one thing that frightens all who use terror as a weapon: joy.