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Different Trains is a three-movement work
for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988.
One need not know anything about Different Trains’ background
to experience the full force of this evocative work.
But its story is a gripping one.
During the Second World War, Reich traveled by train
between New York and Los Angeles
to visit his parents who had separated.
As a Jew, had he been in Europe at the time,
he would have more than likely
been put on a train to the death camps.
Different Trains is therefore a ‘what if’ story for Reich.
What if he had been on one of those trains?
And what emerged from his ruminations
were three highly charged movements:
movement one- before the war,
movement two- during the war,
and movement three- after the war.
One of the many remarkable things about this work
is how Reich uses the human voice.
Unwittingly, we are making music as we talk.
No one speaks in a robotic monotone
and thus a word or group of words
has quite literally a melodic line
that can have actual notes ascribed to it.
Reich recorded the voices of people
both in Europe and the United States
who were witnesses to these three periods
and events of history, and then he selected words and phrases
to be used in conjunction with their musical counterparts.
Melodies are introduced in each movement,
usually by a single instrument
(viola for women, cello for men),
accompanied by recordings of spoken words and phrases-
resulting in an eerie kind of chamber music.
On the face of it, adding a prepared tape
to the string quartet makes the group simply a quintet.
But the tape portion is an enormous player
in Different Trains. Along with the human voice,
Reich has recorded the sounds of trains,
sirens, and warning bells- those of
American trains before and after the war,
European ones during the war.
In addition, Reich pre-recorded multiple lines by the string quartet
making it in effect four quartets in one.
The overall impact of Different Trains
is bone chilling as one hears the clickity-clack of wheels
over tracks reproduced by the string quartet,
the bits and pieces of holocaust survivors’ speech,
and the shriek of train whistles.
The string instruments of a quartet
have remained stubbornly unchanged
since their creation almost five hundred years ago,
but that doesn’t preclude them being wedded
to the latest technology. Reich transferred his speech
recordings into a digital sampling keyboard-
something musicians in the pop, dance, and electronic field
have been using for years. The result of Reich’s
imaginative if unlikely mix of strings,
speech, and sampling is Different Trains,
a work that is utterly new in concept
yet deeply moving in a very old fashioned way.
Since speech intonation is the foundation of this work,
let’s take a look at some of the phrases
Reich sampled to create this powerful narrative.
In Movement 1, eleven phrases occur
as spoken by Reich’s governess, Virginia
and the Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis.
Here is a sample of the phrases:
Virginia - 'from Chicago to New York'
Virginia - 'one of the fastest trains'
Lawrence - 'from New York to Los Angeles'
and again Lawrence - ‘1939’
Notice that phrases like 'from Chicago to New York'
suggest certain pitches and rhythms -
'from Chi-ca-go to New Yo-ork'.
In Movement 2, Reich uses twenty-three phrases
spoken by three Holocaust survivors -
Rachella, Paul and Rachel.
Here are a few examples:
Rachella - 'The Germans walked in'
Paul - 'I was in second grade'
Again Paul - 'He said, 'Black crows invaded our country many years ago'
Rachel - 'No more school'
Rachella - 'Lots of cattle wagons there'
Rachella - 'They shaved us'
and again Rachella - 'They tattooed a number on our arms'
In Movement 3, twelve more phrases
occur as spoken by the speakers
in both Movements 1 and 2:
Paul - 'and the war was over'
Rachella - 'Are you sure?'
Rachella - 'going to America'
Lawrence - 'from New York to Los Angeles'
Virginia - 'one of the fastest trains'
And finally, Lawrence - 'but today they’re all gone'
Note the return of phrases heard in movement one.
Through the inventive use of sampling,
Reich takes these phrases, their musical
versions as played by the Kronos String Quartet,
and the trains sounds to create a tapestry
of ideas that are manipulated and developed
through repetition, fragmentation,
and even reverse sampling. The result
is a powerful expression that brings
the string quartet into the technological age.
Let’s close with an excerpt
from the opening section of the first movement.
[MUSIC]
Arnold SteinhardtPerformance Faculty
Dr. Mia ChungInstructor of Interpretive Analysis
