Different Trains

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Different Trains is a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988. It won a Grammy Award in 1989 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

Steve Reich's earlier work had frequently used tape, looped and played back at different speeds; however, Different Trains was a novel experiment, using recorded speech as a source for melodies. This followed Scott Johnson's John Somebody of 1978, an early attempt to construct directed melodic motion by harmonising recorded speech.

In Different Trains, after each melody in the piece is introduced, usually by a single instrument, a recording of the spoken phrase from which the melody derives is played. The melody is then developed for a while, with the instruments playing along with the recording of the phrase or part of the phrase. In addition to speech, the piece calls for recordings of train sirens.

Much of the recorded speech that forms the basis for Different Trains is among the first recordings made on magnetic tape. It is taken from interviews with people in the United States and Europe about the years leading up to, during, and immediately after World War II. In the first movement, America — Before the War, Americans speak about train travel in the US. American train sirens are heard in the background. In the second movement, Europe — During the War, Europeans, many Holocaust survivors, speak about the conditions in Europe during the war, in particular how trains were used to transport millions of civilians to concentration camps, and the sirens used are European train sirens. The third movement, America — After the War, features people talking about the years immediately following World War II, and a return to the American train sirens from the first movement.

During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in very different trains.

Reich developed his 'speech melody' work further with projects such as The Cave (1993) and City Life (1995).

Reich created these works by transferring his speech recordings into a digital sampling keyboard (a Casio FZ-1). Musicians in the pop, dance and electronica fields had been using samplers for years, but this was one of the very first 'classical' works to use sampling. City Life actually used sampling keyboards in performance (rather than using a backing tape) and the samples are notated and played in exactly the same way as the conventional instruments.

[edit] References

• Espiner, Mark. "And the beat goes on", Times Newspapers Limited, Sunday Times of London, August 20, 2006. Retrieved on October 19, 2006. (in English)