Steve Reich – Different Trains

Steve Reich’s “Different Trains” partly tells the story of his travels as a child between New York and Los Angeles by train, where he was accompanied by his governess to alternate visiting his divorced parents. Thinking of these journeys, the resemblance of the situation of him as a Jew on the train between the years 1939 and 1942, and European Jews traveling on trains to their deaths at the same time, inspired him to create this piece.

“Different Trains” is divided into three sections: “America: Before the War”, “Europe: During the War”, and “After the War.” In all three sections, he uses repeating cycles famous in minimal music and authentic train sounds from the ’30s and ‘40s. Reich utilizes voice recordings of his governess, after interviewing her about their shared trips across the country, and voice recordings of a retired train porter for one part of the song. For the other part, he utilizes archive recordings of Holocaust survivors. Furthermore, string musicians were directed to imitate the sounds of the trains which were then recorded and mixed with the original train sounds.

For the live performance, Reich cuts the speech recordings and repeats them to play them over the original train sounds and the imitated train sounds. Meanwhile, the string musicians on stage add their own train sounds to the recording that is being played. All is then set in chronological order, presenting first the governess and the train porter’s ‘looped’ speech, then the Holocaust survivors and their experiences, imitating the chronological style of a documentary.

Reich says that “the piece to me is really an homage to those people [Jews in Europe during the Holocaust] – a memorial to those no longer around and to those living.” His work “Different Trains” is immensely important as an archive work and new form of documentation of the world’s history. Reading about Reich’s work is a completely different experience than listening to the live performance. “Different Trains” is an important piece of art that launches itself into memorability, not only in the genre of minimal music but for historical documentation in every possible sense.