Steve Reich – Different Trains

     Steven Reich's "Different Trains" (1988) is a semi-autobiographical account of the Holocaust. The author, using electronic means, intertwines memories of his own childhood in America in the 1940s and the memories of a person who survived the Holocaust as a child.

     For his project, Reich recorded the memoirs of his governess "reminiscing about [our] train rides together," a former sleeper-car conductor, and three Jewish Holocaust survivors, "all about my age and now living in America." With the help of digital processing, he cut the received interviews and created from them a semi-sequential story, which is divided into three parts: "America, before the war", "Europe, during the war" and "After the war". The speech of the heroes is accompanied by a string quartet. The music is inspired by the work of Béla Bartók, one of Reich's favorite composers, and reproduces the melodic and rhythmic contours of speech samples using the "speech melody" method.

     Like the work of fellow minimalists Philip Glass, Reich's compositions reject the characteristic complexity of mid-20th century classics, namely traditional harmony and tonality. Instead, he prefers a single chord, a short musical motive, a spoken exclamation repeated for a long time, with other small variations that are introduced very gradually. "Different Trains" was not an exception. The sound vibrations produced by the violins are indeed reminiscent of a train journey, as well as the chaotic arrangement of sounds and a repetitive voice accompanying the movement of a vehicle. At first the sounds seem to be out of tune and not exactly pleasant to listen to, but with time they immerse you into a real world of noises and even create an impression of a realistic harmony of the world people used to live in. In my opinion, the repetitive voice enhances the effect, especially united with instrumental music, which makes the whole piece appear quite dramatic and conveying the alarming mood of the Second World War.