I’ve always been fascinated by the connection between speech and music. Music often mirrors the natural flow of speech: questions are asked and answered, tension builds and resolves, and clear statements are made. In his early compositions, It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Steve Reich experimented with recorded speech on tape loops played against each other, with the sounds slowly shifting in and out of phase. However, Different Trains takes it a step further by blending speech into the music itself.
Background
From 1939 to 1942, Reich travelled between his separated parents in Los Angeles and New York by train, accompanied by his governess. Later on, he reflected that, as a Jew, he may have been travelling on very different trains had he been born in Europe.
Different Trains explores the role of trains and the lives they carried from pre-war, wartime, and post-war perspectives. It incorporates recorded speech from Reich’s governess, a railway porter, and various Holocaust survivors. These recordings, along with pre-recorded string quartet parts, trains sounds, and sirens, were recorded onto tapes and played live with a string quartet.
The first movement, “America, Before the War“, contains Reich’s childhood memories of train journeys between his parents. The train whistles are cheerful and the tone is optimistic. This is in sharp contrast with the second movement, “Europe: During the War“, where shrill train whistles punctuate air-raid sirens and mournful strings. A more hopeful tone returns in the third movement, “After the War“, though an undertone of doubt and uncertainty is still present.
What it means to me
The facts of the Holocaust are easy to understand, but not as easy to feel. By melding the voices of the people who experienced it with the backdrop of the music, Reich allows them to speak for themselves. Reich explained:
“Who am I to talk about something that I didn’t go through? But if people who were there are presented as they really speak, and all the innuendos and bends of melodic subtleties of their voices are there, are part of the music, then you have a testimony. You don’t have someone writing their imagination of the Holocaust.“
It’s this testimony that is so powerful to me and, as the trains propel the motion of the piece forward—sometimes slow, sometimes breakneck—the facts become a little easier to feel.
What to listen for
Reich uses fragments of recorded speech as his musical themes. He introduces these motifs in the instruments first—the male themes in the cello and the female in the viola—before developing them after including the speech samples. These speech fragments become music themselves in the end, and it creates a powerful bond between the characters and the music of the trains that carried them.
The train whistles in the first movement are cheerful and what we’d consider consonant intervals in Western music, perfect fifths and major seconds. This is contrasted with the whistles in the second movement which are short, painful shrieks.
Suggested listening activity
This might be obvious, but this piece can truly be appreciated when travelling by train.
love it !! 🥺