Steve Reich: The String Quartets

For Steve Reich, music is both intellectual and emotional. “And it makes it such a powerful force in the human race,” the pioneering minimalist composer tells Apple Music. For proof, look no further than his three string quartets—Different Trains (1988), Triple Quartet (1998) and WTC 9/11 (2010). In Different Trains, Reich’s trademark pulsing rhythms powerfully evoke contrasting worlds: that of his childhood in America during the late 1930s and early ’40s, and the world of wartime Europe. The recorded sounds of trains, the voices of Holocaust survivors and those who worked on the Pullman trains in the US are woven into the fabric of the work. It is all a far cry from Reich’s initial concept for the work, experimenting with the voice of the 20th-century composer Bartók. “There are late recordings of Bartók talking in English, but when it comes to the quartet genre he is about as great a musician as we have, so to have him sitting on my shoulder was a case of ‘Thank you, but no thank you’: I have enough superego worries going on without that.” As one of the founding fathers of minimalism, Reich stands out for his expressive use of recorded sounds. His Triple Quartet comprises three quartets which can be performed at once by 12 players, or the first can be played live against a recording of the second and third. In WTC 9/11, completed nearly 10 years after the terrorist attacks when he felt able to think about it as source material, Reich captures the intensity of events as they unfold in New York, drawing on the voices of people who lived through it. As with his early quartets, he arrived at his ideas for WTC 9/11 through an essentially “organic process”. “When you compose you are in a room and you are by yourself, so who are you writing for? If you’re writing commercial music then you have to write to fit the film or the jingle, but if you have an audience, you compose to please yourself. If I have misgivings, you certainly will, and if I love it then there’s a good chance you will too.” Read on, as Reich guides us through each of his three quartets on these startling new interpretations by the Mivos Quartet. Different Trains “With the arrival of sampling keyboards in the 1980s, you could play back a recording—of a dog barking, or a Beethoven melody, say. So the question became: what am I recording and why? I remembered the childhood trips I had taken between my mother, living in LA, and my father in New York, accompanied by my governess Virginia. It was the late 1930s and early ’40s, and my experience would have been very different had I been living in Europe. At that time, being a Pullman porter in the US was one of the best jobs open to a Black man. So the piece features all these perspectives: recordings of a retired Pullman porter; Virginia talking about the good old days; Holocaust survivors speaking of their experiences; and the train sounds. It all conspires to create a consistent environment that is personal and inspiring.” Triple Quartet “As a student at Juilliard, I listened to a lot of Bartók, particularly the Fourth String Quartet, which made me want to write this piece. If you go back to the basic idea of It’s Gonna Rain [Reich’s seminal 1965 work for magnetic tape], you can hear two identical voices going against each other. In the string quartet—with two violins, one viola and a cello—I wanted to have these unison canons using sounds that are similar but different to the violin. I also wanted to make more voices available, so I multiplied them using pre-recorded tape, which felt very liberating. The three-movement fast-slow-fast structure goes all the way back to Scarlatti and the Baroque.” WTC 9/11 “This work draws on a very powerful personal experience of the 9/11 attack. That day, I was in Vermont with my wife, while our son, granddaughter and daughter-in-law were all in my apartment in New York, four blocks from the World Trade Center. My son called saying there’s been a collision with an airplane. We all turned on the television to see a gaping hole in the tower and the announcers caught out to lunch. At the time I was worried the towers would fall over and demolish the apartment block—it was an intense, warlike experience limited to this little area of Lower Manhattan. The Quartet features the voices of the people who were there and lived through it all. One new musical technique was made possible by the ability to prolong and elongate a sound without changing its pitch—such as the ‘n’ of the newsreader’s ‘Boston’; the syllable of one speaker is picked up by the next, establishing a harmonic connection between them.”