Different Trains

Steve Reich's intensely evocative work, written for the Kronos Quartet and tape in 1988, was inspired by the cross-country journeys he made as a young boy between his father, who lived in New York, and his mother, in Los Angeles. What struck Reich was how different that train journey might have been had he been living in Europe at that time—a time when the Jewish boys of his age had been rounded up and transported to the camps by the Nazis. With their pulsing strings and chugging rhythms, the three movements of Different Trains take us from “America—Before the War” to “Europe—During the War” to “After the War”, returning to the American train sounds of the first movement. The sounds of train whistles, warning bells and, in the second movement, air-raid-like drones all set the scene. Meanwhile, snippets of interview footage with people—among them Holocaust survivors and a Pullman porter in the U.S.—relay the experiences of those who lived during the Second World War. Reich had used sampled voices in his pioneering tape-loop experiments, most strikingly in It's Gonna Rain (1965), but the idea of creating melody out of recorded speech was new, and one that would become a feature of his later works, such as The Cave (1993) and City Life (1995).