On "Different Trains" (Steve Reich)

Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and tape begins a new way of composing that has its roots in my early taped speech pieces It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). The basic idea is that speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments.

The concept for the piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that , if I had been in Europe during this period , as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation. In order to prepare the tape, I had to do the following:

1- Record my governess Virginia, now in her seventies, reminiscing about our train trips together.
2- Record a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, now in his eighties, who used to ride lines between New York and Los Angeles, reminiscing about his life.
3- Collect recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul and Rachel - all about my age and now living in America - speaking of their experiences.
4- Collect recorded American and European trains sounds of the 1930s and '40s.

In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then notated them accurately as possible in musical notation.

The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples as well as the train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Kronos then made four separate string quartet recordings which were combined with the speech and train sounds to create the finished work.

(Steve Reich, August 1988)