It is perhaps even more important to listen to and reflect on Steve Reich’s Different Trains today than it was at the time of its premiere, says Tom Service
THE LISTENING SERVICE
‘If anybody came to me and said, “We’d like you to write a piece about the Holocaust,” I would run, not walk, in the other direction as fast as is humanly possible.’ That’s the American composer Steve Reich talking about Different Trains, his piece for amplified string quartet, sampled spoken voices and a pre-recorded ensemble of multiple string quartets, written for the Kronos Quartet in 1988.
And yet Different Trains has been called by the musicologist Richard Taruskin ‘the only adequate musical response to the Holocaust’. So how can it simultaneously be not about the Holocaust, and also a life-changing confrontation with the genocide?
It’s because of Different Trains’s fusion of voices – real-life, documentary voices, including three Holocaust survivors – as the musical catalyst for everything we hear in its three movements, along with Steve Reich’s own biography.
Different Trains opens by tracing the melodic contour of the speaking voice of Reich’s childhood governess Virginia Mitchell. Reich’s parents separated when he was one year old, in 1938, so he and Virginia crossed the country every year, from New York, where his mother lived, to California to see his father.
And having had the idea of using the voice of his governess, Reich imagined other – different – trains in other parts of the world: ‘I thought, ’37, ’38, ’39… what’s going on then? Well… other little [Jewish] boys like me who were born in Düsseldorf or Rotterdam or Budapest were taking trains to Poland’ – to the concentrations camps. Reich visited the archive of voices of Holocaust survivors at Yale University, where he found the recorded voices of Rachella, Paul and Rachel, whose speech melodies spoke
