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Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' Author(s): Christopher Fox Reviewed work(s): Source: Tempo, New Series, No. 172 (Mar., 1990), pp. 2-8 Published by: Cambridge University Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/945403. Accessed: 24/01/2012 08:31 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at. http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Cambridge University Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Tempo. http://www.jstor.org

Christopher Fox Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27-minute work for string quartet and tape, written in I988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premiered it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch.' Reich's reputation has never been confined to 'serious' new music circles and the combination of his (so-called) 'crossover' credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Diferent Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Diferent Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates. To any listener, whether Reich aficianado or not, the most immediately striking aspect of Dffereiit Trains is the contribution made by the tape part. To the sound of the live string quartet, the tape adds another three layers of string quartet sound, the sounds of trains (engines, whistles, etc), sirens and bells, and a sequence of short extracts of recorded speech. It is this last element that is the most remarkable feature of the work. Reich has linked the voices of his former governess, Virginia, of a retired American railway steward, Lawrence Davis, and of three survivors of the Nazi holocaust, Rachel, Paul and Rachella, all reminiscing about their experiences during the Second World War. Inevitably these experiences were radically different. As Reich says: 'Stcvc Reich, Dit lircnt TrainIslElectric Counterpoint, Nonesuch 979176-2, 1989. I travelled back and forth between New York and Los Angeles from.i939 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 ajew I would have had to ride very differentrains. Reich uses just 46 spoken phrases during the course of the piece, grouped in three movements, as shown in Table I. As can be seen, through them Reich is attempting nothing less than a brief history of perhaps the most appallingly systematic onslaught, in this or any other century, by a government on the lives of millions of people. By focussing on the personal histories of a few individuals he is able to emphasize the inhumanity of the Nazis' invasion of so many people's lives; the juxtaposition of the two Americans with their European contemporaries establishes the contrast between normality and the Europeans' experiences. Thus when the Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, says in the third movement, 'But today, they're all gone', he is recalling the luxurious transcontinental trains on which he worked; however, for the listener, these words can also become an elegy for the millions of people who died between 1933 and I945. Such a project is, like any which seeks to make art out of other people's suffering, fraught with danger; and Reich courts this danger with his decision to attempt some sort of resolution within the work. The evolution of the music, from the brisk confidence of the start of the first movement to the silence which follows the wailing sirens and the words, 'Flames going up to the sky - it was smoking' at the end of the second, is totally convincing. But by writing a third movement in which the voices from the first movement, together with some of the musical ideas associated with them, return, Reich risks devaluing the impact of what has gone before with some pat recapitulatory conclusion. Indeed, the bustling opening of the last movement - as a series of entries unfolds around figures (a) and (b) (see Example I) - suggests Reich may be about to do just that. However, these fears prove groundless: the optimism

Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' 3 TABLE 1 1 America - Before the war 'from Chicago to New York' (Virginia) 'one of the fastest trains' (Virginia) 'the crack train from New York' (Lawrence Davis) 'from New York to Los Angeles' (Lawrence Davis) 'different trains every time' (Virginia) 'from Chicago to New York' (Virginia) 'in 1939' (Virginia) '1939' (Lawrence Davis) '1940' (Lawrence Davis) '1941' (Lawrence Davis) '19411 guess it must've been' (Virginia) 2 Europe - During the war '1940' (Rachella) 'on my birthday' (Rachella) 'The Gerlans walked in' (Rachella) 'walked into Holland' (Rachella) 'Geimans invaded Hmingpry' (Paul) 'I was in second grade' (Paul) 'I had a teacher' (Paul) 'a very tall man, his hair was concretely plastered smooth' (Paul) 'He said, 'Black crows invaded our country many years ago' (Paul) 'and he pointed right at me' (Paul) 'No more school' (Rachel) 'You must go away' (Rachel) 'and she said 'Quick, go!' (Rachella) 'and he said, 'Don't breathe!' ' (Rachella) 'into those cattle wagons' (Rachella) 'for 4 days and 4 nights' (Rachella) 'and then we went through these strange sounding names' (Rachella) 'Polish names' (Rachella) 'Lots of cattle wagons there' (Rachella) 'They were loaded with people' (Rachella) 'They shaved us' (Rachella) 'They tattooed a number on our arms' (Rachella) 'Flames going up to the sky - it was smoking' (Rachella) 3 After the war 'and the war was over' (Paul) 'Are you sure?' (Rachella) 'The war is over' (Rachella) 'going to America' (Rachella) 'to Los Angeles' (Rachella) 'to New York' (Rachella) 'from New York to Los Angeles' (Lawrence Davis) 'one of the fastest trains' (Virginia) 'but today they're all gone' (Lawrence Davis) 'There was one girl who had a beautiful voice' (Rachella) 'and they loved to listen to her singing, the Germans' (Rachella) 'and when she stopped singing they said, 'More, more' and they applauded' (Rachella)

4 Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' Ex.1 a) b) mp implicit in the figures and their association with the phrase, 'The war is over', is surely expressing the immediate personal response of Holocaust survivors to their arrival in America, rather than a more general historical assessment of the world in the post-war years. As the movement continues, interweaving Rachella's voice with those of Reich's governess and Mr Davis, and particularly as it concludes in the extraordinarily poignant music that accompanies Rachella's final reminiscence, Reich would seem to be suggesting that while America provided a new world in which to escape the external reminders of Nazi oppression, the internal wounds of the Holocaust are not so easily resolved. In retrospect, Reich's career as a composer can be seen as a quest for the techniques that would allow him to confront the expressive challenge of Different Trains. This is not the place for a summary of that career - others, most notably K. Robert Schwartz in his extended article 'Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process' in Perspectives of New Music,2 have successfully accomplished that - but it is useful to consider the ways in which Reich has employed voices in his work and also to compare Reich's conception of form in Different Trains with that of earlier works. During the 1970s the voice seemed to hold little interest for Reich, at least in its traditional role as a carrier of texts. Whilst women singers appeared as regular members of his ensemble, Steve Reich and Musicians, and featured in works such as Drumming (197I), Musicfor Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ (1973) and Musicfor Eighteen Musicians (1974-6), they were there to provide another instrumental timbre - in particular, Reich used women's voices for their ability to act both as sustaining instruments and as highly mobile treble instru- 2 K. Robert Schwartz, 'Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process', Perspectives in New Music (Fall-Winter I98o/Spring Sulmmerr 196), pp.373-394 (Part i) and (Fall-Winter 1981/ Spring- Suimmer 1982), pp.226-286 (Part 2). ments capable, through the use of different consonants, of a wide range of percussive attacks. However the very processes underlying all Reich's instrumental music of the I970s had first appeared in his work in two tape pieces of the mid-sixties, It's Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966), both of which take as their source material rich examples of utterly authentic vocal behaviour. Schwartz gives an extended account of both these pieces; suffice it to say here that, in each, Reich takes a tape recording of a live speaker against which he sets one or more identical recordings which gradually shift out of phase with one another. Thus what begins as documentary evidence of a particular speaker (a black revivalist preacher in It's Gonna Rain, for example) is slowly transformed into a dense canonic texture in which the rhythms and intonation of the original performance become at least as important as the sense of what was said. In his book, Writings about Music, Reich has described how he began to explore ways of developing his use of the 'phase shifting' technique, discovered in these tape works, within live instrumental music. Although the musical traces of this exploration are to be heard most readily in works such as Violin Phase and Piano Phase (both I967) and Drumming, the legacy of phase shifting is present in even the most recent music. Reich's players are no longer required to imitate the mechanical process of tape machines slowly moving out of synchronization; but the musical product of that process - the gradual appearance of a second version of a musical figure at a rhythmically discernible distance from its first appearance - remains Reich's primary means of achieving proliferation within a musical texture. At its simplest this can be oldfashioned canon, as in the vocal entries at the start of Tehillim (1981), or old-fashioned imitation, as in the instrumental imitations of the speakers in Different Trains, a device which I shall discuss later. In the more complex textures of Electric Counterpoint (1987) one is aware not so much of the workings of voice against voice as of the elaborate cross-rhythms that result from their combination. In the early I98os Reich created two works in which live voices were given texts to articulate: in Tehillim four women's voices, accompanied by chamber orchestra, sing settings of the psalms in the original Hebrew; in The Desert Music (1984) a chorus of 27 voices, with orchestral accompaniment, sing settings of poetry by William Carlos Williams. However inventive they are, either vocally or instrumentally - and Tehillim is, I believe, one of Reich's finest

achievements - neither work can be said to break new ground in their combination of words and music. Perhaps because text-setting itself was new to Reich (with the exception of student works) when he came to write Tehillim, and setting an English text was new to him when he wrote The Desert Music, he adopts a straightforward, predominantly syllabic approach in both pieces. As Keith Potter observed soon after the premiere of The Desert Music: 'The use of an English-language text is entirely new in Reich's mature, "repetitive" music and... he sets the words in a manner resembling the Western traditional notion of the term "setting" '.3 Only in Different Trains is the significance of the reintroduction of words into Reich's music through Tehillim and The Desert Music confirmed. It might appear that the problems presented by texts were ignored in the years between It's Gonna Rain and Tehillim until the potential of the phase shifting technique discovered in the early tape pieces had been refined. It is nevertheless important to note that throughout this period Reich returned from time to time to a 'work in progress' that did involve words. This was My Name Is: Ensemble Portrait, begun in 1967 and only provisionally completed in 1980. Ian Gardiner has described it as dating back to a loosely structured piece of 1967, where the names of the audience, taped as they entered the hall and then edited onto tape loops, were improvised on by Reich, crossing phase relationships across three portable tape recorders. In 1980 he visited IRCAM in Paris with the aim of discovering the technological means to reapply this concept in real time, using the name of the performers of his own ensemble, and with the phase relationships organized in advance. At its first performance, in New York on January 6, 198 I, the eight performers of Octet stepped forward to the microphones and introduced themselves... the tape phased each name, one at a time.4 Schwartz quotes Reich as insisting that My Name Is: Ensemble Portrait 'is just a sketch... because the important part of it is to introduce... instruments' so that 'one would end up with a tape and a live score'.5 Schwartz also reports that, in the work for which My Name Is was the sketch, Reich hoped also to add real-time treatments of voices from history, such as Hitler or Roosevelt perhaps. As Ian Gardiner has observed, these intentions 'would seem to indicate a renewed 3 Keith Potter, 'The Recent Phases of Steve Reich', Contact 29 (Spring 1985), p.3 1. 4 lan Gardiner, Music was a gradual process: the rediscovery of tradition in the music of Steve Reich since I976, (MA Thesis, Keele University, 1983), pp.37-8. s Schwartz, op cit., p.263. Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' 5 interest in the political implications of his music, last in evidence in the benefit concert that premiered Come Out in April I967, for the retrial of the "Harlem Six" of which Daniel Hamm, the voice on the tape, was a member'.6 Different Trains is certainly a triumphant fulfilment of those intentions. Perhaps the most obvious difference between Reich's plans for the successor to My Name Is and Different Trains is the absence of any attempt at real-time processing of the voices used. Above all else Reich is a composer with a strong sense of the art of the possible: much of his instrumental music in the I970s evolved around the particular gifts of the musicians with whom he worked, and the documentation accompanying the recordings of works such as Musicfor Large Ensemble (1978) and Octet (1978-9), in which the process of revision after the first performance is described, demonstrates Reich's determination always to achieve the most idiomatically successful form for his ideas. Reich's visits to IRCAM, in I980 for work on My Name Is and later while he worked on Sextet (I985), must surely have convinced him that, although equipment was available which would technically be capable of the sort of live signal processing he required, the problems presented by the use of this equipment in rehearsal and performance were too great to be practicable. In particular the live integration of passages of prerecorded speech with the sort of instrumental music that Reich writes is bedevilled by the fact that few speakers adhere to the regular pulse that is such a characteristic of all Reich's work. If this pulse was absent in the vocal material, that material would be felt to stand outside the world of the live instruments; whereas Reich's aim was, as Schwarts says, 'to utilize live instruments... to imitate the sounds [of the voices]... as well as to complete the implied harmonic, melodic and rhythmic inferences of the resulting patterns'.' (It is worth noting that, in the initial stages of planning The Desert Music, Reich considered using a tape of William Carlos Williams - author of the poetry chosen as text for the work - reading one of his poems. Here too the rhythms of the prerecorded voice would inevitably have meant that the voice was heard at one remove from Reich's music and, perhaps for that reason, Reich abandoned the idea.) Reich's solution of this technical problem was typically elegant and practical. One of the great revolutions in commercially manufactured music technology in the I98os has been the 6 Gardiner, op cit., footnotes p.iii. 7 Schwartz, op cit., p.262.

6 Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' Steve Reich (photo: ( 1989 Martha Swope Assocs.) development of digital sampling: Reich used the Casio FZ-I and FZ-IoM samplers to record, edit, transpose and play the fragments of speech that make up the vocal element of the tape part. In this way he was able to draw his 'documentary' material into the rhythmic and harmonic scheme of the work. By similarly sampling and editing the train sounds, sirens and bells also used in the tape part they too could be fully incorporated into the structure of the music. Thus the repeated semiquavers of the string writing are unmistakably coupled to the clatter of trains, while, most memorably, the train-whistles signal tonal shifts. Some might argue (Boulez has always offered this as a defence of the unwieldy technical requirements of Repons) that live electronics offer a flexibility in performance that a preordained tape part cannot match. In the end this became an impossible luxury for Different Trains, as Reich decided to multiply the Kronos and have three extra versions of them on tape, but recent experience would seem to suggest anyway that younger performers (Kronos themselves or, in very different music, the new generation of Stockhausen interpreters) can learn to play live with tape in such a way that their music-making sounds completely spontaneous. (On record, the medium through which the majority of people get to know music today, the distinction is of course quite irrelevant.) Sampling and the manipulation of samples have become mainstays of a lot of pop music in the last few years; but if sampling offered Reich the technology through which he could integrate the vocal and ambient sound materials of Different Trains into the kinds of rhythmic and harmonic patterns which now characterize his music, he did not succumb to the lure of the flashing lights of the acid-house party. Whereas House-music favours abruptly edited samples, obsessively repeated sound-bites dominated by an insistently regular tempo, in Different Trains the speed of each voice's delivery is always respected. Consequently, although Different Trains is cast in three distinct movements, there are many tempo-changes within each movement, the pace of the music being adjusted to accommodate the speed of each new phrase so that the identity of each voice and of each phrase is preserved. However, Reich does sometimes loop one or two words within a phrase to create a new rhythm out of the rhythms already present. This is particularly the case in the first movement where, for example, the second phrase starts as 'one of the fastest trains' (repeated three times), and then becomes 'one of the fastest trains, fastest trains' (repeated four times), and then becomes 'one of the fastest trains, fastest trains, one of the fastest trains' (repeated seven times) before the next phrase is introduced (see Example 2). Ex.2.m J 9 J //' n j. i. J.L / one of the fast - est trains one of the fast - est trains fast - est trains one of the fast - est trains fast - est trains one of the fast - est trains one of the fast - est trains fast - est trains one of the fast - est trains Music examples? copyright 1989 by Hendon Music Inc.

Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' 7 In the sleeve-notes for the recording of The Desert Music, Reich talks about his fascination with 'that constant flickering of attention between what words mean arid how they sound'.8 In Diferent Trains where, rather than being set to music as in The Desert Music, the words themselves become music, that ambiguity is even more evident. Reich says in the sleeve-notes for Different Trains that '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 as accurately as possible in musical notation'. As example he gives the opening phrase (see Example 3). Yet it Ex.3 music and text back through The Desert Music, Tehillim and, especially, My Name Is: Ensemble Portraito Come Out and It's Gonna Rain. In the same way I think it can be demonstrated that the formal sophistication of Different Trains, unprecedented though it is in Reich's work, is nevertheless the result of an evolutionary process that can be traced through his earlier works, particularly those of the I98os. With the exception of the four-movement Drumming,'l each of Reich's works in the I97os was cast in a single movement with a continuous unchanging pulse. Within these large structures the music, though cearly sectionalized, is rhythmically and T _ P4 from Chi-ca - go to New Yor - k is important that the words are heard and understood, and to this end Reich always assigns an instrument to the task of either anticipating and/or echoing each phrase. These instrumental imitations act both as indication that a new phrase is about to be introduced and - especially useful in the second movement, where some voices are almost submerged in the instrumental music - as a recurrent impression of the voice's inflection, enabling the listener gradually to piece the phrase together. At the same time an in- triguing ambiguity is set up between the gradual unfolding of the music's narrative and that of the speakers' various stories. Reich's sleeve-notes for Different Trains acknowledge this ambiguity: he argues that 'the piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality' and goes on to claim that it also 'begins a new musical direction'. However, as I have already suggested, the new direction taken by Different Trains can also be seen as a fulfilment of a number of ideas more or less explicit in Reich's earlier works. In I980, in an interview with the Christian Science Monitor, Reich said that 'I believe that music does not exist in a vacuum... My work [is]... moving back... toward a more mainstream approach',9 and the use and choice of texts in his work in the I980s is a clear indication of his desire to engage with major contemporary themes: humanity's relationship to God in Tehillim, to the environment in The Desert Music and to itselfin Different Trains. It is also possible to trace the roots of Different Trains' approach to the interaction of 8 Steve Reich, The Desert Music, Nonesuch 797 IOI-I, 1985. 9 David Sterritt, 'Tradition Reseen: Composer Steve Reich', Christian Science Monitor, 23 October 1980, p.20. harmonically consistent: as Reich said of Music for Eighteen Musicians, 'The relationship between the different sections is... best understood in terms of resemblances between members of a family. Certain characteristics will be shared but others will be unique'." In Tehillim, however, Reich divides the work into four clear movements, characterized not only by different tempi (in the scheme fast-fast-slow-fast) but also by distinctly different melodic, harmonic and rhythmic material; and the majority of his works from the I980s similarly consist of a number of separate movements. Both New York Counterpoint (1985) and Electric Counterpoint adopt a three-movement, fast-slow-fast outline while The Desert Music and Sextet are both in five movements. Reich seems to'have a particular predilection for symmetrical forms and in The Desert Music takes this to its logical conclusion, organizing the music in an arch-like form - ABCBA - where the central movement is itself a tripartite structure - CDC (he even admits to having first read William Carlos Williams because, aged I6, he was attracted by the symmetry of the poet's name!). Geometric schema are easily read in a two-dimensional representation, less easily in three dimensions, and with great difficulty when articulated through time,12 so while the symmetries of The Desert Music may please the eye they '0 However Drumming is perhaps best regarded not as a work in four movements but as four transformations of the same material. " Steve Reich, MusicforEighteen Musicians, ECM I I29, I978. 12 Reich's Musicfor Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, where each section is based on a process of gradual durational expansion followed by contraction, is almost an exception to this rule!

8 Steve Reich's 'Different Trains' make rather less sense to the ear. To avoid the stagnation possible in a structure requiring such wholesale repetition Reich modifies each repeat, setting a different text when the first movement returns as the last movement, adding an extended orchestral introduction before the voices enter, and a siren-like wail for the violas in the last part of the middle movement. Implicit in any narrative, dramatic or musical form where the end is a return to the beginning is a sense of existence as a ring of destiny out of which it is impossible to progress. For all its striving to convince us that Man has survived hitherto because he was too ignorant to know how to realize his wishes. Now that he can realize them he must either change them or perish. The Desert Music, by arriving ultimately at the point from which we started, takes us no further. Perhaps as a result of Reich's at least subconscious awareness of this, symmetry in Different Trains extends to no more than a fast-slow-fast distinction between the three movements; indeed, by running the first two movements together, Reich deliberately avoids any emphasis even of this symmetry. Continuity between the first and second movements is achieved both verbally - 'I941 I guess it must have been' is fbllowed by '1940' - and through tempo: Virginia's phrase anticipates the slower speeds of the following movement. More subtly, the same accompaniment figure, first heard at the work's opening (Ex.4) and present throughout Ex.4 mf the first movement, continues to be heard throughout the second movement, albeit much slower. At the start of the last movement, however, this figure disappears - to return, only briefly, when Mr Davis's voice returns with the words 'from New York to Los Angeles'. Thus, while the renewed vigour of the music at the beginning of the third movement may initially imply a return to the 'America- Before the war' from which the work began, the absence of this accompaniment figure suggests something quite different. It is through the use of such essentially simple musical devices that the 'musical reality' of Different Trains achieves its meanings. * * * In each of Steve Reich's major works with text from the I98os there is a concern with the very act of making music. Most straightforwardly, in the last movement of Tehillim Reich sets Psalm 150, an exhortation to worship for all musicians: Praise Him with drum and dance, praise Him with strings and winds. Praise Him with sounding cymbals, praise Him with clanging cymbals. In The Desert Music Reich chooses for the central section of the middle movement a text that might almost read as an injunction to his performers: It is a principle of music to repeathe theme. Repeat and repeat again, as the pace mounts. The theme is difficult but no more difficult than the facts to be resolved. (William Carlos Williams, The Orchestra) while in the second and fourth movements the text can be read as a description of the type of listening Reich's music requires: Well, shall we think or listen? Is there a sound addressed not wholly to the ear? We half close our eyes. We do not hear it through our eyes. It is not a flute note either, it is the relation of a flute note to a drum. I am wide awake. The mind is listening. (William Carlos Williams, The Orchestra) In Different Trains Reich turns to one of the fundamental question posed by the Holocaust: how is it possible that the same music can be enjoyed by both oppressed and oppressor? At the end of the work the voice of the Holocaust survivor Rachella describes how 'There was one girl, who had a beautiful voice, and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans, and when she stopped singing they said, "More, more" and they applauded'. By placing this text at the end of Dfferent Trains Reich demands that we recognize that the people who carried out the Final Solution were ordinary men and women, not just the inhuman executioners simplistically conctructed by popular myth; he also insists that we examine ourselves as we in turn say 'more, more' and applaud.