steve reich - biography


7. Different Trains - Beryl Korot

Different Trains (1988) consists of a taped string quartet piece (as performed by Kronos Quartet) played as part of a live string quartet performance, which also incorporates recorded speech and sound effects which are controlled by a sampling keyboard. Reich's return to the use of electronics after his abandonment of the form in the early '60's was due to his exposure to the sampling keyboard, which allowed a human to "perform" the samples according to a score, rather than confine them to another tape loop. Different Trains tells the story of Reich's childhood train journeys from New York to Los Angeles, shuttling between his divorced parents, while at the same time, Jews his age in Europe were riding very different trains, to Nazi death camps during World War II. Through vocal samples of his governess Virginia, a steam train conductor, and various Holocaust survivors (along with sound recordings of period train whistles), the piece compares and contrasts the two train experiences in a powerful, poignant way. The music played by the string quartet is based off the pitches of the vocal samples, with the strings echoing the notes spoken in the vocal samples, along with the notes produced by the train whistles and even an air raid siren.

What may have seemed a logical step forward took many years--it was at this point that Reich began a creative collaboration with his wife since 1976, Beryl Korot. Her work as a video artist--abstract, repetetive, multilayered--seems the perfect compliment to Reich's music. Their mutual interest in Judaism led them to begin work on their first true collaboration, an elaborate multimedia "opera" that would become The Cave (1993).