To commemorate Holocaust Remembrance Day (Yom HaShoah), beginning the evening of April 7 and ending April 8, CBC Classical spoke to American composer Steve Reich about Different Trains, his electro-acoustic composition that samples first-hand accounts of Holocaust survivors. It remains one of Reich's best known scores.
Since its premiere by the Kronos Quartet in the late 1980s, Different Trains has been performed the world over. According to Kronos Quartet violinist David Harrington, "Everything about Different Trains caused us to rethink our work."
That's because, while working on the piece in 1988, Reich had decided to make use of a digital sampling keyboard. Though the instrument was common in pop music and electronica at the time, Reich was one of the first classical composers to use samples.
Reich called upon his own childhood memories as inspiration for Different Trains. Back in 1937, Reich's parents divorced, so from a young age he would divide his time between New York with his father, and Los Angeles with his mother.
Reich took that trip by train twice a year with his governess, Virginia. As a starting point for Different Trains, he decided to use fragments of speech from his governess talking about her life. Then Reich began to think about what was going on in the world when he was riding those trains in the late 1930s.
"Mr. Hitler was trying to take over the world and grabbing every Jew he could get his hands on and sending them first outside of Munich, then later way off to Poland," he explained. "And up a chimney they went. If I had been born in Brussels or Stuttgart, I would have been going up a chimney and you and I wouldn't be having this conversation."
That was when a light bulb went on in Reich's head. "The idea came from making recordings of Virginia talking about her life. And I thought, wait a minute, there might be archives of Holocaust survivors talking about their lives."
After tracking down the archival recordings, Reich took a documentary approach in presenting how the people spoke, sampling their testimonials to create speech melody. Different Trains was born.
"It was a very inspired piece because there was a new technique to match the voices to the instruments," he said. "Every time a woman speaks, the viola doubles her speech melody. And every time a man speaks, the cello doubles his speech melody."
The end result is a multilayered piece that runs close to 30 minutes. The first movement is called America – Before the War. It features Reich’s governess talking about her life, and a Pullman porter speaking about U.S. train travel.
The second movement, Europe – During the War, features three archival recordings of Holocaust survivors talking about going to concentration camps. There are European trains shrieking, along with American trains emitting longer, gentler whistles.
In the third movement, After the War, we hear the Holocaust survivors talking about life after the war ended.
The first performance of Different Trains took place in Miami, Fla., in 1988. In the audience was a young man who came up to Reich afterwards and told him about his mother.
“He told me her name was Rachel," Reich said. "She was born in Brussels. She was hidden in a laundry basket and later raised in the Catholic church, all to hide her from the Nazis. Eventually she got to the States and stayed in Florida.”
Today, string quartets around the world perform Different Trains. It won Reich a Grammy Award for best contemporary classical composition in 1990.
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Reich’s Different Trains is played in a railway station. Where else?