Different Trains, for string quartet and tape, begins a new way of composing that has its roots
in my early tape 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 idea for the piece comes
from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated, with my mother going to Los
Angeles and my father staying 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, as a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period 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 did the following:
- Record my governess Virginia, now in her 70s, reminiscing about our train trips together.
- Record a retired Pullman porter, Mr. Lawrence Davis, now in his 80s, who used to ride lines between New York and Los Angeles, reminiscing about his life.
- Collect recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul, and Rachel, all about my age and now living in America, speaking about their experiences.
- Collect recorded American and European train sounds of the ’30s and ’40s.
The process of combining the taped speech with the string instruments was to select small speech
samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then to notate them as accurately as possible
in musical notation. The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples and
train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Three
separate string quartets are also added to the pre-recorded tape, and the final live quartet part
is added to the performance.
Different Trains is in three movements, although that term is stretched here, since tempos change
frequently in each movement. They are:
- America—before the war
- Europe—during the war
- After the war
The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality, and begins a new musical direction.
It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theater in the
not-too-distant future.
—Steve Reich
|
|