Song Exploder - Steve Reich - Different Trains: America, Before the War

Episode Date: March 23, 2022

Steve Reich is a legendary composer who was one of the pioneers of minimalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music, and the New York Times called him “America’s greatest living composer.” I had the incredible honor of getting to speak to Steve Reich about his piece Different Trains, written for string quartet and pre-recorded performance tape. It was first performed in 1988 by the Kronos Quartet, and they released a recording of it in 1989, which won the Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary Composition. Different Trains is a piece about World War II and the Holocaust. It’s made up of three movements: America – Before the War, Europe – During the War, and After the War. For this episode, Steve Reich breaks down the first movement, which was inspired by his own childhood experiences. For more, visit songexploder.net/steve-reich

You're listening to Song Exploder, where musicians take apart their songs, and piece by piece tell the story of how they were made. I'm Rishi Keshirwe. Steve Reich is a composer who was one of the pioneers of minimalism. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for music, and the New York Times called him America's Greatest Living Composer. I had the incredible honor of getting to speak to Steve Reich about his piece, Different Trains, which was written for string quartet and pre-recorded performance tape. Different Trains was first performed in 1988 by the Kronos Quartet. They released a recording of it in 1989, which won the Grammy for Best Classical Contemporary

Composition. Different Trains is a piece about World War II and the Holocaust. It's made up of three movements. One, America before the war. Two, Europe during the war. And three, after the war. For this episode, Steve Reich breaks down the first movement, which was inspired by his own childhood experiences.

My name is Steve Reich. The first inklings of different trains happened with an offer from the Kronos Quartet to write them a piece. The Kronos Quartet is a string quartet started in the early 70s by David Harrington and other musicians in the San Francisco Bay Area. Their specialty by far is new music. The important part of background here is that in 1965 and 66, I did two tape pieces. one call that's going to rain, which is the first piece that was ever recorded in mine, and then come out. I had to, like, open the bruise up and let some of the blues blood come out to show them.

The pieces were about speech melody. Daniel Hamm, the kid whose voice is on Come Out, said, I had to, like, open the booze up and let some of the bruised blood come out to show them. Come out to show them. Come out to show them. Come out to show them. Come out to show them. Come out to show them. Come out to show them. But in, you know, in 1987, about then, I was very interested in this new sampler keyboard. And I was discussing all this with my wife, Barrett, the video artist. And she said, well, why don't you use the sampler for the Kronos piece? I said, wow, that's a great idea.

But I had absolutely no idea, you know, well, what am I sampling? So then I just, the trips that I took as a child popped in my head. when I was one year old, two years, all three years, up to about five or six, I took cross-country trains with my nanny, Virginia, who was basically acted as my mother for the first 10 years of my life. My mother, who was a singer and a lyricist, and my father, who was a lawyer, managed to be married for one year, and I was born 36. In 1937, they divorced. My mother went back to L.A. where she was from. A father stayed in New York where he was from. which meant I'd spend six months with one and six months with the other.

Well, they were 3,000 miles apart, and in those days you didn't fly unless you were, I don't know, a millionaire. So five years of my life was six months here, six months there, train trips both ways. So it was great to look out the window and see cowboy country and then go back and see New York, and you would eat on the train, which was very, that was exciting. You go in the dining car, which had a tablecloth.

I mean, it was very civilized. travel, but, you know, it was a very complex part of my childhood. And then all of a sudden I thought, now, what years did I do this? 1939, 1440, what was going on in the world while I was riding these trains? And we all know what was going on in the world. I thought that Mr. Hitler was trying to take over the world, and he was grabbing every Jew and every Jewish kid. And I thought, there, but for the grace of God, go I.

I was born in America, and if I had been born in Europe, that just emblazoned in my mind different trains. So my first thought was, I'll just revisit that, the sound of the train, the train whistles, and I'll use Virginia's voice. She had a very melodic voice for a woman in her 70s. So I went over to visit Virginia, which I did from time to time. I had a Sony Walkman Pro tape recorder running and I said, I'm going to record you and I said, I'm going to make a piece of it.

And she just thought, well, it sounds crazy but why not if he wants to do it? So I would record a number of our conversations, many of which centered around reminiscing about these train trips, which is something we shared. Different trains every time. And then I thought,

I need to find a Pullman Porter. In the 1930s, and 40s. Pullman Proorters would generally be the concierge, if you like, of the train. When Martin Luther King was coming up, one of his important allies was A. Philip Randolph, who was the head of the Pullman Porter's Union, and he represented a large and important part of the black community. And so the Pullman Proopers as a group were a formative force in the civil rights movement. So I was able to travel down to Washington, D.C., and meet with Lawrence Davis. It was a retired Pullman Porter on these transcontinental trains. And he was glad to speak about

the old days. The crack train from New York. That melodic character to his voice grabbed me. And what I did was start playing them back. And when I got something, I ran it through the sampler. The crack train from New York, from New York. The criteria for selecting a particular speech fragment, basically it was two things. It has to be musical and it has to be meaningful. And it turns out there was a lot of that. It starts off with from Chicago to New York, from Chicago to New York, from Chicago to New York, from Chicago to New York. That's Virginia.

Now, that's very emblematic of like, it's kind of like all aboard. You know, she's talking about a trip to two well-known cities that every one. knows. But it's the Dampadida, it's her speech melody that says this is a keeper. That's where the music from different trains comes from.

The basic idea was string instruments are going to double the speech melody. Dampada F-A-flat-F. So I would be sitting with a tape recorder playing back, a pencil in my hand, a music notebook in my hand, and a keyboard to check the speech

melody. And that's going to be the viola. Theola gives a little bit more weight than a violin. And the viola is Virginia. From Chicago. Oh, here's Virginia. From Chicago. From Chicago.

From Chicago to New York. And then Mr. Davis was doubled by the cello. Crack train from New York. Crack train from New York. Later on, from New York to New York, when that comes back, it's followed by in 1939. From Chicago to New York, from Chicago to New York, from Chicago in 1939. And all of a sudden, the date of the whole piece is clear. In 1939, 39, in 1939, in 1939, in 1939, in 1939, in 1939, in 1939, 1939, in 1939,

And Mr. Davis comes to 1939, 1940, 1941. 1939. 1939, 1939, 1939, 1939, 1949, 1940. 1940 . 1940, 1940, 1940, 1940, 1944, 1940, 1840, 40, 1940, 1980, 1940, 14, 1940, 1940, 1940, 1940, 14, 1940, 1941, 1940, 1940, 1941.

And then, Virginia says, I think it must have been. 1941, I guess it must have been. And she's thinking at the beginning of World War II. 1941, I guess it must have been. I took piano lessons as a child, didn't get very far. I later became a train as a drummer, and a lot of my music is very percussive.

Now, different trains has got no percussion in it whatsoever, but in fact, it has a very basic drumming rudiment called a paradigtle, which is the locomotive. and I'll just go on a table over here, left, right, left, left, right, left, right, right. That struck me in my head as a drummer. This is the engine that's going to drive this piece. David Harrington playing the first violin in John John John Marinoe playing the cello,

and they're playing the paradigital like crazy. A lot of the writing throughout the piece is various forms of the paradigm. So you've got a Paradigital Locomotive band. And the string players kind of got into it. Besides the string quartet and the human voices, you hear train sounds, particularly train whistles. I lived in Lower Manhattan,

not too far from a record store called J&R. And I went over there while I was just beginning the piece, and I started browsing, and lo and behold, they had a section called train sounds, believe it or not. So I bought one, I remember I bought one called Trains in Trouble. The train whistles in America are, perfect fourths or fifths. They're just big, wide intervals.

You know, hey, wow, and they're long. Okay, now we're going to add these other sounds, and we're going to mess with them in the computer until we get them to really work with the strings and voices. New York to Los Angeles from New York, from New York. Speech melody, which is something that happens. We don't think about it. The way I speak, the way you speak,

the way my nanny Virginia, the way Mr. Davis speaks, It is as indicative of who they are as a photograph. Some would say it's more revealing. The crack train from New York. It's one of the fastest trains. But I realized that everybody would be speaking in a different tempo, because when you speak, you don't think about what, you know, bomb, bomb, bomb, take it.

No, that's not the way it works. You just speak. But when you make a loop out of it, it do. Dam-p-de-dam-bam-b-b-b-d-a-d-d-d-d-you have a tempo. from Chicago to New York. Okay. And then you're going to go to one of the fastest trains.

One of the fastest trains. It's faster and it's unrelated. It's not like, well, twice as fast or, you know, a triplet equals. Forget it. It's just another tempo. Well, how are musicians going to play with this so that they can go from one section to the next? A lot of people, you know, will say, oh, hey, man, put it on a computer. and slow them down or speed them up until they get them all in the same tempo.

But it's like saying take the people who were like your mother, who were a prime representative of the black community in the 1940s, and just sort of fix them up. That just seemed like me, my stomach, you know, churn. But if the basic idea was string instruments are going to double the speech melody, well, you better figure out how it works. So the solution, what makes the performance of the piece possible, was a backing track. Different Trains was written for a string quartet to perform live,

but along with the live instruments, there are additional pre-recorded layers that play at the same time. So the Kronos Quartet had to record those parts before they could ever play it live. So you hear between 12 and 16 string players, where you're actually hearing the recording, or when you're hearing a live performance. and the recording was done a Russian Hill Studios in San Francisco. And the first couple of days was just me and the engineers

working out two different click tracks. So first, da-bidi-da, okay, let's figure out that. From Chicago. Put down quarter-nard equals, whatever it is, and then it shifts to another number. One of the fastest trains. So musicians come in, they hear, let's say, two bars of the tempo for the very first thing,

and they play the first part. From Chicago. From Chicago. Now you've got to go to the next fragment. So you rewind the tape a bit, and you switch over to click track B, which is at the other tempo. Musicians put on their headphones,

they hear again, bap, bap, bap, and they're off on the new tempo. One of the fastest trains. One of the fastest train. So laboriously, and I mean laboriously with the capital L, these different sections are recorded and then put together.

And, hey, they work. From Chicago to New York, from Chicago, the fastest train. The fastest train. I had built my whole musical life on multiples of exact same instruments playing against themselves in canon or in some kind of imitative counterpoint. So what interested me was the kind of web of sound that's created by instruments of the same timbre interlocking in a way where you don't know who's doing what.

And you just get lost in this larger fabric and various things in the fabric pop out to you as a psychoacoustic reality that we can't predict, but they're really there. And it also enables you to thicken the plot musically to make richer harmonies more kind of. complex rhythms, more response to the voices in the counterpital texture of the music. In the recording studio, I heard first one layer. Okay, let's add the second. And we play both of those back when you add the third. Now let's add the live part and the voices.

In 1939. It was an overdubbing fest. I mean, we're not the Beatles or anything like it, but I mean, hey, you know, we had 16 tracks and they only had four. The backing tape and the finished recording came out of the exact same sessions. So we are hearing in the studio the finished piece, and this was really exciting. The second and third movements of different trains shift their focus away from Steve Reich's experiences in America and turned to Europe and the Holocaust.

For those movements, he sampled the voices of Holocaust survivors. The original idea for the piece was just me, Virginia, Mr. Davis. And then when I started thinking about the times that I'd actually made these trips, the Holocaust came to mind because I could have been a part of it. I was the same age. So it was an archive of Holocaust survivors recordings at Yale, just having people talk about their experiences in Auschwitz and other camps. And that was a pretty intense experience to sit up there

in some library at Yale with the headphones on, listening to one incredible thing after the other, and copying that off onto tape. Can I ask you why you chose to discuss the first movement for this episode and not the second or third movement? I think I get choreographed a lot. A lot of my music is used by dancers, and occasionally, not very often,

but occasionally they want to do different trains. And I've specified to the publisher, I said, if they want to choreograph the first movement, it's fine, but not the second or third movements. And I feel that the use of the Holocaust survivor voices was a pivotal decision and that they control the music. And when it comes to dealing with the Holocaust, I feel like it just, look, it works the way it is. Leave it alone. I was a touring musician for 40 years with my own ensemble. and part of my ensemble was a string quartet.

And whenever we did a concert, different trains was the last piece on the program. And that's where it goes. I mean, it's the anchor. Different trains. Different trains. Different trains. What are you feeling right now as you listen to this?

Well, happily, I'm moved. A good piece really can't be judged until years later. I mean, it isn't just hearing Virginia and the memory of her personally. It's how everybody in the piece demanded, deserved a perfect setting. How do I know whether anybody will like a piece of music of mine? I don't know. So what have I got? If I'm almost moved to tears, maybe you will be two.

And in a number of cases, it's proved to be the case. And I feel blessed because of that. Different trains. Trains. Different trains. Different trains. And now here's Different Trains, Movement 1, America Before the War, by Steve Reich, in its entirety. Visit SongExploder.net.

You'll find links to stream or download different trains. Steve Reich also has a new book out called Conversations. In it, he speaks to other artists, like the late Stephen Sondheim, Johnny Greenwood from Radiohead, Brian Eno, and David. David Harrington from the Kronos Quartet, among others. There's a link to the book on the Song Exploder website as well. I have a new album of my own coming out on April 24th. It's been about 15 years since I last put out a full length,

and this is the first one that'll be out under my own name, Rishi Kesh Her Way. I started making Song Exploder when I was feeling lost in my own music career. And then for over a decade, I've gotten to have these incredible conversations about the process of making music, talking to other artists, and it made me completely rethink my relationship to music and my way of writing songs. And this album is the product of all of that. It features contributions from some of my favorite artists, including some folks that you may have heard on this podcast, like Iron and Wine, Kevin Morby, Vagabon, Fenlily, and the producer Phil Wine Robe.

I'm going to be on tour playing in cities across the U.S. starting in April, and I'm trying to bring the spirit of the podcast with me. So every show that I'm playing will begin with a conversation about the album, with a different amazing guest moderator in each city, like Adam Scott, Samin Nasrat, Jason Manzukas, Josh Molina, Minjin Lee, Ken Jennings, John Roderick, Austin Cleon, and more. They're all going to be my conversation partners on stage, and then I'll play with my band. The album is called In the Last Hour of Light,

and the first couple songs are out now. You can listen to the music and get tickets for the shows on my website, Rishikash.co, or just go to SongExploder.net, slash live. That's songexploder.net slash live. Thanks. Song Exploder is made by me, along with the show's theme music. I produced this episode with Craig Ely and Casey Deal, with artwork by Carlos Lerma, music clearance by Kathleen Smith, and production assistance from Chloe Parker. Song Exploder is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a network of independent, listener-supported, artist-owned podcasts. You can learn more

about our shows at Radiotopia.fm. You can follow me on Twitter and Instagram at Rishi Hereway, and you can follow the show at Song Exploder. You can also get a Song Exploder t-shirt at songexploder.net slash shirt. I'm Rishi-Kesh Hereway. Thanks for listening. Radiotopia.