Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint

Different Trains / Electric Counterpoint - Steve Reich
WU Mabee Music CD
M452.R45 D5 1989

Different Trains / Steve Reich

Different Trains (1988) is perhaps Steve Reich's best-known work, and it is certainly his most powerful. The impetus for the piece lay in Reich's observation that, though he spent the first years of World War II being shuttled between divorced parents in New York and Los Angeles, if he had been in Europe, he would as a Jew have been riding trains to concentration camps. Two distinct sonic entities--taped phrases (from conversations with the nanny who accompanied Reich on his childhood trips, an American railroad worker from the war years, and archival recordings of holocaust survivors) and a string quartet--interact in a striking combination of pathos and psychic distance.

The string quartet prefigures the pitches and rhythms of each spoken phrase in an manner similar to that in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, in which the winds play the distinctive rhythms of the text before it is sung by the choir. This abstraction of speech into purely musical components represented a new and apparently stimulating stylistic development for Reich, who explored it further in text-based works like The Cave (1994) and City Life (1995). The emotional impact of Different Trains is heightened by sound effects that evoke the era of World War II--most memorably, train whistles which become more ominous as the piece progresses from America to Europe--and by the manipulation of the text, which skillfully points up the ambiguity of the work's central theme. Reich eschews overt drama throughout, increasing the emotional impact by allowing the facts of the Holocaust, and the persecution that preceded it, to speak for themselves. ~David A. McCarthy, All Music Guide

Electric Counterpoint / Steve Reich

Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) belongs to a group of the composer's works (including Vermont Counterpoint [1982] and New York Counterpoint [1985]) which call for a soloist to play along with a recording of him- or herself. Written for noted jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, Electric Counterpoint requires the player to pre-record up to ten electric guitar tracks and two electric bass tracks; the player performs the eleventh part live against the tape. This configuration creates an interesting aural effect; the ethereal homogeneity of ten timbrally identical electric guitars simultaneously playing different figures is immediately quite striking.

Electric Counterpoint is in three movements, labeled simply "Fast," "Slow," and "Fast." The first begins with a stream of rapidly repeated chords that gradually fade in and out of audibility, subtly changing harmony at the quietest moments. After the harmonic outline of the piece has been presented, one guitar enters with a new theme, which seven other guitars reiterate one by one in canonic fashion. The remaining two guitars, along with the two basses, supply harmonic support. The second movement similarly builds up canonically, this time employing a slower, plaintive theme. While the third movement recalls the tempo of the first, it stresses rhythmic variety in its frequent metric shifts. The basses drive this effort, dividing the ambiguous twelve-beat textures of the guitars first into three groups of four, then four groups of three -- a familiar feature in Reich's music ever since Clapping Music (1972) and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973). These metric shifts are accompanied by complementary shifts in harmony. The changes in the final movement occur at shorter and shorter intervals until the basses fade out and the guitars reach a final harmonic and rhythmic acquiescence. ~Jeremy Grimshaw, All Music Guide