Different Trains

Different Trains is a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988. Its original release was performed by the Kronos Quartet and won a Grammy Award in 1989 for Best Contemporary Classical Composition.

During World War II, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in Holocaust trains.

Steve Reich's earlier work had frequently used tape, looped and played back at different speeds. However, Different Trains was a novel experiment, using recorded speech as a source for melodies.

Different Trains is made up of three movements, which bear the following titles:

In each part, melodies are introduced, usually by a single instrument (viola for women and cello for men), a recording of the spoken phrase from which the melody derives is played. The melody is then developed for a while, with the instruments playing along with the recording of the phrase or part of the phrase. The music for the strings makes extensive use of paradiddle rhythms, with alternating pitches instead of alternating drum sticking. In addition to speech, the piece includes recordings of train sounds, as well as of sirens and warning bells, and prerecorded multiple lines by the string quartet, thus effectively creating four quartets out of one, reflective of three Counterpoint pieces that preceded it: Vermont Counterpoint for multiple multitracked flutes, New York Counterpoint for multiple multitracked clarinets, and Electric Counterpoint for multiple multitracked electric guitars.

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