SteveW
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More AOTM: music from speech 10-Jun-2012 20:25:49
| CorrsClub Time: 07-Aug-2026 17:53:51 |
Steve Reich's masterpiece is a 1988 piece entitled "Different Trains", in which the music is based on fragments of people's speech. That is, Reich interviewed numerous people, and the melody and rhythm in their words determined the music of the piece.
I'm going to try embedding the video here. I've never tried this before; in case it doesn't work, here's the link.
First some background: Reich was born in 1936. When he was a small boy, his parents separated and moved to opposite coasts of the US, 3000 miles away from each other. As a result he would take long train rides across the country to visit them.
It later occurred to Reich that as a Jew, had he lived in Europe at the same time instead of America, he would likely have taken very different kinds of trains. He thus set about to write a piece about this realization, calling it Different Trains.
He interviewed people who worked on the trains he took (such as porters) and survivors of the Holocaust. He then transcribed the melodies and rhythms inherent in these people's speech, and based the piece on these musical fragments. For example, the first fragment is a woman saying "From Chicago to New York" (0:33-1:20), and the second is a man saying "One of the fastest trains" (1:20-2:34). He also incorporates samples of train sounds such as train whistles (0:14-0:32).
I think this is an amazing piece because it works as music despite all the constraints inherent in its structure.
First, the speech fragments have to make sense from a historical and narrative viewpoint, as a story of Reich's train trips and of the Holocaust.
Second, the melodies derived from the speech fragments have to make musical sense, purely as as a piece of music.
Third, the first two constraints have to be satisfied even though it is the speech fragments themselves that determine the music. So if one of the speech fragments didn't sound right, he couldn't just make up some music that sounded better; he had to follow what he had in his interviews and what people said.
I think it's amazing that Reich was able to satisfy all of these constrains, and yet produce a moving and emotional piece of music.
The part I've linked is the first movement, entitled "America -- Before the War". There are two other movements, titled "Europe -- During the War" and "After the War".
Cara, thanks for putting together the AOTM! I think your book club analogy is right on (but this is much less work than having to read an entire novel!)
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