New York, NY (Top40 Charts) Steve Reich's 1988 piece Different Trains is the subject of this week's episode of BBC Radio 3's The Listening Service.
Host Tom Service shares music from Kronos Quartet's 1988 Nonesuch recording of the piece, which won the Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Composition, and talks with author/journalist Jonathan Freedland about creating such art that addresses the Holocaust.
Different Trains is a three-movement piece for string quartet and tape written by Steve Reich in 1988.
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 traveling 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.
You can hear the episode below via Spotify and Apple Music.
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