Listening to Steve Reich’s Holocaust Opus “Different Trains” (original) (raw)

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Steve Reich, one of the world’s greatest living composers, was born in 1936 to a Jewish family. When he was 1, his parents divorced. His father stayed put in New York and his mother moved to Los Angeles. As a child, he would travel between the two cities by train. Thinking of these trips later in life, it occurred to him that train travel was happening at the same time across Europe: to concentration camps. It did not take much magical thinking for him to imagine how, if he had a less lucky birthright, he would have a different life on a different train.

In 1988, Reich wrote a composition honoring that revelation, called “Different Trains.” Though it is centered by a string quartet piece, “Different Trains” is, in many ways, aligned with Reich‘s early, experimental work, both in its political theme and its grand scale. In 1964, as a young man during the civil rights era, Reich composed his watershed piece “Come Out.” The entirety of that composition is a looped recording of a young black man, Daniel Hamm, talking about the injuries he sustained when beaten by police. Reich utilized this method of tape looping in other pieces, some overtly political, some not, before he began to mimic its disorienting effect for larger orchestras. In 1978, he released “Music for 18 Musicians,” which added harmony to his oft-hard rhythms while still reflecting his interest in repetition. It was as though he was trying to make wordless, organic cover versions of his tape work. His music always had a haunting quality, but here he shifted away from shredding specific words into the abyss and just began with the nothingness itself.

“Music for 18 Musicians” is likely Reich’s most brilliant and beautiful piece of music; whereas “Come Out” finds its power through pain, “18 Musicians” does so through ecstasy. In a nice bit of foreshadowing, the album’s liner notes say, almost as an aside, that recently Reich had “begun studying the traditional forms of cantillation (chanting) of the Hebrew Scriptures.” Sure enough, four years after “18 Musicians,” he released “Tehillim,” the culmination of all his learnings and methods, enmeshed with a deep contemplation of his Jewish identity. On its surface, “Tehilim” is similar to “18 Musicians,” but instead of wordless syllables, there are lyrics: Jewish hymns, sung in Hebrew. At the time of recording “Tehilim,” Reich had “rejoined” the Jewish religion and was exploring his faith through music. Speaking about his renewed path in 2011, he said, “As a child I learnt nothing. I was given a transliteration to read from for my bar mitzvah. I may as well have been a parrot and this made me highly resentful and somewhat anti-Semitic, which I think it would make any normal, well-disposed young man.”

My experience was similar. In the 22 years since my bar mitzvah, I have almost entirely eschewed anything that might be interpreted as organized religion. While my Jewish identity has never been in question, what that meant in a tangible, everyday way has been largely undefinable. Mostly, it seems to correspond to pain, or at least ways out of it. I’ve used humor as a path through misery and thought as a path through adversity, and these things have always felt like vaguely Jewish parts of my life. My ability to recite parts of my Haftorah portion by memory seems about as close to my definition of who I am as the fact that I once learned multiplication tables.

In the last year, though, that’s changed. Due to the visible rise of Nazism, very few days go by where I don’t think about anti-Semitism. My grandparents are just a bit older than Reich (only one of them is still alive), and they were also fortunate to avoid being murdered in the Holocaust, either by fleeing Europe or having the fortune to be born in the United States. They didn’t escape discrimination entirely, but for the most part, the Jewishness in our family has not been an overt presence, by necessity or otherwise. It’s ironic, then, that our current culture’s loud hatred of Nazis seems to have stirred my dormant sense of Jewish identity.

Before recently, when I’ve thought about the Holocaust, it’s often been in the context of pop culture. Mention Schindler’s List, and I’m as likely to think of the episode of “Seinfeld” where Jerry gets in trouble with his parents for making out in the theater while watching as I am to think of the Spielberg movie, let alone the actual life of Oskar Schindler. Being Jewish is not written on my body by my skin color, or otherwise undeniably by my appearance. I suppose I look stereotypically Jewish, and my last name sounds it, but I have never had to fend off fear because of my religious identity. But that privilege is just not sufficient anymore. It’s difficult for me to look something so large in the eye. So I’ve been listening.

“1940... on my birthday,” says a woman’s voice in the second section of “Different Trains,” muffled by a wheezing alarm. The piece, originally performed by the Kronos Quartet, features snippets of vocals either recorded by Reich or from various archives: his nanny who accompanied him on the train, a Pullman Porter, Holocaust survivors. It’s split into three movements, “America - Before the War,” “Europe - During the War,” and “After the War,” and each has an appropriate tenor. It begins and ends with nervousness, the violin and viola’s quick pace echoing the sound of the train wheels rolling. The samples in “Before the War” are about the vast expanse of technology—there’s forward momentum here, a locomotive industry rounding the bend to a new era. A man intones the years: “1939! 1939! 1939! 1940!” And then the sound of another horrible siren undercut by a woman with a heavy European accent. “1940. 1940. 1940. 1940. On my birthday.” We enter the second movement.

If you thought it too intense to listen to, I wouldn’t blame you. The sirens wail louder but move slower, like whatever they’re warning of will creep for a long time. In its structure, the piece is the same as the first: train sounds, audio samples. But where the first movement’s string composition imitated the freedom of Reich’s childhood, here the notes are sour. Within the body of Reich’s work, that in and of itself is unusual. So much of Reich’s music is marked by big sounds buoying big ideas—the gorgeousness of a wave cresting then hitting the shore, the miracle of nature ad infinitum. But there’s nothing beautiful here; it’s as much terror as it is music.

That’s not such a bad way to process such an unfathomable piece of history, booming and vague. The facts are easy to understand, but not so easy to feel. If you ask me what being Jewish means to me right now, I wouldn’t be able to totally answer. It feels important, ever present. It feels like how this music sounds, smart and all encompassing and tinged with timelessness—an inability to die.

The last movement of “Different Trains,” “After the War,” begins quickly, with only one stringed instrument at first, then another, this time no longer echoing the trains. Instead, they sound like people running, maybe escaping. “The war was over,” comes a man’s plain voice. And then a woman’s, “Are you sure?”