Steve Reich (1936 - Present)

Introduction
Steve Reich was born on October 3rd, 1936, in New York city. Reich would be influenced by his father who was a singer / lyricist as well as a attorney. Reich would go through three colleges, majoring in philosophy at Cornell University(1953–57), before studying composition at Juilliard. By the 1960’s Reich would be one of the main factors of the minimalist movement that was based on repetition and combination of simple phrases with variations slowly introduced.

https://www.vanityfair.com/culture/2016/07/steve-reich-composer - Photo

Work Analysis
In 1988, Steve Reich would release For Different Trains, a three movement work based around life around World War II. In this piece, Reich uses  a string quartet, prerecorded string audio, and audio cuts from holocaust survivors. Reich also uses train sounds as the work is titled after trains. While only a children, Steve would go back and forth to see his parents who were divorced and remembered how fascinated he was with how fast the trains were; being on those trains were found memories of his. The first piece embodies that as it is is very upbeat and lively, creating  positive tone as someone talks about the fastest trains going from New York to Chicago. The second movement however displays Reich thinking about how his life would have been if he was living in europe at that same time. With being from jewish descendants, Reich’s life as a young boy living in Nazi controlled europe would have been a polar opposite while on the different train that he describes. Movement two feels like a downward spiral compared to the first. The movement starts with a slow string section as the sounds of bomb sirens sound off in the background; a sound quite constant in europe at this time. The audio samples talk are from people who were just kids like Steve while the Nazi’s invaded. The train sounds that are used in this movement are from “Cattle Wagons”. Cattle wagons are tied to the dark tone of the Nazi Invasion because they would pack up to 80 people into one cart like animals. The intensity of the Cattle Wagon screeches escalates and triggers the string quartet to get faster, creating a sense of anxiety.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sq5jmTx_gO0

Comparisons
There’s no signal artist i could connect the sound that steve reich expresses in this piece. This work does though relate heavy to Psychedelic and Jam Band music by how it repeats a certain motif that changes overtime. Psychedelic music also has been known for creating atmospheric sounds that can sometimes come off as uneasy; a main example comes from many of Led Zeppelin’s songs.

Observations
Steve Reich’s minimalist qualities come through in this piece as his main motif changes as the music progresses. Without even knowing most of the details around World War II, Reich’s work puts listeners right into the fray of the environment people had to survive in. The sounds of the cattle wagons as the string quartet picked up made me feel nauseous. The layered textures of the different strings plus the audio made it hard to just focus on one part of the music.