May 09, 2006 'DIFFERENT TRAINS' (1988) is one of the better known works by Steve Reich (1936 - ), an American composer who helped develop minimalism in music, during the mid to late 1960s - along with La Monte Young (1935 -); Terry Riley (1935 - ); Philip Glass (1937 - ); later John Adams (1947 - ) - better known for his choral work titled 'On the Transmigration of Souls' (2002), commemorating the victims of the September 11 2001 attacks on the Twin Towers, and also for the opera 'Nixon in China'. Different Trains is a three-movement composition for string quartet and tape, which Reich conceived, based on his experiences as a young child (between 1939 and 1942), when he frequently rode trains from New York City to Los Angeles and back, in order to spend time with both his parents who were separated. Here you can download three movements shared files: Three movements from the ballet 'petrushka'.pdf from 4shared.com 1.68 MB, Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Three Movements.zip from mediafire.com 81.95 MB, MS 01 Stravinsky- Le Sacre Du Printemps & Symphony in Three Movements.rar from mediafire.com 85.33 MB, Stravinsky - Three Movements from Petrushka.mp3 from mediafire.com 23.6 MB. Reich Different Trains Electric Counterpoint Rar Extractor. We give the accessing and install media like a pdf, word, ppt, txt, zip, rar, and also kindle.
Kronos Quartet
Pat Metheny: guitar
Lossless: Ape (img + cue + log) = 210 mb
Lossy: Mp3 (lame 'preset standard') = 58 mb
Artwork @ 300dpi = 20 mb
Total playing time: 41:35
Recorded:
DIFFERENT TRAINS
August 31 - September 9, 1988
Russian Hill Recording, San Francisco
ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT
September 26 - October 1, 1987
Power Station, New York City
Released: 1989, Elektra/Nonesuch 7559-79176-2
Track listing:
DIFFERENT TRAINS
1. America - Before the War
2. Europe - During the War
3. After the War
ELECTRIC COUNTERPOINT
4. Fast
5. Slow
6. Fast
Reviews:
Amazon ('essential recording')
Different Trains (1988) will probably go down in history as Reich's masterpiece. And deservedly so. Reich's phase-shifting minimalism is made dazzlingly entertaining in Different Trains, which is scored for string quartet and digitally sampled voices that repeat bits of speech concerning trains and Reich's experience with them growing up. The sinister part here is than some trains carried Jews to death camps. That's here as well. The Kronos Quartet has also never sounded better. Electric Counterpoint (1987) has one guitar--Pat Metheny in this case-- playing to 10 pre-recorded motifs, also on guitar. You absolutely need this.
Allmusic
This late-'80s work finds the minimalist composer mixing acoustic and taped material to great effect. The disc's centerpiece is 'Different Trains', a work that frames Reich's impressions of his boyhood train trips between his mother in Los Angeles and his father in New York; Reich also intersperses references to the much more harrowing train rides Jews were forced to take to Nazi concentration camps. Using the fine playing of the Kronos Quartet as a base, Reich layers the work with the taped train musings of his governess, a retired Pullman porter, and various Holocaust survivors -- vintage train sounds from the '30s and '40s add to the riveting arrangement. And for some nice contrast, Reich recruits guitarist Pat Metheny to create a similarly momentous piece in 'Electric Counterpoint' (Metheny plays live over a multi-tracked tape of ten guitars and two electric basses). Two fine works by Reich in his prime.
About the compositions:
Different Trains (1988) is perhaps Steve Reich's best-known work, and it is certainly his most powerful. The impetus for the piece lay in Reich's observation that, though he spent the first years of World War II being shuttled between divorced parents in New York and Los Angeles, if he had been in Europe, he would as a Jew have been riding trains to concentration camps. Two distinct sonic entities--taped phrases (from conversations with the nanny who accompanied Reich on his childhood trips, an American railroad worker from the war years, and archival recordings of holocaust survivors) and a string quartet--interact in a striking combination of pathos and psychic distance.
The string quartet prefigures the pitches and rhythms of each spoken phrase in an manner similar to that in Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms, in which the winds play the distinctive rhythms of the text before it is sung by the choir. This abstraction of speech into purely musical components represented a new and apparently stimulating stylistic development for Reich, who explored it further in text-based works like The Cave (1994) and City Life (1995). The emotional impact of Different Trains is heightened by sound effects that evoke the era of World War II--most memorably, train whistles which become more ominous as the piece progresses from America to Europe--and by the manipulation of the text, which skillfully points up the ambiguity of the work's central theme. Reich eschews overt drama throughout, increasing the emotional impact by allowing the facts of the Holocaust, and the persecution that preceded it, to speak for themselves.
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Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint (1987) belongs to a group of the composer's works (including Vermont Counterpoint [1982] and New York Counterpoint [1985]) which call for a soloist to play along with a recording of him- or herself. Written for noted jazz guitarist Pat Metheny, Electric Counterpoint requires the player to pre-record up to ten electric guitar tracks and two electric bass tracks; the player performs the eleventh part live against the tape. This configuration creates an interesting aural effect; the ethereal homogeneity of ten timbrally identical electric guitars simultaneously playing different figures is immediately quite striking.
Electric Counterpoint is in three movements, labeled simply 'Fast,' 'Slow,' and 'Fast.' The first begins with a stream of rapidly repeated chords that gradually fade in and out of audibility, subtly changing harmony at the quietest moments. After the harmonic outline of the piece has been presented, one guitar enters with a new theme, which seven other guitars reiterate one by one in canonic fashion. The remaining two guitars, along with the two basses, supply harmonic support. The second movement similarly builds up canonically, this time employing a slower, plaintive theme. While the third movement recalls the tempo of the first, it stresses rhythmic variety in its frequent metric shifts. The basses drive this effort, dividing the ambiguous twelve-beat textures of the guitars first into three groups of four, then four groups of three -- a familiar feature in Reich's music ever since Clapping Music (1972) and Music for Pieces of Wood (1973). These metric shifts are accompanied by complementary shifts in harmony. The changes in the final movement occur at shorter and shorter intervals until the basses fade out and the guitars reach a final harmonic and rhythmic acquiescence.
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Graham Reid | | 3 min read
The 1965 recording It's Gonna Rain by the New York composer Steve Reich was one of the most interesting, innovative and important pieces of its era.
At least for Reich.
In San Francisco, Reich had heard a streetcorner preacher Brother Walter in apocalyptic mode warning of another Great Flood to wipe out sinners, and Reich recorded him.
As with Dylan's Hard Rain's Gonna Fall, Reich heard in the words “it's gonna rain” a more metaphorical message and slicing the tape on those few words he looped the parts in different tape players, and cued them up.
The idea was that “it's gonna” would come from one machine and “rain” from the other.
However when he played them back one machine ran slightly faster than the other and so they increasingly went out of synch to create pure, rhythm-driven sound.
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The minimalist element was always appealing but here now was a 17-minute piece – with doubled and doubled again overlays, there's an edited three minute sample here – which morphed into something different with an almost self-generating rhythmic and melodic mind of its own.
And so Reich was away and into more tape experiments, increasingly coupling them with real instruments and music of his own creation.
It's Gonna Rain and other Reich pieces from the period (Come Out, Clapping Music and Piano Phase) appeared on the Nonesuch album Early Works in 1987.
Which brings us rather neatly to this Nonesuch album from two years later and its game of two halves: Different Trains is tape loops and recorded sounds with the Kronos Quartet, the second side Electric Counterpoint is layering, looping and editing of guitar parts by Pat Metheny.
The front and back photos of the album cover neatly parallel each other.
If Reich's work could be filed under “minimalism” alongside Philip Glass, there is a clear if loose distinction to be made between the two: Reich was exploring rhythmic pulses and repetition (which led to more melodic work), Glass explored melodic minimalism which created the rhythm.
Or something like that.
Different Trains and Electric Counterpoint were composed and recorded in the late Eighties (Electric Counterpoint a commission by the Brooklyn Academy of Music's Next Wave Festival for Metheny).
As Reich tells it in the liner notes, Different Trains – commissioned for the Kronos Quartet with pre-recorded tapes of Holocaust survivors, train sounds and voices reminiscing about train journeys – was prompted by him as a child travelling on trains between his mother's home in LA and his father's in New York.
Those journeys happened during the first years of World War II and Reich reflected on how, as a Jew, had he lived in Europe at that time he would have been on very different trains.
The piece is in three parts: America, Before the War; Europe, During the War and After the War.
There is an extraordinary tension here due to the taut repetition of the string quartet passages and the howling of train sounds which sound like sirens of alarm in the first two movements.
And during the final section, snatches of survivors voices are cut into a piece which is no less tense through the reminiscences (“There was one girl who had a beautiful voice”) and the snippet of an old Pullman porter talking about the trains (“but today, they're all gone”) is freighted with meaning.
With strings echoing speech patterns and the clacking of the tracks, Different Trains remains a remarkable and moving piece.
Electric Counterpoint is also in three sections (fast, slow, fast) and is a studio construction where Pat Metheny pre-recorded multiple guitars and electric basses (it isn't a wall of sound however) for a piece which rides gentle, repetitious pulses and overlapping melodies where keys and rhythms change very subtly.
There are some lovely melodic passages here – notably in the second section – which those familiar with Durutti Column, Penguin Cafe Orchestra and certain, reined-in music by Robert Fripp would feel very much at home with.
So the album is a game of two very different halves.
Over the decades Steve Reich has written for percussion ensembles, choral groups, string quartets and orchestras. He has written operas (notably The Cave) and had his music remixed and sampled.
But this album, starting with the more approachable Electric Counterpoint, is a useful entry point into that vast body of work.
And the piece Different Trains is emotionally white-knuckle in places.
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There are other Steve Reich albums reviewed at Elsewhere starting here and he is interviewed here.
You can hear the original Kronos/Metheny album at Spotify here
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Steve Reich Electric Counterpoint
Elsewhere occasionally revisits albums -- classics sometimes, but more often oddities or overlooked albums by major artists -- and you can find a number of them starting here
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Here is Different Trains in a recent live recording with the London Contemporary Orchestra