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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 February 2010
Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27–minute work for string quartet and tape, written in 1988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premièred it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch. Reich's reputation has never been confined to ‘serious’ new music circles and the combination of. his (so-called) ‘crossover’ credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Different Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Different Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.
1 Reich, Steve. Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint, Nonesuch (979176–2. 1989 Google Scholar.
2 Schwartz, K. Robert, ‘Steve Reich: Music as a Gradual Process’, Perspectives in New Music (Fall–Winter 1980/Spring–Summer 1961), pp. 373–394 Google Scholar (Part 1) and (Fall-Winter 1981/ Spring–Summer 1982), pp.226–286 (Part 2).
3 Potter, Keith, ‘The Recent Phases of Steve Reich’, Contact 29 (Spring 1985), p.31 Google Scholar.
4 Gardiner, Ian, Music was a gradual process: the rediscovery of tradition in the music of Steve Reich since 1976, (MA Thesis, Keele University, 1983), pp.37–8Google Scholar.
5 Schwartz, , op cit., p.263 Google Scholar.
6 Gardiner, , op cit., footnotes p.iii Google Scholar.
7 Schwartz, , op cit., p.262 Google Scholar.
8 Reich, Steve, The Desert Music, Nonesuch 797 101–1, 1985 Google Scholar.
9 Sterritt, David, ‘Tradition Reseen: Composer Steve Reich’, Christian Science Monitor, 23 10 1980, p.20 Google Scholar.
10 However Drumming is perhaps best regarded not as a work in four movements but as four transformations of the same material.
11 Reich, Steve, Music for Eighteen Musicians, ECM 1129, 1978 Google Scholar.
12 Reich's Music for Mallet Instruments, Voices and Organ, where each section is based on a process of gradual durational expansion followed by contraction, is almost an exception to this rule!
