Customer Reviews

Reich: Different Trains, Electric Counterpoint / Kronos Quartet, Pat Metheny

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Having never been a major aficionado of Minimalist music, my first real introduction to it was via Godfrey Reggio's movie Koyaanisqatsi. The soundtrack to that film, by Philip Glass, was enthralling. It made me seek out his and other composer's music. As part of that search, I picked up Steve Reich's Different Trains/Electric Counterpoint recording about ten years ago. I included it, almost as an afterthought, as part of one of those mail order "buy 10 CDs for a penny!" promotions. The last thing I wrote on the order card, I remember, was this Steve Reich CD. My thought at the time was, "Oh well, I don't know what he sounds like, but it should be interesting." Guess which recording, among all of those I got through that mail order fiasco, is the only one that I still listen to regularly? You got it, Steve Reich's Different Trains. I didn't realize what I was getting. . . . It took time to grow on me. I listened to it maybe three or four times that first year. It was typical minimalist fare; repetitive sound images flowing and changing in organic patterns. It is only now, 10 years later, that I can comprehend what is happening on this CD. Somehow, Steve Reich managed to take the often starkly cold patterns and theories of Minimalism and infuse them with immense humanity. The two separate pieces: "Different Trains" and "Electric Counterpoint" are widely different in tone and intent, but work together strangely well. "Different Trains" is a combination of oversampled recordings by the Kronos Quartet, the recordings of trains, and sound bites from interviews with people who rode on trains during the 1940s. The speech recordings provide 10 or 15 simple phrases such as ". . . from Chicago to New York." These phrases provide the tonal images that are the 'melody' of the piece. The slow transition from people speaking about traveling in American trains to a sudden realization that one is now listening to Holocaust survivors speaking about trains that run to death camps is heart breaking. The second piece, Electric Counterpoint, is a massively oversampled piece built up from the recordings of the guitar work of Pat Metheny. Electric Counterpoint is optimistic, flowing, and surprisingly energetic. I heartily recommend this recording as a masterpiece of 20th century composition and performance. I listen to it at least once a month just for the shear joy it provides.

Different Train is one of Steve Reich's most talked-about pieces. It was inspired by his personal memories of his experience as a child riding trains a lot all over the United States to visit each of his divorced parents, & also interviews he did with holocaust survivors about their experiences aboard European trains in WWII. The string quartet's job is mostly to match speech melody, & there are other trainy sounds mixed in, too. The music is very muscular, very compelling.

Electric Counterpoint is some of Reich's most beautiful music if you ask me. Each note is absolutely clear; the music changes gradually in increments with great awareness of keeping the listener never bored but always interested. The guitar virtuosity of Pat Metheny does a lot for the piece, too. For one thing, Reich finished his drafts of the music with Metheny telling him where the notes could go given the physical shape of guitars. For me, Electric Counterpoint is probably much more enjoyable to listen to than Different Trains. Wonderful music.

Different Trains is an important Reich piece to be familiar, but I'd even highly recommend this cd just for Electric Counterpoint. This cd is very high on the list of Steve Reich cd's to get.

I was very fortunate to hear the Kronos Quartet perform this up in Orono, Maine (at the University of Maine) the year this CD was released. Not being familiar with either Reich, the piece, or the KQ at the time, I was completely blown out of the water by the uniqueness of the idea, the emotion of the narrative, and the jarring comparison between Reich's life and the lives of so many others. Several jazz perfomers have tried similar "voice-matching" techiniques--Victor Wooten and Jason Moran, most recently--but hearing a child's message on an answering machine replayed on the bass guitar does not match the emotional impact of the narrative Reich provides. It is such an abstract notion with such concrete results. Kronos is impeccable in their performance, as usual, and they provide the flair and brass needed to pull off such a feat. I played this CD (along with Gorecki's Symphony #3) every year in my Holocaust class for juniors and seniors in high school. They are as blown away by the whole concept as I originally was. It is a technically impressive and emotionally draining experience.

Electric Counterpoint is, quite sadly, the overlooked portion of this CD for me. I am a huge Pat Metheny fan, but I look to his other CDs for his best work. I know it is my loss. . . .

Bottom Line: Whether or not you like Steve Reich and/or the Kronos Quartet, you need to give this CD a listen--it is a challenge and a delight.

As I listen to Different Trains for the hundredth time, I reflect upon what this music means to me. I don't think I had ever experienced anything quite like it before...

It's magic, I believe... How else could something so distant and far gone come back to life through music? How else could something we all try to remove from our spoiled memories drill its way into our heads? How else could music be so powerful as to force us to admit: "it's true, it all really happened"? All of a sudden it's real, more real than it had ever been before. Holocaust, that is.

The twentieth century was the century of sight, they say... Photography, the cinema and TV have made our vision keener. This is good, no doubt, but there are counterparts. Through television, our eyes have gotten to be so familiar with death and the horrors of war, they no longer move our brains, or hearts. It all looks the same, therefore it all feels the same. Like fiction.

Steve Reich asks us not to look, or watch, or even "see," but to close our eyes and listen carefully for once... It's music, he has in store for us, but not the music we are used to... You see, art has no "ethical sympathies," says Oscar Wilde (and I agree with him). So music - perhaps art's most sublime form - should be concerned with Beauty and not with Reality. And that's the way it is, usually, and rightly so. I believe in Aesthetics, and I wouldn't want music to become a political ground. But if someone comes along who manages to combine beautiful music with Reality - or rather, to make a "documentary in music" - there can't possibly be any harm in that...

On the contrary, I believe, it can open a new channel into our hearts, pierce our recalcitrant consciences, allowing them to bleed at last. Different Trains, in my case at any rate, succeeded in doing just that. It threw History right at me, and it hurt - but oh so beautifully... It felt good letting it all out. It felt like through "hearing" my eyes could regain their power, and "see" what had always been there.

This is perhaps both Reich's best work and the Kronos Quartet's finest performance. Different Trains is simply phenomenal. The piece consists of short "pitched" fragments of interviews Reich conducted, with always one instrument doubling the voice on the same pitch, over a quasi-minimalist texture with a few additional sounds (train whistles and such) in the background. The subject matter is train rides before, during, and after World War II, with the middle section obviously involving Holocaust stories. Uplifting, mesmerizing, heart-breaking, this piece is a must-have. Kronos is at their best, playing with great rhythmic clarity and an unusually nice sound for them.

Electric Counterpoint is a nice addition to this disc. While it doesn't have the emotional content of Different Trains, it certainly provides an enjoyable listening experience. A reviewer below with more knowledge than I of the electric guitar and this performer has gone into greater detail.

This was always going to be a controversial album. Wherever Pat Metheny treads, he brings fans. Some may be disappointed to hear their axe hero performing a piece by another composer which offers scant opportunity for the musician's individuality to shine through. Some may bypass the Kronos Quartet piece altogether, thinking the use of the Casio FZ-1 sampler somewhat elementary compared to the sounds Metheny has extracted over the years from his beloved Synclavier.

But if they did that, they would be missing a treat. 'Different Trains' is almost Kraftwerk's "Trans-Europe Express" with a point of view. Rhythmic trains sounds are generated by a classical string quartet. The sampled voice-overs don't always work for me -- I would imagine this was the first and last record Reich's governess would ever provide the vocals for -- but there is deep emotion in the recollections of the Holocaust survivors. After the intro, the best movement is track #3, 'After the War'.

Prior to 'Electric Counterpoint', Reich had written mainly for keyboard, hammered instruments and percussion. The piece is credited solely to Reich, but both Reich and Metheny have admitted that Pat provided considerable guidance on what would be unplayable on guitar. It is typical of the Reich brand of hypnotic music, and it is outstanding. Reich has specified that in order to perform it live, the soloist should pre-record up to ten guitar tracks and two electric bass parts, and then play the final 11th guitar part live against the tape. But it would be fascinating to hear the results if the whole thing was performed live by a 13-piece band -- two bassists and 11 guitarists! Chaos perhaps?!

If you like this type of music, then my recommendation, as ever, is to buy either version of 'Music for 18 Musicians'. Reich still hasn't done better than this 1978 masterpiece.

I originally heard about this CD from the Kronos Quartet's best of album: "Released," which includes "America Before the War." Although beautiful in and of itself, the true brilliance of Reich's composition comes from the juxtaposition of alternating domestic, wartime, and domestic imagery in the respective movements. I was familiar with Electric Counterpoint from samples in albums by the Orb, but the samples obviously did not retain the sensitivity of the original composition. I could not give this album a higher recommendation

The Grammy-award winning "Different Trains" is probably one of Reich's most famous and popular compositions. One of its originalities is the use of small bits of recorded speech as the basis of melodies, which Reich plays on tape and has the string quartet very accurately imitate. It is fascinating to hear how the two can become indistinguishable, and Reich really makes you hear how much speech is already song. But what makes "Different Trains" quite moving is its autobiographical nature. When Reich was one year old, his parents separated and his mother moved to Los Angeles, while is father remained in New York. Since they arranged shared custody, the young boy would frequently travel by train between the two cities, between 1939 and 1942, accompanied by his governess. Much later, he reflected that, had he been born in Europe, as a Jew, he would probably have traveled on very different trains. So he went on to record his old governess Virginia, then in her seventies, reminiscing on their train trips together, and a retired porter from the train company, and to gather recordings of three Holocaust survivors who had emigrated to the United States after the war, speaking of their experiences.

The composition's architecture is simple, in three parts, "America - Before the war" with the reminiscences of Virginia and the Pullman porter, "Europe - During the war" with the reminiscences of the Holocaust survivors, and "After the war", mixing the two. To those materials Reich adds real sounds of American and European trains of the 1930s and `40s (there is even what sounds like sirens at the beginning of Part II), always embedded in the texture of the string quartet, so that it is difficult at times to say which sounds are produced by the acoustic instruments and which are sampled. All this makes "Different Trains" a quasi-opera: Reich's typically propulsive rhythmic writing makes the description of the different trains and different situations very graphic. According to Reich's entry on Wikipedia, Richard Taruskin said that "Different Trains" was "the only adequate musical response -- one of the few adequate artistic responses in any medium -- to the Holocaust", and credited the piece with earning Reich a place among the great composers of the 20th century. I'm not so sure about the second part of the proposition, because one may hesitate to place the piece so high based on its purely musical (as opposed to moral) value, but I entirely agree with the first part.

The composition was fresh out of the pen when it was recorded, between August 31 and September 9, 1988 and in the liner notes, Reich announced that "the piece (...) begins a new musical direcction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theater in the not too distant future". Well, it did, with The Cave, the opera composed in 1993 with his wife, the video-artist Beryl Korot (Steve Reich: The Cave).

Electric Counterpoint was completed in 1987 and is the third pendant of a triptych which includes Vermont Counterpoint for flutist (1982) and New York Counerpoint for clarinetist (1985). It pits the live guitarist - Pat Metheny - against his pre-recorded and overdubbed self - playing no less than ten guitars and two electric bass parts. The music is typical Reich, shimmering and pulsating, rhythmically propulsive, very pretty and not demanding.

The only drawback of this CD, like the others from the series recorded in the late 1980s and early 1990s by Nonesuch, is the stingy TT of 43 minutes.

The two works on this disc are essential listening for anyone with even the slightest interest in Steve Reich. For those who don't know the composer, there are perhaps easier places to start - the Music for Mallet Instruments, Octet, Music for 18 Musicians, for instance.

It's now nearly 20 years since these pieces were recorded. Different Trains juxtaposes the Kronos Quartet with taped railway announcements, words overheard on trains, lines relating to train journeys etc. Throughout, there's a true integration of the form, since the strings pick up rhythmic and melodic lines from the spoken words, develop them, amplify them.

Electric Counterpoint is performed on an electric guitar. Pat Metheney plays against pre-recorded tapes to create something like a complex - but surprisingly easy on the ear - fugue (well, canon).

I have one criticism of the disc in that I have always found the recording quality of Different Trains just too much "in the face". It's too close for my liking, but the problem isn't great enough to detract from the playing or the piece.

Both pieces on this disc are delightful and brilliant - very emotional and accessible I find. Neither has the vast (Well-tempered klavier of percussive phase-shifting!) scale of _18 Musicians_ or _Drumming_, but that's almost certainly an advantage for most people (and has been for me). Just two quick comments about the pieces:
1. Holocaust themes in art are often ponderous... "Different Trains" ingeniously avoids all sorts of traps of that sort by starting us off, as it were, in the New World with technology and optimism. The darkness enters later and is all the more powerful for it. Now I think about it, this piece makes the disc a great gift for a precocious kid... if they like Pink Floyd or other broadly conceptual rock stuff they'll dig this.
2. The second "slow" movement of "Electric Counterpoint" is flat out gorgeous.