Intimate Landscapes
September 19, 2026
The Adagio from Samuel Barber which we most often hear is an arrangement Arturo Toscanini commissioned in 1938. It was originally written, however, as the slow movement of his String Quartet. As a string quartet, its purely elegiac qualities are somewhat lessened in favor of its finely balanced contrapuntal tensions and long, arched structure.
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The name ‘Minimalism’ has a diminutive quality to it and it wasn’t meant to be nice when it was first used, but the name makes some sense. Musical counterpoint can be enormously complex, and the reduction of music to essential sonic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns is, in a way, about the removal of a certain kind of complexity in favor of new possibilities.
And new complexities do indeed arise from this kind of music; in the case of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, they show something very powerful. Different Trains is one of only a few pieces of music which may be said to achieve a kind of musical ‘realism’. The sound of the train is the sound of the string quartet; the pre-recorded string quartet track is the sound of the disappeared; the mechanics of the train itself are the mechanics of the writing; the inevitability of the recorded track leads both to an end in Europe and to an opening in America.
There may be no more clear or harrowing expression of how America itself might choose a different path from Europe. It is a new use of the string quartet, a new idea of harmony, a new idea of listening—a new world in the possibilities it creates.
--Notes from Steve Reich regarding Different Trains:
Different Trains, for String Quartet and pre-recorded performance tape, begins a new way of composing that has its roots in my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). The basic idea is that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments.
The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation.
In order to prepare the tape, I did the following:
The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples as well as the train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Three separate string quartets are also added to the pre-recorded tape, and the final live quartet part is added in performance.
Different Trains is in three movements (played without pause), although that term is stretched here since tempos change frequently in each movement. They are:
The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theatre in the not-too-distant future.
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Music can deliver many sorts of messages, and any piece of music must rise from its place and time as well as from its author. But music thrives just as well, or perhaps even better, in ways which defy concrete description or any contextualization. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70 No. 2 is this sort of music. Its most beautiful qualities remain resolutely intrinsic. One might compare it to the string quartets of Haydn, whose jokes and tricks are easy to hear but impossible to tell without an instrument, or one might compare it to the impossible ease with which Mozart creates expansive, inarguable coherence. But describing these sorts of musical phenomena is not what words are for. The ‘First Viennese School’, which rose at about the time of the American Revolution, seems to have had a knack for such self-sufficient music.
To set this trio’s qualities in relief, one could say that its content is neither inventive cleverness (like Haydn) nor preternatural naturalness (like Mozart). Donald Francis Tovey describes the difference in this way: “...what eventually did appear was the integration of Mozart’s and Haydn’s resources, with results that transcend all possibility of resemblance to the style of their origins, and are nowhere more transcendent than in a work like the Piano Trio in E-flat, Op. 70, No. 2, where Beethoven discovers new meanings for Mozart’s phrasings and Haydn’s formulas.”
Beethoven’s methods in the trio are not completely beyond analysis or description, but they are beyond a brief explanation. If, however, one wonders how music might stand completely on its own terms, this trio may give as good an answer as has ever been given.
–Tim Summers
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The name ‘Minimalism’ has a diminutive quality to it and it wasn’t meant to be nice when it was first used, but the name makes some sense. Musical counterpoint can be enormously complex, and the reduction of music to essential sonic, rhythmic, and harmonic patterns is, in a way, about the removal of a certain kind of complexity in favor of new possibilities.
And new complexities do indeed arise from this kind of music; in the case of Steve Reich’s Different Trains, they show something very powerful. Different Trains is one of only a few pieces of music which may be said to achieve a kind of musical ‘realism’. The sound of the train is the sound of the string quartet; the pre-recorded string quartet track is the sound of the disappeared; the mechanics of the train itself are the mechanics of the writing; the inevitability of the recorded track leads both to an end in Europe and to an opening in America.
There may be no more clear or harrowing expression of how America itself might choose a different path from Europe. It is a new use of the string quartet, a new idea of harmony, a new idea of listening—a new world in the possibilities it creates.
--Notes from Steve Reich regarding Different Trains:
Different Trains, for String Quartet and pre-recorded performance tape, begins a new way of composing that has its roots in my early tape pieces It’s Gonna Rain (1965) and Come Out (1966). The basic idea is that carefully chosen speech recordings generate the musical materials for musical instruments.
The idea for the piece came from my childhood. When I was one year old my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While the trips were exciting and romantic at the time I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation.
In order to prepare the tape, I did the following:
- Record my governess Virginia, then in her seventies, reminiscing about our train trips together.
- Record a retired Pullman porter, Lawrence Davis, then in his eighties, who used to ride lines between New York and Los Angeles, reminiscing about his life.
- Collect recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul, and Rachel, all about my age and then living in America—speaking of their experiences.
- Collect recorded American and European train sounds of the ‘30s and ‘40s.
- In order to combine the taped speech with the string instruments, I selected small speech samples that are more or less clearly pitched and then notated them as accurately as possible in musical notation.
The strings then literally imitate that speech melody. The speech samples as well as the train sounds were transferred to tape with the use of sampling keyboards and a computer. Three separate string quartets are also added to the pre-recorded tape, and the final live quartet part is added in performance.
Different Trains is in three movements (played without pause), although that term is stretched here since tempos change frequently in each movement. They are:
- America—Before the war
- Europe—During the war
- After the war
The piece thus presents both a documentary and a musical reality and begins a new musical direction. It is a direction that I expect will lead to a new kind of documentary music video theatre in the not-too-distant future.
--
Music can deliver many sorts of messages, and any piece of music must rise from its place and time as well as from its author. But music thrives just as well, or perhaps even better, in ways which defy concrete description or any contextualization. Ludwig van Beethoven’s Piano Trio in E-flat Major, Op. 70 No. 2 is this sort of music. Its most beautiful qualities remain resolutely intrinsic. One might compare it to the string quartets of Haydn, whose jokes and tricks are easy to hear but impossible to tell without an instrument, or one might compare it to the impossible ease with which Mozart creates expansive, inarguable coherence. But describing these sorts of musical phenomena is not what words are for. The ‘First Viennese School’, which rose at about the time of the American Revolution, seems to have had a knack for such self-sufficient music.
To set this trio’s qualities in relief, one could say that its content is neither inventive cleverness (like Haydn) nor preternatural naturalness (like Mozart). Donald Francis Tovey describes the difference in this way: “...what eventually did appear was the integration of Mozart’s and Haydn’s resources, with results that transcend all possibility of resemblance to the style of their origins, and are nowhere more transcendent than in a work like the Piano Trio in E-flat, Op. 70, No. 2, where Beethoven discovers new meanings for Mozart’s phrasings and Haydn’s formulas.”
Beethoven’s methods in the trio are not completely beyond analysis or description, but they are beyond a brief explanation. If, however, one wonders how music might stand completely on its own terms, this trio may give as good an answer as has ever been given.
–Tim Summers