Program

Steve Reich — Different Trains
George Crumb — Black Angels

The two works on this program are musical reactions to wartime experiences, though they approach these experiences from different perspectives. In Different Trains, Steve Reich uses pre-recorded speech on a tape, and the rhythms and inflections of the spoken words serve as the basis for “speech melody,” where the instruments mimic the voices. Reich spent his childhood during World War II crisscrossing the United States by train to visit his separated parents in New York and Los Angeles. Reflecting upon this childhood experience, as an adult Reich, an American Jew, imagined how different his life might have been had he grown up in Europe, riding a different train to an altogether different destination.

By contrast, George Crumb wrote Black Angels during the height of the Vietnam War, at a time when public backlash was growing and the atrocities of the U.S.’s actions were receiving condemnation at home. The work is a “threnody,” or lament, and includes many allusions to war and death, notably the “night of the electric insects” (attack helicopters), musical quotations from Schubert’s “Death and the Maiden” quartet, and the Dies Irae. Originally scored for electric string quartet, this sonority imparts a more visceral quality to the music by stripping away the instruments’ natural woody resonance and replacing it with distorted intensity.