The Encinitas Library sits near the crest of a hill overlooking the downtown Encinitas shopping district. The west wall of the Library’s Community Room is mainly glass. Inside this room, looking through the large windows past the concrete observation deck outside, one sees the green fronds of palm trees swaying back and forth, the red and white stucco tops of businesses on Highway 101, a relatively thin dark blue strip that is the Pacific Ocean, and, most of all on a warm, clear Spring day, a brilliant expanse of blue sky unblemished by clouds. It was against this dazzling backdrop that the California Quartet performed Steve Reich’s Different Trains, a composition for string quartet and tape in which audience members had to visualize Jews being crammed into cattle cars and shipped off to camps in Poland, where crematoriums belched fire and thick black clouds into the air.

The California Quartet.

^{Courtesy photo}

Many compositions have dealt with the Jewish Holocaust, but few have entered the repertory. Written in 1988, Different Trains has already earned a niche in the concert programs of string quartets, despite the technical difficulties of working with a sound system. A good deal of Reich’s success in handling this subject matter has to do with his oblique treatment of the Holocaust. Rather than graphically depict the atrocities committed, Reich suggests them through veiled references, and this emotional distance paradoxically increases the tragedy.

As a child in the late 1930’s, Reich had to make cross-country trips by rail in order for his separated parents to share custody of him. Different Trains contrasts the experiences of American train riders with those of Reich’s Jewish counterparts in 1940s Europe. To do this, Reich recorded reminiscences of his childhood governess, a Pullman porter, and Holocaust survivors who were children at the time. From these oral histories, he extracted 46 snippets—most of them fragments of sentences—to use as his recorded narrative.

The first section, “America—Before the War,” recounts train routes. The second and longest section, “Europe—During the War,” begins with reminiscences of the German invasions of Holland and Hungary, followed by a heartless instance of race-baiting by a 2nd grade teacher in the classroom, and ultimately leads up to the mass deportation of undesirables to concentration camps. Here Reich hints at the horrors of the Holocaust with no more than a few brief lines:

“and he said, “Don’t breathe!”

“into those cattle wagons”

“for 4 days and 4 nights” …

“They were loaded with people”

“They shaved us”

“They tattooed a number on our arm”

“Flames going up to the sky—it was smoking”

We’ve seen the documentaries and photographs and read the stories. Reich understands that in a work of art we don’t need to hear numerous details about the brutal treatment of prisoners or the Zyklon B or the mass graves. It’s all there in our minds, and the short excerpts of the voices of Holocaust survivors cannily chosen by Reich subtly unleash those terrors.

The final section, “After the War,” opens with the European refugees going to America, and then a brief reprise of the governess and porter from the first section, but with a new observation. Following Virginia’s line “one of the fastest trains” the porter comments “but today, they’re all gone,” referring to trains; however, the proximity of this to the earlier section on death camps prompts the listener to additionally relate “they” to the slaughtered Jews. To drive the double meaning home, and end the work with another paradox, Reich has one of the survivors tell a brief story about how much the Germans enjoyed hearing a young girl sing. The very last line is, “and when she stopped singing they said, ‘More, more’ and they applauded.” The string quartet continues playing, with the quote “More, more” encouraging the music to continue. When the music finally tapers off, a listener is reluctant to applaud lest one be tainted by association.

The music in Different Trains was a new direction for Steve Reich. In his earliest works, the tape music masterpieces It’s Gonna Rain and Come Out, Reich looped fragments of speech, and in so doing unlocked the melodies in the contour of the speaker’s intonation. What Reich then did with these speech-melodies was to play these loops against themselves, creating an unpredictably dense layer of music and pointing the way towards his early Minimalist vocabulary, which transferred the technique of a tape loop going slowly out of phase with itself to performers duplicating this effect on instruments. In his subsequent compositions, however, he never returned to this idea of extracting the melody in human speech.

In Different Trains, the compositional materials Reich worked with are the speech-melodies in the 46 different samples of speaking used in the work. They determine the pitch content (including the key), as well as the tempo of each section. The result is a strange new type of composition which speeds up and slows down, changes from key to key, all on the basis of the speech fragment used.

What could have been a series of musical non-sequiturs is held together through Reich’s strong musical voice, an individual language of canons, musical expansions and contractions, and repetitions, all conducted over very clear areas of tonality. The other thing which binds the work together is the railroad sounds which feature prominently in the first two parts: whistles, horns, and the wheels rhythmically clacking on the tracks. Just as Reich contrasts the different train experiences of the passengers in America and Europe, he also highlights those differences by restricting himself to period American train sounds for Part I, and European train sounds for Part II. The horns and rhythmic chugging are duplicated by the string quartet, although the klaxons in the Europe section sound frighteningly like air raid sirens to my American ears.

The music also serves the dramatic arc of the work, so that at the end of Part II, as those cattle cars discharge their passengers, the rhythmic chugging ends. The last several lines of this section are spoken above a static harmony, a motionless music—another emotional distancing by Reich from his subject matter. No operatic hysteria here. No wailing sirens. Just an immovable chord, over which the snippets of degradations are recited. Reich is telling us that for the Jewish passengers, this was the last stop.

One other aspect of Reich’s earlier compositions comes into play in Different Trains, and that is the idea of a soloist playing with a multi-tracked pre-recorded version of themselves on a tape part; he had successfully explored this in Violin Phase, Vermont Counterpoint (for flute), New York Counterpoint (for clarinet), and Electric Counterpoint (for electric guitar). In Different Trains, Reich requires the string quartet to multi-track itself 3 times (a total of 12 individual parts), and this recording, combined with the speech and railroad sample, becomes the final tape part (which these days is played back digitally). The live string quartet then plays along with the tape, and is miked and mixed into the amplified sound.

It’s no small feat for a live group to sync up with the tape; the performers need to have the many sudden tempo changes down cold. While the California Quartet nicely managed all the transitions, and demonstrated precision in their ensemble work and intonation, the playback system seemed unduly muddy. Words and sounds were obscured, and at times the live quartet seemed to stand out from the pre-recorded part. Despite that snag, this was a heartfelt performance of a profound work. If we had to squint at the group, backlit by the glare of the brilliant blue sky, to experience the piece, well—it seemed like a ridiculously trivial problem after hearing the ordeals that European Jews endured in the 1940’s.

Not so trivial, however, was the decision to program the "Adagio" from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet without a break following the conclusion of Reich’s work. Different Trains is something which demands to close a half—it is too difficult of a piece to follow. If one had to insist on a closer after Different Trains, it would have to be something so completely different as to take the audience to a completely different emotional place, like Milton Babbitt or Webern or late Cage, and those aren’t exactly strong closers.

The problem with Barber’s "Adagio" is that it’s Barber’s Adagio. It is an icon, an emblem. It is the American equivalent to the Chopin Funeral March. It has become the musical security blanket of the United States, a big old thumb to plant in our collective mouths during times of mourning.

I don’t mean to denigrate the "Adagio." It’s a beautiful piece. But unfortunately, it’s a symbol, and a potent one at that. It’s been played too often during funerals or as somber background music, that to perform it—without a pause, mind you—after Different Trains is to sentimentalize something (the Holocaust) that Steve Reich went out of his way to portray in a matter-of-fact, unemotional veneer. Gee, how should we feel after hearing about all those poor Jews killed in Auschwitz? Well, duh. I don’t need a fucking red-white-and-blue funereal armband to wear on my sleeve. Let me wander off on my own for a while to reflect on what I just heard, instead of shoving Uncle Sam down my throat.

Programming error aside, how did the California Quartet do with this work? They had some problems staying on pitch here, and their sound in the stratospheric climax was unduly harsh. It almost sounded as if they were trying to play the Adagio for Strings instead of an Adagio for a string quartet, which is how the original incarnation of Barber’s warhorse should be interpreted.

The quartet’s performances in the second half, though, were admirable. In John’s Book of Alleged Dances (by John Adams), they are required to channel bluegrass and jazz styles, which the California Quartet did with aplomb, in addition to keeping their rhythms sharp and their ensemble work clean. Adams allows groups to pick and choose any of the 10 movements for performance; the California Quartet chose “Rag the Bone,” “Judah to Ocean,” “Toot Nipple,” “Habanera,” and “Dogjam.” The quartet performs with a pre-recorded rhythm section consisting entirely of prepared piano loops. If one didn’t know that “Judah to Ocean” referred to a streetcar line, the maniacal chugging of the prepared piano crashes and bangs with the strings bouncing along certainly suggested a crazy trolley. I’ve never read the Annie Proulx story wherein the character of Toot Nipple figures, but if Adams’ musical portrait is accurate, he’s a furious bruiser, unpredictable and offbeat. The “Habanera” is more of an oddball tango, with the prepared piano thudding out a left hand habanera rhythm, while the 1st violin played an Arabic-tinged melody which seemed filtered by Stravinsky’s fiddle-playing soldier. In “Dogjam,” jazz and bluegrass fiddle playing merges with a wacky emulation of a gamelan ensemble in the prepared piano recording. To properly play these movements requires equal parts madness and humor, and the California Quartet delivered in those departments.

Matthew Tommasini is the ambitious co-director of the Connections Chamber Music Series (of which this concert was the third installment out of 6 different programs). He was represented on the program by a violin duo, Fiddle States. Judging from this work, Tommasini is a confident composer who appears to have found a voice that merges popular American musical styles, predominantly tonal but occasionally crunchy harmonies, and a concern for straightforward ideas and forms. With younger composers, I often wish that they had trimmed their music more, but in Tommasini’s case, I actually felt as if he could have extended his ideas. There were promising moments which he could have easily developed into more music. The pieces ended too soon for me, but that is a far better virtue than having them overstay their welcome. Tommasini said that he was influenced by fiddle music, especially since he knew a violinist studying with Mark O’Connor. I couldn’t help but compare Tommasini’s compositional talents with O’Connor’s, and came to the conclusion that if O’Connor took some composition lessons, in a few years his music might sound as competent as Tommasini’s is now. Violinist Bridget Dolkas and Jeanne Skrocki captured the bluegrass idioms well and produced some thrilling crescendos, all the while maintaining their classical music composure.

Michael Daugherty has written some serious musical examinations of American popular culture, but Elvis Everywhere is not one of them. Another vehicle for string quartet and tape, Elvis Everywhere makes the tape, or more specifically, the three Elvis Presley impersonators (one of whom is a woman) on the tape, the star of the work. Over blues yells, karate grunts, and deep-voiced crooning from the impersonators, the string quartet adds a volley of new music techniques such as tone clusters and glissandi. Hearing dissonant music over a repeated blues boogie bass is perhaps not too shocking to younger generations raised on rap music, but it still provokes the senior citizens who constituted the bulk of the audience for this recital.

Once more the California Quartet channeled the composer’s intentions, in this case a lighthearted encore that pays homage to an American original at the same time it winks at him.

If the remaining concerts in the series are as good as this one was, you would do well to get to the Encinitas Library early to grab a seat. It was standing room only on Sunday. It might also be a good idea to bring some sunglasses. That blue sky backlighting is pretty intense.

For a copy of the program, click here.

Listen to the entire Part I of Different Trains here.

Listen to excerpts from John's Alleged Book of Dances here.

Listen to all of Fiddle States and read a score if you want to, right here. (Scroll down to Fiddle States)

A good chunk of Elvis Everywhere may be heard here. (You need to click on "String Quartet and Pre-Recorded Sounds," and then click on "Elvis Everywhere")