Passenger Trains > Different Trains

Listening to this contemporary music piece by Phillip Glass that incorporates people speaking about journeys, trains and background sounds. During World War II, Reich made regular transcontinental train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Six months with his mother in LA, six months with his father in NYC. Years later, he pondered over the fact that, as a Jew, had he been in Europe instead of the United States at that time, he might have been travelling in Holocaust trains. You can find the piece on YouTube and more info about Glass in Wikipedia.



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 07/30/14 22:50 by jnorton.

So glad to be reminded of this. It's one of my very favorite CDs. The project is a history of the mid-Twentieth Century, as told through the voices of two very different groups of railroad passengers: the contented Americans who rode the great streamliners, and captives of the Nazis who rode boxcars to the death camps. Glass examined audio interviews and picked out the most meaningful snatches of survivors' storytelling. He selected the clips with the most musical inflection, accent and rhythm -- such as "...crack train from New Ya-ork..." -- and wrote out brief tunes for string quartet that copied and enhanced the music if the voices. Think of it as an overheard conversation, every voice echoed by strings. Train-based shuffle beats, whistles and horns get things running at a brisk pace, then ominous minor keys emerge with the Nazi ascent, and wailing sirens signal its defeat.., followed by peace. It's a heavy piece of music, but it shows plenty of love and admiration for trains, as well as the opposite side of the coin.