‘Different Trains’

In 1988 Steve Reich wrote ‘Different Trains’, an innovative work in three movements for string quartet and pre-recorded tape. This autobiographical piece evokes the train journeys from New York to Los Angeles that the composer made between 1939 and 1942 to visit the homes of his divorced parents. In the second movement, the remembrance of these journeys as a romantic childhood adventure is overlaid by a ‘contrafactual’ scenario exploring the likely fate of a Jew like him in the Europe of the time: the trains would have been one-way vehicles of deportation to the Nazi extermination camps. The final movement refers to the end of the war period and the rapid process of social transformation, as symbolized by the new trains, but also to the survivors’ inability to leave behind the doubts, anxieties and memories of the crimes and devastation of the Nazi regime.

In 2016, in a work commissioned by the BBVA Foundation, Beatriz Caravaggio has revisited Steve Reich’s ideas, giving the score a visual life. Her cinematographic recomposition builds on a montage of archive images of the wartime period. The film transports us from a bucolic setting of idyllic landscapes and magnificent trains to the survivors’ journey to America, by way of a central movement that conjures up the darkest chapters of the conflict. In this passage, the author juxtaposes archive images of deportations, death camps and the liberation. The film is characterized by the division of the screen into three parts, bringing out a rich range of meanings; a slightly out-of-synch triptych that achieves a temporal fragmentation while producing a cohesive ‘collage’ of dynamics and transitions. The video artwork has been synchronized with the Kronos Quartet’s canonical 1989 performance of ‘Different Trains’.