The Score

Steve Reich’s Different Trains is not the first
music to grapple with the Holocaust and the Second World War, but it
stands apart. Writing for string quartet and sampled sounds, Reich
substitutes rhythmic agility and evocative aural imagery for the
symphonic bombast you might expect. Does any other somber musical
memorial start so fast?

Huffing and chugging like a dirigible-sized klezmer
accordion, layers of live and overdubbed strings pulse and stutter.
Train blasts, slightly smeared and elongated by a keyboard sampler,
encase ever-shifting modules of strings.

The power of Different Trains rests in how Reich deploys
fragments of speech (“Crack train to New York,” “They tattooed a
number on our arm“). Alert to the musical nature of speech since
his early 1960s pieces such as Come Out and It’s Gonna
Rain, the string quartet follow the rhythmic and tonal inflections
of spoken fragments. We hear speech and witness it as music.

Different Trains doesn’t tell us what we already know, that
millions were murdered in a sweeping genocide. Instead, Reich culls
telling phrases that offer an oblique, chilling perspective. Interviews
with Holocaust survivors, a retired train conductor, and the governess
who accompanied Reich on his bicoastal journeys to visit his divorced
parents remind us we are fortunate survivors mostly by accidents of
geography. Imagining that his childhood could have been spent in
Europe, Reich once wrote, “As a Jew, I would have had to ride on very
different trains.”

Music of Remembrance, a chamber- music organization that not
only preserves music composed by Holocaust victims and survivors but
also champions and commissions contemporary composers, revives
Different Trains (Sat April 18, Chapel Performance Space, 2 pm,
free). A song cycle by Seattle-born composer Daniel Asia,
Breath in a Ram’s Horn, rounds out the afternoon program. MoR’s
1999 performance of Trains at Benaroya’s Recital Hall remains
one of my favorite concerts. It should be lovely at the Chapel.
Don’t miss it.

Two notable CD-release shows grace the weekend. Andrew
Boscardin’s Nickel and Brass Septet celebrate the release of
Four-Color Heroes! (Sat April 18, the Mix, 6006 12th Ave S, 8
pm, $7/$5). A jazz tribute to the great comic-book artists of
yore—I dig the moody up-tempo groove of “Professor
Kubert”—the septet include Tom Varner on French horn and
vibraphonist Ben Thomas. Also the Tom Baker Quartet (Sun
April 19, Egan’s Ballard Jam House, 6 and 8 pm, $10 including CD) debut
their new disc, Save (Present Sounds), which slyly and
splendidly blurs the boundary shared by composition and
improvisation.

Finally, ex-Bonus sound sorcerer Scott Goodwin shares the
bill with Grouper (Fri April 17, Vera Project, 7:30 pm, $7/$8),
making what he alluringly describes as “music using sinusoidal
waveforms that explores sort of psycho-acoustic territory in the
vein of Phill Niblock or Maryanne Amacher.” The ears make the music,
too: Turn your head, and the sound changes dramatically.