Steve Reich: Strings
Maximal minimal
Kicking-off the festival: music by the pioneer of minimal music
Steve Reich is a living legend, and he is visiting Hamburg. The New York-based composer is one of minimal music’s pioneers and one of the most influential composers of the second half of the 20th century. His innovative experiments with »tape music« and the resulting technique of »phasing« characterised the beginning of his career – an early form a »sampling«.
In his ground-breaking composition »Different Trains« (1988), Steve Reich uses snippets from interviews with Holocaust survivors, turning the intonation of their spoken words into musical motifs and notation. These rhythms and melodic lines of language are combined with the sounds and rhythms of trains. The idea of the composition is to create parallels between Reich’s own extensive train journeys during World War Two in the USA and the train journeys Jews in Europe were forced to undertake at the same time.
It is a highly emotional work, performed this evening by one of the most interesting up and coming ensembles: the vision string quartet.
Performers
vision string quartet
Jakob Encke violin
Daniel Stoll violin
Sander Stuart viola
Leonard Disselhorst violoncello
Programme
Steve Reich
Different Trains für Streichquartett und Tonband