1. 'While This Happened Here, That Happened There': Different Trains, Musical Document, and Musical Reality.
- Author
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Venter, Carina
- Subjects
- *
AMERICAN composers , *DOCUMENTARY films - Abstract
In 1988, Steve Reich completed Different Trains, a piece that draws in part on his own autobiography to commemorate victims of the Holocaust. Reich described Different Trains as pointing towards 'a new kind of documentary music video theatre', while Richard Taruskin laud ed the piece as one of the very few adequate responses to the Holocaust. In the same year that Reich finished Different Trains, a Jewish intellectual, Yehuda Elkana, sounded an urgent cautionary note about the continued memorialisation of the Holocaust. Taking seriously Elkana's concerns, this article is concerned with the sonic aestheticisation and spatialisation of autobiography, memory, and archival testimony within the context of Reich's own claims about the piece. Following an introductory section, it first asks how--creatively and technically--Reich treats traumatic material before addressing the question of how Different Trains articulates its own poietic present in 1988. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]
- Published
- 2021