Saturday Night Randomry

From the Youtube user, boototter:

Metros and trams on Amsterdam Zuid station. Friday-evening early spring, people still coming home, switching platform or already going out.

Music from Different Trains / Steve Reich

Different Trains is hands down my favorite musical piece of all time. Ever.

Some background:

During the war years, Reich made train journeys between New York and Los Angeles to visit his parents, who had separated. Years later, he pondered 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 very different trains.

Steve Reich's earlier work had frequently used tape, looped and played back at different speeds. However Different Trains was a novel experiment, using recorded speech as a source for melodies. This followed Scott Johnson's John Somebody of 1978, an early attempt to construct directed melodic motion by harmonising recorded speech.

In Different Trains, after each melody in the piece is introduced, usually by a single instrument (viola for women and cello for men[1]), a recording of the spoken phrase from which the melody derives is played. The melody is then developed for a while, with the instruments playing along with the recording of the phrase or part of the phrase. The music for the strings makes extensive use of paradiddles rhythms, with alternating pitches instead of alternating drum sticking. In addition to speech, the piece includes recordings of train sounds, as well as of sirens and warning bells.

You can listen to my favorite movement here.