In his composition, Reich used several speech excerpts from testimonies by three survivors, all roughly his age, recorded by the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University and the William E. Wiener Oral History Library of the New York Public Library. He added other recorded reminiscences from his governess and from a retired Pullman porter, as well as recorded American and European train sounds of the 1930s and 1940s, prerecorded string passages, and a live string quartet to complete the layers of the work. But rather than fit the oral history recordings into his musical concept, Reich notes, he fit the music to correspond to the pitch and rhythm of selected speech samples. In this way, the speech recordings “generate[d] the musical material for musical instruments.”2 Structurally, Reich divided his piece into three: part I, America—Before the War; part II, Europe—During the War; and part III, After the War. Part I features speech excerpts from Virginia, Reich’s childhood governess, and from Mr. Davis, the retired train porter. They include, for example, excerpts in which Mr. Davis says, “From New York to Los Angeles” and Virginia says, “Different trains every time,” repeatedly. Part II highlights reminiscences from the three Holocaust survivors, Rachella, Rachel, and Paul. For example, we hear Rachella say, “into those cattle wagons, for four days and four nights, and then we went through these strange-sounding names, Polish names, lots of cattle wagons there.” Part III includes excerpts from all five, merging America and Europe and, as its title indicates, erasing the distinction between the two locales.

Musicologist Amy Lynn Wlodarski, in her close and thorough reading of Reich’s piece, complicates Reich’s presentation of his work and our reception of it. Wlodarski recognizes the special technique behind the composer’s “‘speech melodies,’ Reich’s term for a type of musical transcription that attempts to replicate the distinctive rhythm, intonation, and inflection of human speech. . . . By deliberately maintaining the acoustic integrity of the sound clips, Reich respected the semantic meaning of the testimonies and amplified them by using the speech melodies to generate musical motives for the live string quartet.”3 However, Wlodarski’s remarkable, painstaking reconstruction of the source testimonies for Reich’s work uncovers heretofore hidden compositional decisions reflected in editing choices and even two significant transcription errors that affect the meaning of the work. Because these decisions are hidden from the audience’s view, the reception of the work is impacted: “The perception that Reich presents the archival evidence in a straightforward and unsentimental manner facilitates acceptance of the work as documentary rather than dramatic”; this perception is intensified by the minimalist aesthetic of works like Reich’s, which intends to display a kind of “musical objectivity” and “self-referential impulse,” often utilizing repetition to draw focus onto the “musical object at hand.”4 What is ultimately produced, in Wlodarski’s incisive interpretation, is “Reich’s own Holocaust testimony, one crafted from the voices of witnesses other than himself”; the composer’s “techniques of selection, suture, and substitution alienate the distinct accounts from the experiences of the survivors, assembling them as Reich’s own personalized remembrance. His psychological engagement with their traumatic stories is traceable in his editorial decisions, which reveal his involvement as a secondary witness.”5 In some respects, the notion of secondary witness is itself problematic, as it assumes the primacy of so-called primary accounts, often historical or testimonial, which raises the latter to a presumed level of unmediated discourse that rarely, if ever, actually occurs. But the sense of secondariness embodied in the various adoptive, vicarious, and imaginative retellings of the Holocaust still has something to teach about the belatedness of such testimony. For Wlodarski, Reich’s problem is that he “seems unaware that testimony inherently straddles the boundary between the aesthetic and the true and that his framing of primary witness creates a secondary one,”6 and we should certainly bear the risk of such ignorance in mind.

Wlodarski’s nuanced reading of Reich’s piece is instructive for my analysis in at least two ways. First, Reich’s avowed concern for authenticity in incorporating actual audio recordings into his work reflects an underlying interest, discussed in the introduction to this volume, in using authentic Holocaust objects for its representation. Even if, as Wlodarski has shown, Reich’s execution of this objective, to a certain extent, “effectively supplant[s] the survivor’s interpretation of the Holocaust with his own reading of its cultural and literary tropes,”7 the underlying interest in authenticity is not undone. Indeed, even primary witnesses are seen to make aesthetic choices in shaping their own narratives. Second, the close analysis of Reich’s work reveals the extent of his affiliative postmemory driven, in large part, by the iconic power of the Holocaust-era train; in turn, that sense of affiliation may obscure a range of decisions made in secondary witnessing contexts.

Reich therefore does an interesting thing in Different Trains, something I want to use to introduce and frame this chapter. Aside from creating the music itself and its haunting, repetitive cadences, and aside from remarkably transposing the experience of deportation to music, Reich presents the image of the Holocaust-era train as iconic. In creating the music of memory, Reich suggests that the image of the train can be a vehicle for engaging the role of the Holocaust in contemporary culture and identity. He suggests, through his method of composition, that it is the symbol itself (in this case, the train) that determines our interpretive approach to it. In Reich’s imagining, memory coalesces around the symbol, not vice versa.8