Events & Calendars Steve Reich's "Different Trains", performed by the Erebos Quartet

Amherst College performance instructors Sarah Briggs, violin, and Delores Thayer, viola, are joined by Joseph Jewett, violin, and Rebecca Hartka, 'cello, in Steve Reich's Different Trains (1988) for string quartet and pre-recorded tape. The work explores the parallels between the cross-country train trips Reich (b. 1936) took as a child and the trains transporting Jews to imprisonment and death during World War II. The tape contains the voices of Holocaust survivors and train conductors that become the basis for musical melodies. A serious work, it ends with an extraordinary sense of beauty.

Amherst College professor of music David Schneider introduces the work.

The concert is part of Amherst's year-long Copland colloquium "Art in Place and the Place of Art." “Art in Place / the Place of Art” is a one-year interdisciplinary arts series at Amherst College which explores the myriad relationships that the arts have with place, and how artistic practice helps to shape our senses of place, identity, communities, cultures, institutions, and conversations. It is organized by faculty from the Departments of Art & the History of Art, Music, and Theater & Dance, as well as the Mead Art Museum and the Frost Library. Support has been provided by the Copeland Colloquium, the Amherst Arts Series Fund, and the Dean of the Faculty.