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Contents

Music in the Late Twentieth Century

FIRST FRUITS

Chapter:
CHAPTER 10 Millennium's End
Source:
MUSIC IN THE LATE TWENTIETH CENTURY
Author(s):
Richard Taruskin

The sample-based composition best known to audiences at century's end—the first “classic” of the new technology—was Different Trains (1988), a late or “post-minimalist” composition by Steve Reich. It was commissioned by and dedicated to Kronos Quartet, a San Francisco-based ensemble with a self-avowed postmodern repertoire (mixing avant-garde compositions and twentieth-century “classics” with transcriptions of early music, “world music,” jazz, and rock) and over 400 hundred premieres to its credit. In keeping with the group's adventurous spirit, Reich, who had already been planning to use a sampling keyboard for his next composition, wrote a piece that pitted the live quartet against two prerecorded quartet tracks and a track of sampled voices that compared the composer's experience as a child in the early 1940s, shuttling back and forth across the continent between the New York and Los Angeles residences of his divorced parents, and the simultaneous experiences of Jewish children in Europe, who were being transported by train from the ghettos of Eastern Europe to the Nazi extermination camp at Auschwitz.

Citation (MLA):
Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 10 Millennium's End." The Oxford History of Western Music. Oxford University Press. New York, USA. n.d. Web. 12 Nov. 2024. <https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-010013.xml>.
Citation (APA):
Taruskin, R. (n.d.). Chapter 10 Millennium's End. In Oxford University Press, Music in the Late Twentieth Century. New York, USA. Retrieved 12 Nov. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-010013.xml
Citation (Chicago):
Richard Taruskin. "Chapter 10 Millennium's End." In Music in the Late Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press. (New York, USA, n.d.). Retrieved 12 Nov. 2024, from https://www.oxfordwesternmusic.com/view/Volume5/actrade-9780195384857-div1-010013.xml
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