The Horrors of Identification: Reich's "Different Trains" Author(s): Naomi Cumming Reviewed work(s): Source: Perspectives of New Music,

Vol. 35, No. 1 (Winter, 1997), pp. 129-152 Published by: Perspectives of New Music Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/833682 . Accessed: 11/06/2012 00:35
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THE HORRORS
OF IDENTIFICATION:

REICH'S DIFFERENT TRAINS

NAOMI CUMMING

Fifteen hundred persons had been travelling by train for several days and nights: there were eighty people in each coach. All had to lie on top of their luggage, the few remnants of their personal possessions. The carriageswere so full that only the top parts of the windows were free to let in the gray of dawn. Everyone expected the train to head for some munitions factory, in which we would be employed as forced labor. We did not know whether we were still in Silesia or already in Poland. The engine's whistle had an uncanny sound, like a cry for help sent out in commiseration for the unhappy load which it was destined to lead into perdition. Then the train shunted, obviously nearing a main station. Suddenly a cry broke from the ranks of anxious passengers, "There is a sign, Auschwitz!" Everyone's heart missed a beat at that moment. Auschwitz-the very name stood for all that was horrible: gas chambers, crematoriums, massacres. Slowly, almost hesitatingly, the train moved on as if it wanted to spare its passengers the dreadful realization as long as possible: Auschwitz!l

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PART ONE-PLAYING

TRAINS: THE COMPULSION

INTRODUCTION

Listening to the opening of Different Trains there is no mystery to the fact that the repetitive patterns played by the string quartet-recorded over itself four times-are supposed to represent the motion of a train. Not only the title of the work, but the additional cues of railroadcrossing warning bells and the train siren itself alert the listener to this signification. Bracketing these elements for a moment, the repeated patterns gain a signification that is not purely technological, not simply a reference to a train. The experience of obsessive, mechanical motion can involve the listener in such a way as to suggest a more primitive "drive"-an involuntary motion, a compulsive participation in something beyond his or her own control. Involvement with this motion is reinforced by the possibility of an empathetic response to gestural patterns, created in the voices and imitated in the instrumental parts. The timbre of the voices, the emphatic shapes of their enunciations, and the force of repetition all contribute to their emotional signification. Further to this, the narrative content of the vocal parts creates a reference to historical realities which are at first simply nostalgic, but become an unnameable trauma. The first part of this article will seek to elaborate the tensions between the possible positions a listening subject may assume in response to Reich's "train." The analysis is based on listening experience, not on a study of the score (which I have not seen), and in approaching it I assume the relevance of both bodily and affective responses in understanding the content of the work. Modes of musical analysiswhich focus very strongly on attributes of the score may exclude reference to states of bodily motion, as effects of the music on the listener rather than aspects of signification embodied in "the music itself." Such a bifurcation of "the music" from "the listening subject" is, I think, a mistake. For example, the kinds of motion suggested by repetitive patterns are not something that is unambiguously "in the score," able to be explored without reference to kinds of bodily motion, but neither are they intractably "subjective"-determined entirely by the personal characteristics of listeners. Although fear about the accidents of subjectivity may inhibit reference to a listener's possible bodily states, it is largely unfounded, as a basic feel for rhythm is stylisticallyentrained and reflects the kind of response endorsed by a community as appropriate to a style. A reference to the kind of "feel" suggested in a given rhythmic patterning is not therefore to be construed as automatically a reference to some individual's idiosyncratic

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response. It is because this is so that jazz musicians may refer to a beat's "feel" or to the quality of its "groove," in language suggestive of bodily response, while eliding reference to any particular listener. An aspect of music understood primarilythrough a capacity to move to it in an appropriate way is thus shared intersubjectively among members of a community. And insofar as they may share a response to a given rhythmic "feel" it may also be argued that they have some means of access to the emotional connotations of that "feel," as it may be experienced by others. A shared experience of motion does not, however, determine that emotional responses between listeners will be entirely commensurate with one another, and some further theorization is needed before an account can be given of the divergent emotional potentialities embedded in a single rhythmic feel.
PSYCHOANALYTIC SEMIOTICS AND REICH S TRAINS

A psychoanalytic perspective on musical signification is helpful in suggesting how shared signs, such as the "train," can act as the point of contact for strongly divergent affective experiences of repetitive music. This approach, suggested by David Schwarz,2 is admittedly speculative, but not unfounded. In brief, the argument for interpreting the train is as follows: The repetitive rhythmic patterns which form the train-motion are "compulsive" insofar as they seem to stimulate their own continuation. In their compulsiveness they may be linked with the notion of "drive" in Freud's thought-a depersonalized aspect of the self (the Id-or It), giving expression to primitive impulses preceding the differentiation of the "I" (ego). Rhythmic interchange may be seen as an important aspect of relationship between the self ("Subject") and primary Other, at an early developmental phase.3 To the extent that a "driving" quality is heard in the rhythm, and engaged with by a listener, it may evoke not only a sense of psychologically primitive "compulsiveness," linked with the drives of this phase, but also a secondary level of reaction to it. Conflicting responses to a regressive state, once evoked, are entirely predictable. An experience of sympathetic engagement with the rhythms of the music as Other, such that it makes regression possible, can bring a passive pleasure. The same passivity may, however, become an unwelcome threat to the autonomy of a self if it is felt as something imposed involuntarily, a forced regression dislocating any sense of self-possession and control. In listening, this uncomfortable kind of response may occur when the listening Subject has little sense of freedom to disengage because his or her agency is compromised by the felt compulsion of a given motoric beat.

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An aversive reaction by some listeners even to the opening of Reich's work suggests an antipathy towards depersonalizing compulsion, irrespective of the fact that other elements of the music give cues for nostalgia instead. The work's power depends largely on its capacity to harness both this aversive connotation and its pleasurable counterpart. A "train" is particularlysuited to suggesting a "drive" (Zug), engendering a passivity that can be pleasant or personally destabilizing. This psychoanalytic account of compulsiveness in rhythm allows for varied affective connotation, independent of linkage between rhythm and other elements of the work. It is nonetheless undeniable that Reich's choices of textual fragments give strong cues about the appropriateness of comforting nostalgia or horror in different movements. The nonthreatening potentiality of repetitive rhythms is suggested when it is linked with a benign image: riding on a steam train at some past time. Nostalgia for a lost past plays a large part in reinforcing passivity and regression in time (like a pleasure trip on a renovated steam train). In the case of Reich's trains, such nostalgia can be engaged with imaginatively, whether thirties trains have been experienced by a listener in reality or not. Linked with the more sinister image of an involuntary ride, the "drive" of the train becomes more clearly a force that is threatening in its impersonality, beyond the control of those subjected to it. Where the subjects of the ride are multiple, their texts interleaved, depersonalization in a unifying rhythm is even more marked, and disturbing. Reich's own understanding of the connotative dimension of repetitiveness is not explicitly psychoanalytic, but his comments on it have some interesting links to the notion of a depersonalizing drive. In "Music as a Gradual Process" (1968), Reich emphasizes the suppression of individual mores in the creation of repetitive music, describing the repetition as capable of distracting attention from the individual, to an impersonal process which takes hold of him or her. "Focusing in on the musical process" will, he says, make possible "that shift of attention away from he and she and you and me outwards towards it."4 The depersonalization suggested here is a positive self-transcending value, not a negatively viewed loss of differentiation between self and other, but a means of decentering, recognizing that "self-expression" is not an unassailable aesthetic goal. A move from "human expressive activity" to a state of greater impersonality was, as an historical move in style for Reich, an antidote to Western subjectivism, inspired by meditative practices which could be associated with African music or the Balinese gamelan.5 The motoric rhythms of machines were able to serve him as a tool for developing this alternative aesthetic, where the depersonalizing tendency of repetitive motion, even if externally imposed, could be somehow harnessed to a "higher" goal.

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During an interview in 1971, Reich expressed an explicit interest in the activity of "people imitating machines" not as "a sickly trip" but as something which could be "psychologically very useful, and even pleasurable." A strange kind of marriage might be found in these remarks, between the mechanization of movement and the pleasures of a loosely defined spirituality, based on self-development through self-loss. Its tensions become even more tantalizing when it is remembered that the involuntary movements of a factory laborer were observed by Marx as a source of "alienation," far from a form of self-enhancement in their suppression of individual freedom. If these kinds of movements are psychologically linked also with aspects of regressiveness, their multivalent connotation becomes quite clear. In Different Trains Reich is to draw out these ambivalent associations, linking repetitive motions with fragments of historical narrative.The very acts of depersonalization that, in some circumstances, bring a necessary distraction from unhealthy Western obsessions with selfhood can, in other circumstances, bring a violent deprivation of identity from those held in the grip of some "it" as an external force. The "It" of the train ride must inevitably hold a multiply ambiguous role. Although, in Freudian theory "it" is a force within the self, driving involuntary behaviors, it may also appear as a force "outside" the self-a compelling "necessity." Whether "moved" and "carried along" with regressive ease, or "driven" in distress, the self must negotiate an entity less than perfectly integrated and controlled. Projected onto an historical plane, this "it," engendering passivity, takes on an unavoidably ethical tone. So-called "forces" of history appear as movements beyond historically responsible selves-movements driving actions which lead dispossessed groups into a horrible and involuntary passivity. Reich's different trains, moving inexorably, manage to convey this scale of force. But then their connotation is not overwhelmed with the destructiveness of war. "It"-the train's motion-is also that continuity which is regained in the movement that succeeds destruction, as the trains of the New World again are heard. One way in which the psychological tensions of responding to repetitive patterning can be further explored is through the psychoanalytic theories of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva, which bring Freud's thought about early development into dialogue with semiotic notions derived from Ferdinand Saussure and Charles Peirce, among others. The move towards psychoanalytic thought in dealing with repetitive processes has been suggested by Schwarz,6 whose account of the French psychoanalytic literature is mediated by Kaja Silverman's book The Acoustic Mirror.7 His applications are more orientated towards Kristeva than

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towards Lacan, but really to understand the point of Kristeva'scontributions it is necessary to place them in relation to those of Lacan, and these will be reviewed briefly below. Further potentialities for interpreting objects in culture through Lacan's thought have also been explored by the Slovenian philosopher, Slavoj Zizek, who has drawn extensively on examples from film, and his work also will be cited later as a means of interpreting the "train." The relevance of Lacanian theory is found in its capacity, developed from Freud, to elaborate the kinds of relationship that may form between an interpreting subject and an "other," an interpreted thing, in a way that suggests different kinds of emotional investment in the relationship. The most general questions to ask of Lacan's discourse are "how does an account of 'object-relations'-the formation of a subject in relation to the mother, and to things in the world-serve as a possible model for the relationship of a listening subject to aspects of a musical work?" "How are Lacan's different developmental stages represented in listening attitudes?" Consider three possible attitudes: Listener A takes a position of participatory involvement with repetitive processes, which he experiences as comforting or horrible by turns. He is immersed in the rhythm, allowing it to create subliminal movements in the body, and to have an impact on his emotional states. Listener B finds herself more engaged with the shaping of motives derived from the vocal incipits. She recognizes the vocal shapes as ones she herself could conceivably utter, and identifies with what she imagines to be the affective states conveyed, even to the point of making scarcely visible movements mimicking the "gestural" motion she hears in the musical fragments. Listener C assumes a more objectifying stance, recognizing the "train" as a represented item. She is not immersed in the rhythmic motion, nor identified with imagined affective states, but more concerned with categorizing the sounds, as representing definite objects, or as ordered in a manner reminiscent of some minimalist works she knows. In his "immersion" in rhythmic pulsations, listener A could be said to enter a state in which psychologically primitive drives are felt, but not explicitly recognized and objectified. Listener B, in her imaginary identification with the gestural movements of the voices she hears has recognized something of herself in an other, without being concerned that an illusion is implied in this "recognition." The imaginary mode allows her to assume an experience that is beyond her in reality. Listener C, in her self-distancing sophistication, does not "lose herself" in the work, but remains aware of the manner in which it attempts to achieve its representation. If these three listeners were aligned with the attitudes most typical of Lacan's three developmental stages, they could

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be said to illustrate modes of the "real," the "imaginary" and the "symbolic." They are not, of course, states that need necessarily be isolated in an individual listener, but possible attitudes that could be taken up by the same listener at different times. Only the "real" requires further comment. Lacan's theory suggests that, from the point of view of the subject existing within language, what precedes the "symbolic" stage is unknowable and unrepresentable. Once entered, the symbolic stage cannot effectively be escaped, and vestiges of earlier stages can make an appearance only by using the vocabulary of some articulate "symbolic" scheme (such as language), not in a standard way, but as a form of intrusion betraying unspoken desires.8 The "real"is that which is outside linguistic representation, or "meaning." Kristeva's Lacanian reflections open up a space within the "real"which allows more explicitly for nonlinguistic modes of signification. Her emphasis is on bodily motions or "drives" as the main items of consciousness for the (not yet formed) self, and her mode of expression often includes reference to musical rhythm (vaguely defined) as a means for these drives to be signified. Her term for the stage of development at which these rhythms are dominant is the "chora."9 Musical rhythms, when they are systematically and self-consciously ordered, are part of a "symbolic" domain, but it is Kristeva's hypothesis they retain the capacity to evoke aspects of a prearticulate state, a stage of envelopment in the mother's movements and sounds.

THE REPETITIVE PATTERNS OF DIFFERENT TRAINS AS INDUCING A REGRESSIVE STATE

In Different Trains a vestige of the presymbolic is experienced through the convention of repeated figuration. Schwarz argues that in this work "Reich establishes the illusion of the sonorous envelope through a texture that suggests both an internal, oceanic immersion in repetitive fragments of sound, and an obsessive, external, and iconic representation of trains" (40). The rhythmic aspect of the ostinato has already been discussed, as promoting a form of engagement which is directly embodied, a form of kinaesthetic motion. Translated into Kristevan terms, this is a manifestation of the "chora," through a state of immersion in sound (the "sonorous envelope"). Of musical processes the ostinato is one of the least amenable to being represented as a complete "unit," a musical "object." Although the basic units of repetition may readily be identified, higher levels of structure are not formed into a hierarchicpattern, leading to a distinct point of closure (as in the rhythms of many tonal phrases),

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except insofar as changes in tempo are heard as segmentations. The ostinato can, therefore, be labelled as a "process," but not set apart as a distinct object, over against the self. Described in spatial terms, it is a continuity "below," "above," or "around" the listener (depending on which pitch level is being attended to in the many-levelled quartet), not something which it is possible to "enclose" in a summarizing phrase, or from which it is possible to gain a controlling distance. It is more something that encloses the listener. The idea of the train as incorporating (or mirroring) a bodily motion allows some further exploration of what it is like to be situated "inside" a movement. The wide range over which the ostinato spans brings the opening up of a musical space, first with the higher registers, then the middle and lower ones. An interpretive move of identification with movement, and yet awareness of the train, can be filled out by situating oneself as a listener "within" the registralspace. (An analog in real experiences of being on a train would be an awareness of motion, reinforced by looking at telegraph posts shooting past "above," and feeling a regulated movement "below" oneself.) Opening up this possible positioning of the listener is useful, because it suggests a direction for explaining widely divergent emotional responses to the experience of the ostinato-even at the beginning of the work before verbal cues introduce an element of horror. Given that developmentally "presymbolic" states cannot be known directly, but only from the point of view of one who already inhabits a symbolically differentiated world, the possibility of experiencing a state prior to linguistic competence, prior to the differentiation of "self" from "other," may be greeted with very ambivalent feelings. Whether the response is one of enjoyment or hostility depends on how the subject views an apparent loss of the differentiated self. Silverman shows that when such a state is simulated in film, it can bring not only a fantasy of "infantile plenitude and bliss," as evident in the remarks of certain critics on the films she discusses, but also a quite opposed "vision of complete engulfment, and the panic which that vision generates." In Trains the emotion evoked by immersion-if it occurs-could be decisive for the listener in determining his or her choice of a subjectpositioning in relation to the work (insofar as s/he is free to choose). Some cues for the response are offered by the text and its accompanying sound images. The first movement seems to ask for a comforting regression into the nostalgia for an earlier time-historically and perhaps developmentally. The second movement, with its holocaust tales, makes the horror of lost identity almost unspeakable, as it is imposed on those in that train. There are some respects in which this particular "groove," in its motoric character, violates the rhythms of bodily impulse. For a listener

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who experiences the motion as violating, it can be externalized as a "drive," a depersonalized "it." To speculate on Lacanian lines, the rhythmic repetition feels like an "it" because it is an intrusion of something that cannot be fully signified or controlled, but takes on a life of its own.
iIIEK'S CULTURAL INTERPRETATION OF THE LACANIAN REAL

Lacan's treatment of the "real," as something which intrudes from outside signification, captures this point particularlywell, because it suggests in one term a prearticulate state, and a response to an externalized "real." As the symbolic stage cannot be escaped, once entered, the "real" or "presymbolic" is "unknowable" outside of the conventions of representation. Zizek analyzes how this element might appear within the media of symbolization by looking at the appearance of irresistible, mechanical "drives." They are to be distinguished from "desires" which have some definite end (and are expressive of an Oedipal moment, hence of symbolization in the Lacanian view), because they continue despite desire. Like Arnold Schwarzeneger's Terminator, a drive cannot be stopped. It is "precisely a demand that is not caught up in the dialectic of desire, that resists dialecticization."1' While ordinary demands permit reflective consideration, the "drive, on the contrary, persists in a certain demand, it is a 'mechanical' insistence that cannot be caught up in dialectical trickery:I demand something and I persist in it to the end."" The mechanization of movement in Different Trains is able both to elicit a response of empathetic bodily motion, and a resistance born of the feeling of being driven. The linking of this drive with an external thing-a train-itself has a purpose, in giving a symbolic identity to something that would otherwise be unrepresented. The train gives an overt, objective appearanceto the "real" drive, which cannot gain signification without taking on a cultural form. Zizek makes a useful reference to an image, used by Lacan in explaining the process by which something unnameable takes on a visible appearance. He describes the drive as realized through a "mask," which may be interacted with as if it were a part of objective reality.12The train serves just this masking purpose. The paradoxical effect of this masking, is that the "real"-that inaccessible kernel of unsignifiable compulsion-is found staring the audience in the face, in its mask, its object, its "train." This aspect of masking allows for some mobility in subject positioning for the listener, who may chose to focus on bodily motion or its externalized representation. If the train is a mask for a drive that can only be recognized through involvement in the "groove," its externalization as an object cannot, however, be complete.

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The trains of Different Trains are not "merely" a mask for psychological drives, because their historical identity as vehicles of mass transport is ensured by the external cues of the hoots, sirens, and warning bells. Without this external reference, the importance of linking internal, psychological states, experienced as present, with remembered events in the recent past would be lost. By linking drives with an identifiable object in the world, an opportunity is afforded to "symbolize," and to separate from them. This move need not be merely a neurotic denial of a repressed "drive," a denial of having been motorically involved, although it may be used in this way. In listening there is room for multiple positionings, or slippage between these states. (In the first movement, an engagement with the motoric rhythm can alternate with the recognition of "a steam train" as a nostalgic object. In the second movement, recourse to objectification could well be more attractive, as the implications of involvement become more distressing.) Applying Leonard Meyer's idea, that a "tendency" to move in a certain direction enters consciousness only when it is in some way deflected, it could be predicted that moments of adjustment in subject positioning would occur when there is a change in tempo, drawing attention to the ostinato and the momentum it is creating. These points may be heard as a partial segmentation, or interruption of continuity. Such changes would, on Meyer's account, bring an unreflective momentum into attention, leading to a questioning of its meaning.13 At moments when the train becomes a focus, it could be hypothesized that there is a partial splitting off from bodily momentum, as motion becomes symbolized as belonging to something "other." This other is both a mask for a drive, and a real train. It is, however, questionable that the objectification of the "train" is ever so complete that involvement in its momentum is completely suspended. There may be a repeated "splitting" off from the state of identification every time the speed of the train changes, but it need not be complete. In the terms of description developed by Schwarz on a Kristevan model, a partial distancing provisionally "forms the listening subject," through a naming of the train as other, and yet its motion can still be felt as an activity of the self, like a form of motility that is externalized but not fully controlled. If such interpretive moves are made during listening, a mobilized relationship with the ostinato is attained, one where it can at times assume the opacity of a signified "train," while at other times remaining a subliminal effect of passive bodily motion (for example, the sensation of being moved or "transported" as a response to motoric rhythm).14 To these might be added a recollection or imagining of steam trains from the 1930s, fully externalizing and socializing what is perceived.

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TRAINS AS OBJECTS OF NOSTALGIA

A more socially defined listening position, one which locates the trains as specific historical entities, is suggested by the sounds of recorded voices and various train sounds. Robert Harrington, the first violinist in the recorded performance, draws attention to the cultural suggestiveness of the image of a train: For me, there are multiple levels to this piece. I remember hearing the opening of the piece and thinking how universal the image of trains has become, at least in the United States; a lot of kids, for example, find a train under the Christmas tree at some point. Reich tapped into something fascinating.15 Interestingly, the first "voice" to enter above the string quartet is the train's hoot, sounded "straight," as recorded, then altered to produce an ascending motion through a third which has all the gestural characteristics of a Romantic yearning. When the voices enter, the sole focus of their attention is on trains: "from Chicago to New York, from Chicago" . . . "one of the fastest trains, fastest trains." The train gets to be a "subject" that is very close to being endowed with its own animate characteristics, through its emotionalized hoot, and the affectionate attention given it by the voices only reinforces that effect. The manner in which the relationship between different levels of signification is presented within this piece (in the treatment of the ostinato as an embodied drive masked by a mechanical object, a train) may be taken to have further social implications. If a likeness is noticed between the relationship of performers and listeners to the ostinato of Different Trains, and the relationship of real individuals to historical train journeys, it can only be found disturbing. The entrainment of performers' and listeners' bodies to a mechanized, incessant rhythm, varying only in tempo, allows the impersonality of a drive to be experienced within the culturally sanctioned context of a "driven" train. The drive is masked behind the illusion of control, but in its impersonality, it in fact has no control. Repetition of the Pullman driver'svoice deprives the train of any final destination. "It" is the subject, not any individual speaker, and "it" has no goal. In the first movement the driving train is remembered (and announced) nostalgically, in longing for a past experience of pleasurable passive states, but the very entrainment to its rhythm which is so seductive here becomes, in the second movement, the condition for a horror ride, in Lacanian terms, a traumatic "return of the real."

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Steve Feld (to Charles Keil): You have a rap in here about participation which involves a certain idealization of participation as the nonalienating, positive, antifascist, antidominating aspect of music.... Charles Keil: ... except that it is fascist.... Participation is fascism. It becomes the bundle, all the rods united for greater strength, with the sum of the parts being greater than the individuals. When it's done nation-state style, it is a horror. That is what the Holocaust was about, and every genocidal nationalism is about this false participation, if you will, in which the nation-state turns solidarity into a state apparatus. So yes, you are playing with fire when talking about participation. My notion is that we have got to make the world safe for small-scale, decentralized, diversified participations, so that the big participation of uniforms, tanks, and kicking ass on alien peoples never happens.... 16

PARTTwo: TRAUMATIZED VOICES

VOICE AS GRAIN AND GESTURE

Timbre-the materiality of voice. If a listener to the first movement has adopted the interpretive strategy of participating in the driving movement of the train, aware also of its identity, his or her participation in the second movement can only take on a traumatic tone, as a form of entrapment in the drive towards death of a victimized people. In order fully to understand this content, a knowledge of the textual plot is, of course, helpful. But even more important than their textual reference is the gestural inflection given to the vocal enunciations, because it is from them that the emotive content of the narrative is derived. Harrington comments as follows on his response to one of the work's voices: And, of course, the train sounds, sirens, whistles, bells, and the beautiful quality of the voices, specificallythat of the Pullman porter. I grew up just at the end of an era when there were still Pullman porters on trains, and I remember hearing voices like that. It was so resonant and beautiful . . . particularlywhen he says, "1939," right at the end of the movement. It's so ominous right there-the quality is amazing.17 His intuitive response to the Pullman porter's voice is a response to its sound, not to the content of its messages. It is the grain of the voice,18

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and its shaping, that elicits an empathetic response. The emptiness of the announcements only goes to reinforce this aural focus in the first movement, the snippets of speech having been chosen by Reich specifically for their sonorous or "musical" quality. Reich's pleasure in the pure sound of the American voice comes out in an interview he gave in February 1986 (two years before composition of Different Trains): If you can't take American speech and set it because in the act of setting it you will freeze it or kill it, the way you set an insect in amber and therefore kill its movements, then better to find the real sound, American speech, and present it as such. The pieces "It's Gonna Rain" and "Come Out" were an instance of finding something that existed, and by repetition you intensify what is naturally there, the is really there rhythm that is there, the speech melody-tune-that ... intensifying it so that you begin to hear the melody almost to the exclusion of the meaning of the words.19 Gesture as expressiveshaping. A further aspect of vocal signification is given by the marked shaping of the contours in the vocal excerpts chosen by Reich. In a Lacanian view, states of complete identification between a subject and "other," without any perception of the "self" as distinct, can only be imagined as existing prior to the development of any mimicking behavior at all. Mirroring responses to gesture imply an empathetic identification, and yet a (preliminary) recognition of difference between the self and other. This sense of "mirroring" differs from that explored by Schwarz, who was concerned primarily with the recognition of familiar stylistic patterns as a stimulus to self-consciousness in the listener. It is a kind of mirroring that may bring a listener into the narrativeby allowing identification with its emotional states, without implying a complete loss of self-awareness. Although states of imaginary identification hold a somewhat derogatory sense for Lacan, their being adopted as part of a response to a musical work need not be rejected as ethically or developmentally suspect. It is by accepting the possibility of identifying in various ways with the charactersof this work that its full impact can be realized. The voices in Different Trains work on three levels of signification: timbral materiality is heard in the "live" recordings; gestural shaping is enhanced by repetition and instrumental imitations; symbolically articulate words enunciate a fragmentary narrative. Possibilities for engagement are, then, multiple. The material qualities of the voice may, in Silverman's terms, provide a "window" into an early developmental state,

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suggesting an immediacy in the speaker'spresence and a feeling of identification. Reich's use of recorded voices heightens this effect. It is possible to hear them as speaking directly, their emotional content "immediate," promoting a response of empathy. With the repetition of the vocal gestures, their referential content is further suppressed, but their gestural shaping is given a heightened emphasis. A responsiveness to timbral qualities in the voice is reinforced by an awareness of gesture, bringing the possibility of "mirroring" behavior. An awareness of the imitative instrumental parts, superimposing the shapes of vocal gesture onto the momentum-producing ostinato patterns, brings together this dimension of expressiveness with a quasi-motoric entrainment to the rhythmic groove. For a listener engaged with the ostinato motion, and empathetic to the shape and timbre of vocal gesture, a state of identification is strongly implied as a subject position. A switching between voices in the use of a verbal narrative does nevertheless present many possibilities for assuming a degree of distance: identifying points of difference between the voices heard, or contextualizing events historically.The "symbolic" is not completely annulled, but there is room for a fluid movement in and out of its domain.

NARRATIVE

A fine discrimination between the emotions conveyed in the vocal gestures can be achieved by considering their timbre, contour, tempo and its changes, as well as modes of attack (degrees of staccato). The speed of delivery and patterns of acceleration are particularlyimportant, because in their instrumental imitation, they have an impact on the perceived tempo of the "train." (The ostinato patterns speed up or slow down to accommodate changes in gestural enunciation.) The narrativecontent of the second movement is contained in the following text: Rachella 1940 "on my birthday" "The Germans walked in" "walked into Holland" Paul "Germans invaded Hungary" "I was in Second Grade" "I had a teacher"

(1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) (7)

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(8) (9) (10) (11) (12) (13) (14) (15) (16) (17) (18) (19) (20) (21) (22) (23)

"A very tall man, his hair was concretely plastered smooth" "He said, 'Black Crows invaded our country many years ago'" "and he pointed right at me" Rachel "No more school" "You must go away" Rachella "And she said, 'Quick, go!"' "and he said, 'Don't breathe!"' "Into those cattle wagons" "for 4 days and 4 nights" "and then we went through these strange sounding names" "Polish names" "Lots of cattle wagons there" "They were loaded with people" "They shaved us" "They tatooed a number on our arm" "Flames going up to the sky-it was smoking."20

In what follows, I will give a description of how this movement unfolds, trying to capture how the various aspects of signification are combined, in order to convey a trauma in which listeners may be involved. This is not a "technical" description, but one based on my own repeated experiences of listening to the work. It should be noted, initially, that many listeners find it necessary to have a copy of the words to follow, in order to make them out at all. A child's terror in an adult voice. Paul, Rachel, and Rachella's memories have the ring of a child's-eye view, with a vivid sense of detail. It is with these memories that Reich is able to communicate the horror of the holocaust, recreated in surprisingly spare descriptions. The horror is there in the fear of children's voices, sounding through the voices of middle-aged people (probably in their sixties).21 The child becomes present in the adult's tone, as if moments in memory were fixed, inexorable, unintegrated in the psyche. Rachella remembers her birthday in 1940 with a tone of abject disappointment, an invasion of this day a personal violation. One small child's disappointment focuses the violation of a country. The invaders gate-crashed her Birthday-and Holland. As she repeatedly announces "1940," her flat tone is given a greater emotional articulation by the descending minor second in the viola part, a gesture which has all of the pathetic connotations acquired by that interval in

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tonal works. The sirens begin to sound, rising to a peak which they hold for some time before descending slowly, harmonically coordinated with the quartet "train."As Rachella thinks of her birthday, the enunciation of her words is slow and, as if in response, the tempo of the ostinato is slowed. An additional "heaviness" is given the moment by its slackened momentum, as if it is difficult for her to move forward against the weight of the memory. The heaviness is reinforced by the descending contour of the melodic gesture, again giving a more pronounced shape to the dejected fall in her voice. Like Rachella, Paul is fixed on a point in the past, a moment in the second-grade class of his school in Hungary, where the Germans' invasion was focussed on him by a teacher, as if his existence in the class could symbolize his people and justify a movement against them. A new urgency is injected into the music with the regaining of a faster tempo, at the point when Paul recalls that the "Germans invaded Hungary." In the snippets that tell his story, it is as if he stands there again, such is the directness of the imagery and "immediacy" of the tone of voice. He can see his teacher, very tall, his hair "concretely plastered smooth." His voice lowers as he intimates the personal secrets of the man's appearance, and the tempo is slowed as the image lingers, as if it were decelerated like a movie picture played in slow motion at a point of crisis. The imitating cello gives articulation to the undulating contours of Paul's voice, and as it does so, the variation in pitch stands out to give the fragment a pathetic beauty, quite apart from the denotation of the associated words. (It first undulates around a major second, then rises a fourth when commenting on the hair.) As Paul remembers the tone of his teacher's voice, his own voice changes. He captures the moment of agitated accusation, exaggerating the teacher's words in just the way that a child might caricature an unbelievable adult's pronouncements. "He said 'black crows' . . ." and the cello imitates, "black crows, black crows," giving sinister inflection to the image with a jagged figure comprised of rising fourth and descending major third. The withdrawn shock and indignation of the child, as "he pointed right at me!" can be heard in his lowered tone, clarifiedmusically as an accelerated, descending line, diminishing in volume. It is worth pausing for a moment on the import of the words. In the teacher's imagery of a supposed earlier "invasion," the child has been made a "black crow," a representativeof his race, a symbol for felt violation by the dominant group, the focus of hatred. Paul's powerlessness, cowed before the teacher, reflectively connotes the powerlessness of his race facing irrational hostility. The hateful voice of dominance is made more stark by being pitted against the speaker, his childhood fear alive in memory, a powerful indictment of abuse.

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Textual repetition as signifier. Repetition itself can become a signifier in this music. Repetition of the teacher's words, and the comment "he pointed right at me!" serves to underscore the confrontation of Paul with his teacher. It also allows space for different interpretive strategies to be assumed by the listener, bringing out a variety of possible affective dimensions in the words. The time of the event, the time of memory, and the time of narration each bring a different perspective. A repetitive dwelling on the teacher's gesture can be heard to intimate Paul's state of disbelief or bewilderment at the moment of accusation, as if he were stalling in order to formulate a response to a gesture of unknown meaning. The actual voice becomes silent as the cello rehearses his vocal gesture, and sirens sound, suggesting an ominous significance in this pause to reflect. Thinking back to the teacher's words opens up another sense to earlier repetitions. Repeating words can evoke a child's way of dealing with an adult's statements, when they are senseless to the child. Lacking denotative meaning for the child, the words "black crows . . . black crows" (an adult's "name-calling") have been savored and repeated for their sinister sound, their detachment from symbolic sense making their sonorous value something to be directly entertained. The repetition of a musical gesture associated with the act of pointing can be heard, finally, as a narrative intervention by the adult telling the story, expressing an adult's indignation at injustice, the words repeated in reflection on the enormity of the teacher's accusation, and its impact on him as a child. These temporal dimensions are joined in a single moment of reporting, without any loss of coherence. Together, they suggest an image so potent that it extends over the time of memory, as an obsessive thought. What was for the child a senseless image, not integrated as a symbol of nationalistic prejudice, sticks in his memory like a stuck record, unresolved, fixing the child's bewilderment unchanged until the moment when it can be retold. The child speaks in the adult's voice, and both are heard. Compulsion and bewilderment-reaching the destination. The splicing in of Rachel's voice at this moment creates the impression of a continuing narrative. "No more school?" The rising contour is questioning, and as she recalls "you must go away," her voice is peculiarly vulnerable in its higher-pitched, whispering quality, so soft that it is scarcely distinct. A slower tempo again has a heart-stopping quality, reinforced by the prominent but slow sirens. This is the pause before an accelerated motion towards the crisis point. Rachella re-enters, with her recollection, "And she said 'quick go!"' The remembered exhortation is made urgently emphatic by a rising tritone and falling second, its hushed tone contributing an element of secrecy, as if a sympathetic person were urging the child

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to evade detection. An acceleration in the ostinato increases the sense of an involuntary momentum, giving greater urgency to the further warning, "he said 'don't breathe!"' The contour (falling minor second and rising minor third) is again rehearsed, giving breathless emphasis. A gap in the narrative, only to be filled in by the listener, has the child unprotected by these warnings. The sound of the child's breath might threaten her life, but holding it did not protect her from the command to get "into those cattle wagons." A dramatic immediacy is found in her traumatized account of a ride on the cattle train, uncomprehending, crowded in, shorn, tatooed, confronted by the smoke of death. As this ride begins, the density of sounds creating the train's momentum increases. A strident train noise, very different from the noises of American trains, sounds out as a warning. Its complex mixture of high-pitched noises are at first very forceful and train-like, but as they are progressively raised in pitch with subsequent entries, these real sounds can gain the signification of a voice, or voices. Unlike the nostalgic identity of the American train, their dissonance creates a strident effect. Rachella's memory impresses her with the length of the journey, "for four days and four nights," under this dissonant sound, with continuing acceleration. Her jerkily enunciated memory of the length of time yields to even greater agitation in the report that "we went through these strange-sounding names." A pitched emphasis on "strange" communicates the child's bewilderment, but an adult's resigned shock is more apparent in the clarificationthat they were "Polish names," with disjointed, suddenly descending interval-fixed instrumentally as a descending major sixth. For a moment there is an ingenuous factuality in the statement that there were "lots of cattle wagons there," as the child again seems to speak, but by superimposing on her voice some very high-pitched sirens, the possibility is created for hearing in the "real" sounds an anthropomorphic fear, the terrified screaming of many voices in the background to this event. As Rachella sees that the cattle trains were "loaded with people," her amazement is unrepressed; a strongly marked emphasis is given her first word ("loaded") by an unprecedented rise in pitch (ascending sixth). Her loss seems understated in the cry, "they shaved us," repeatedly reinforced with the archetypallypathetic figure of a semitonal neighbor-note. It is a loss that is to be heightened by the denial of a name: "They tattooed a number on our arm." Her descending voice is encapsulated in a deathassociated tritone. "Flames going up to the sky-it was smoking, it was smoking." It is at this point that death enters the music in a way that cannot be avoided by a listener whose interpretive strategy has been to accept an entrainment of his or her own sense of bodily motion to the ostinato's momentum.

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The train stops. The momentum that has formed a primary mode of participatory engagement stops. Up until this point there have been only divergences in tempo, drawing attention to the "train" by frustrating its inertia. Now the momentum of bodily "life" is brought to a halt. All that is left is the abject voice, obsessed with the image of flames, and the sounds of hoots and sirens, slow and strangely empty without the motion of the train. This retreat into silence is one of the most disturbing points in the piece. The receding siren and the silence evoke something ominous. In them is a death that not only confronts Rachella, whose voice brings a reenactment of that moment of fear, but a death confronting listeners who are engaged with the work, in active participation. To live this moment is to confront something that cannot fully be symbolized. Only the trace of smoke has been left in memory as an index to the silence.
INTERPRETING THE SILENCE

In coming to grips with the musical silence of death, it is helpful to revisit Zizek's interpretation of the Lacanian "real," and Kristeva'sinterpretation of the "chora." Silence is a refusal of symbolization, its annulment. It is an acknowledgment of a gap in what can be represented. The Lacanian real is that which stands outside the possibility of signification. To acknowledge the Real is fully to give credence to the gap between our powers of symbolization and an intuited "reality"external to them.22 In Zizek's terms, it is to acknowledge "the frailty of the symbolic edifice." If the moment of silence marks a place in the music for an unsignifiable death, it is only made effective in marking this place because it comes as the fulfillment of an accelerating "drive" of the train. That drive itself has been identified as an aspect of the Lacanian "real," something incapable of direct signification, which emerges through the "mask"of the train. In Kristeva'selaboration, it has been linked also with bodily drives, existing at an early developmental stage, prior to any occurrence of mirroring behavior, or to the emergence of a capacity for symbolizing the m/other as distinct from the self. The link between the impersonality of the Lacanian drive and the embodiment of the Kristevan"chora" may not be immediately obvious, but it is found in the threat to individualized identity which occurs in surrendering to an impulse which lacks full "symbolization." As Silverman points out, the early developmental stage described by Kristeva is conceived as a "myth of origins" by someone alreadyexisting in a symbolic world. Re-entering this mythic space carries with it the traumatic suggestion of self-annihilation, and any desire to do so may, then, be termed a death-wish. Any sense of threat that a listener

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might feel when participating in the ostinato "groove" comes from the entrainment of bodily impulse to a mechanized drive, which seems to take on a life of its own, and to propel the body forward towards an annihilating end. This horror fantasy is realized. In Zizek's view, failures in the symbolization of major human crises are a failure to "bury the dead." Attempts at representing the unrepresentable are part of the process of reintegrating "unspeakable" (unsymbolized) horrors into cultural memory. The "return of the living dead" is . . . the reverse of the proper funeral rite. While the latter implies a certain reconciliation, an acceptance of loss, the return of the dead signifies that they cannot find their proper place in the text of tradition. The two great traumatic events of the holocaust and the gulag are, of course, exemplary cases of the return of the dead in the twentieth century. The shadows of their victims will continue to chase us as living dead until we give them a decent burial, until we integrate the trauma of their death into our historical memory.23 Not all listeners experience this movement as effective in giving expression to an unspeakable horror. Keith Potter, for example, reviewing the London premiere of Different Trains, evaluated it as "evocative, perhaps, but also peculiarly naive."24In my hearing of the work, it does achieve its dramatic goal, precisely in its ability to evoke that which is "outside signification" in a Lacanian sense. The drive of the train, offering a potentiality for engagement with its motion, and its final cessation in silence, together bring a possibility of confrontation with personal and historical drives whose lack of recognition can be deadly.
RECONSTRUCTION

The last section of the work is no glib resolution to trauma, but an invitation to listeners to locate their own position in relation to the work. When Paul declares emphatically that "the war was over" Rachella's spliced-in question "Are you sure?" makes the uncertainty of resolution palpably present, as if the question were addressed to the listener. She is now in the United States, an emigree. The ostinato takes some time to be reconstituted, its uncertain beginnings reinforcing the uncertainty of a regained life momentum. The end nears, and the dialogue takes an even more sinister turn. Rachella's recollections are of singing in the camps:

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There was one girl, who had a beautiful voice and they loved to listen to the singing, the Germans and when she stopped singing they said "More, more" and they applauded. "And they applauded," and it is time for a listener to a live performance to applaud. Those listening to the CD have more choice. If I resume a position "outside" the work, bringing to an end my engagement with its rhythmic propulsion, and empathetic mirroring of gestural affect, I place myself in the position of any audience. In that moment I am identified despite myself with an historical audience callously enjoying the beauty of a voice without engagement in the singer's plight. But will distance allow me to escape? In failing to applaud do I refuse to acknowledge the historical complicity of many people in acts of genocide? It is now that work begins, in integrating the work's traumas in the psyche.25

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NOTES

1. Viktor E. Frankl, Man's Searchfor Meaning, trans. Ilse Lasch (New York:Simon & Schuster Pocket Books, 1963), 12-13. 2. David Schwarz, "Listening Subjects: Semiotics, Psychoanalysis, and the Music of John Adams and Steve Reich," Perspectivesof New Music 31, no. 2 (Summer 1993): 24-56. 3. See comments on Julia Kristeva, below. 4. Steve Reich, "Music as a Gradual Process" (1968) in Writings about Music (New York: New York University Press, 1974), 11. While it cannot be assumed that the priorities expressed by Reich in his comments on earlier compositions are maintained by him in Different Trains, they do provide a point of departure for exploring this work. 5. Steve Reich, "An interview with Michael Nyman," Musical Times 112 (March 1971): 230. 6. David Schwarz, "Listening Subjects." 7. Kaja Silverman, The Acoustic Mirror: Theoriesof Representation and Difference (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1988). 8. Jacques Lacan, "The Subject and the Other: Alienation; Aphanisis," in Four Fundamental Conceptsof Psycho-analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Alan Sheridan Middlesex: Miller, trans., (Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1977). It is a choice between "being" and "meaning" as between "your money or your life," where choosing the only real optionmeaning/life-leads to a loss of something formerly held-being/ money (pp. 211-12). Choosing to be signified, to enter the relationship of signification, is choosing to lose the prior experience of "being" but to fail to make that choice is not to live meaningfully as a "subject." 9. Julia Kristeva, "Revolution in Poetic Language," in The Kristeva Reader, ed., Toril Moi (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986), 92. 10. Slavoj Zizek, Looking Awry: An Introduction to Jacques Lacan throughPopular Culture (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1993), 21. 11. Zizek, 22. 12. "As a rule, these embodiments of pure drive wear a mask-why? We could perhaps obtain the answer via one of Lacan's somewhat enigmatic definitions of the real: in Television,he speaks of the 'grimace

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of the real' (Jacques Lacan, Television, in October no. 40 (Spring 1987), 10). The real is thus not an inaccessible kernel beneath layers of symbolizations, it is on the surface-it is just a kind of disfiguration of reality,like the fixed grimace of a smile on Joker's face in Batman. Joker is, so to speak, a slave of his own mask, condemned to obey its blind compulsion-the death drive resides in this surface deformation, not in what is beneath it. The real horror is a stupid laughing mask, not the distorted, suffering face it conceals." Zizek, 172, note 2. 13. "Affect or emotion-felt is aroused when an expectation-a tendency to respond-activated by the musical stimulus, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked." Leonard B. Meyer, Emotion and Meaning in Music (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1956), 31. This observation is based on the Gestalt "law of good continuation." 14. The idea of "interpretive moves" comes from Steven Feld, who recognizes two components in musical communication. "One is a dialectic or tension that emerges as one recognizes and engages a sound object or event in time, the other the interpretive moves one employs to situate, entangle, and untangle this engagement and recognition process." Feld emphasizes the social construction of meanings, equivalent to the Lacanian process of symbolization. "Communication, Music, and Speech about Music," in Steven Feld and Charles Keil, Music Grooves:Essays and Dialogues (Chicago, 1991), 90. 15. Marcia Young, Interview with David Harrington, in Antony Bye and Marcia Young, "Different Trains of Thought," The Strad 102 (1991): 999. 16. Steven Feld and Charles Keil, "Dialog: Grooving on Participation," in Keil and Feld, 170. 17. Young, 999. 18. See Roland Barthes, "The Grain of the Voice," in his ImageMusic-Text: Essays Selected and Translated by Stephen Heath (Glasgow: Fontana, 1977), 179-89. 19. "Steve Reich in Conversation with Henning Lohner, Stuttgart, February 26 1986," Interface 17 (1988), 115. 20. "Excerpts from testimonies of Holocaust survivors used by permission of the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies, Yale University Library and the Holocaust Collection of the American

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Jewish Committee's William E. Wiener Oral History Library." CD Note, Steve Reich: Different Trains (KronosQuartet); Electric Counterpoint (Pat Metheny), Elektra/Asylum/Nonesuch Records 791762. 21. At the third stage of preparing the tape for the piece, Reich collected "recordings of Holocaust survivors Rachella, Paul and Rachel-all about my age and now living in America-speaking of their experiences." CD Note, SteveReich: Different Trains. 22. Zizek, 35-36. 23. Zizek, 23. 24. Keith Potter, "Music in London," Musical Times 130 (February 1989), 103. 25. Christopher Fox makes a similar point: "By placing this text at the end of Different Trains Reich demands that we recognize that the people who carried out the Final Solution were ordinary men and women, not just the inhuman executioners simplisticallyconstructed by popular myth; he also insists that we examine ourselves as we in turn say 'more, more' and applaud." "Steve Reich's 'Different Trains,"' Tempo172 (1990), 8.