I've now started listening to Music, for pleasure rather than studying it for exams, like I've been doing for the last month! I thought I'd blog about one of my favourite pieces of music, Different Trains by Steve Reich. Steve Reich is well known for his minimalist composition (believe me he features in almost every GCSE and A level exam!). This was one of the first classical pieces of music to use sampling, composed for string quartet and tape.

The piece uses samples of conversations about a series of three train journeys. One describing journeys in America before WW2, one in Europe during the War and one after the War. Reich came to write the piece realizing that the train journeys he took as a child which he found exciting, would have been very different had he been on a train in Europe at this time as he was Jewish.

I'd really recommend listening to it especially the orchestral version that was released a few years ago, so often art and history can seem almost clinical, but it takes a look at history from a different angle. I find that refreshing after endless History learning and it has really made me consider the situations I'm facing today and those of similar people just in a different place. It makes everyday things seem a little more significant when I hear it.

Anyway that probably doesn't make much sense, I'm not a writer, but listen to it.