Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27–minute work for string quartet and tape, written in 1988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premièred it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch. Reich's reputation has never been confined to ‘serious’ new music circles and the combination of. his (so-called) ‘crossover’ credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Different Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Different Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.

Benjamin Britten's revision of the original (1938) version of his ‘First’ Piano Concerto (he wrote no other) was undertaken in 1945. There had been discussions of a revival of the work between the composer and his friend, the pianist Clifford Curzon, who had encouraged Britten to replace the original third movement, entitled ‘Recitative and Aria’, and was delighted with the substituted ‘Impromptu’. As Curzon wrote to Britten on 1 September, 1946:

It has arrived and is exquisite. I can't tell you how delighted I am…

Although James Wood has been in the forefront of contemporary music as both choral conductor and percussionist, directing the New London Chamber Choir in many new works, and organizing the Darmstadt Summer School Percussion Course for several years, his own compositions have little in common with the mainstream of postwar European music. It might be assumed that his interest in ancient Greek rhythms, together with their Indian and Chinese equivalents, stems from his association with the music of Xenakis; but he has never shown any inclination to use complex mathematical formulae, and has probably been less concerned than almost any other contemporary composer with the organization of pitch.