How this string quartet mimics the human voice 

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It’s rare for a composer to advise the musicians playing his composition to play something other than the notes written on the page.

But that’s exactly what Steve Reich, considered one of America’s greatest living composers, suggested to members of the Mivos Quartet during the recording sessions for the landmark album “Steve Reich: The String Quartets,” released by Deutsche Grammophon on Feb. 3. The album is the first to include all three of the composer’s string quartets on one recording.

Two of these pieces — “Different Trains” and “WTC 9/11” — differ from typical compositions written for string quartet in that they incorporate spoken-word samples.


“Different Trains,” which Reich wrote in 1988, juxtaposes the train journeys he made across the United States as a Jewish boy during World War II with the train rides of Jewish children in Europe to concentration camps during the war. The music is influenced by recordings of the voices of his governess and a train porter, and interviews with three Holocaust survivors.


“WTC 9/11” takes inspiration from the voices of air traffic controllers during the terrorist attacks that day, as well as the recollections of people who were near Ground Zero.

Reich encouraged the musicians to play the melody they heard in the voices.

“We really, really followed the voices’ inflection,” said Olivia De Prato, Mivos Quartet’s first violinist and an Eastman School of Music alumnus. “And sometimes that’s not exactly what’s notated. But we kind of wanted to really, really get tight with the voice. That took a lot of work, too.”

De Prato said Reich’s insight was invaluable when it came to interpreting other musical elements, such as when and when not to use vibrato, and creating the right separation between notes, which were not stipulated in the score.

De Prato, 39, said that this kind of close working relationship between performer and composer is what first attracted her to playing contemporary classical music while studying violin performance at Eastman.

“I had a great teacher and I loved it, but it was just sort of always like this older tradition,” De Prato recalled. “You listen to recordings, and you're like, ‘Okay, which version of interpretation do I want to pursue?’ It's very different than ‘This is a brand new piece, here's the composer, he’s giving it to me, and we're going to work on this together.’”
Mivos’s 33-year-old cellist T.J. Borden, a graduate of Brighton High School before attending Ithaca College, said the two rehearsal periods the quartet spent with Reich were productive.

“It was incredibly helpful, especially on figuring out how to best articulate the rhythms and the polyrhythms,” Borden said. “You know, what's the best way? Especially, literally, the articulation of our bows. I remember we talked a lot about that, because the articulation of the bow on the string is really how you connect the patterns and the precise rhythmic element with the effective element, you know, what I mean? Is it a harder articulation, or is it a soft and smooth one?”

The articulation of the bows, combined with the hard-hitting historical realities behind the sampled voices, is what helps to make Reich’s music so moving.

“Because the emotional impact is so heavy, we discussed having to kind of put that out of our minds in the recording,” Borden said. “Because the sum total of the materials really kind of speaks for itself.”

Daniel J. Kushner is CITY's arts editor. He can be reached at [email protected].