Different trains/the Berliners (5.17.23)

“Different Trains”  is a Steve Reich recording I essentially discovered by accident. When I first heard it, it made a severe, unsettling impression on me. I recognized polyphonic strings playing paradiddle variations, a rhythmic pattern derived from drummers, while the string voices move in contrasting motion pitch-wise. It mimicked a train's haphazard chugging, much like the old steam locomotives of the mid 20th century. The train rhythm changes speeds throughout the album at seemingly random points, or what we might call in musical terms a “random onset of metric modulation”. This is a slight departure from Steve Reich's signature phase shifting technique in which a handful of slight alterations (i.e. the displacement of a single eighth note or pitch) generates a piece that shifts entirely over the course of time. The key is that it's phased in or out slowly rather than a drastic change. The pitch, rhythmic, and sample changes seemed nearly randomly decided upon here.

A twist in the emotional quality of what was happening would occur as soon as the tempos changed and the harmony shifted intervallically, often by leaps in notes rather than small steps, in a way that sounds almost like glitching. The speech samples start as a variety of train conductors or intercom announcements, some passively mentioning trains “from Chicago”, “to New York” as if doing nothing more than their job they do every day. At other points, there are more harrowing quotes buried in the sound of paralyzing EAS alarms and slow string bowing like “Black Crows invaded our country, many years ago”. Whoever is speaking becomes source material for melodic content, which one of the strings doubles in pitch to reinforce.

What was hard for me to shake was the unspeakable feeling of discomfort and panic. The harmonies that the strings create, even when the paradiddle is so slow as to lose its rhythmic pace, are more disconcerting than relaxing or beautiful. The train horns tend to blare out in intervals of fifths or ninths relative to the harmonic material, until it reaches the darker Part II in an ascension of dates announced - “in 1941...1942...”, where they become triadic and alarming in nature.

Interestingly, this album was released in 1988. The names of the tracks were “I – Before the War”, “II – During the War”, and “III – After the War”, respectively. But I couldn't imagine what Reich's relationship would be to the more recent Vietnam war, and I didn't feel as if the Vietnam war had a relationship to trains or the dates mentioned. The Cold War didn't really seem to fit, and after all, wasn't entirely a real war as much as a propaganda war for/against communism. The dates complied with the samples, but World War II seemed too early. Reich was only a child. I wasn't really sure just upon listening to it. The mysteriousness of it all stayed with me until I finally looked it up.

Steve Reich did, in fact, use samples from trains, conductors, and survivors, before, during, and after World War II, both in the US and in Europe – despite the fact that he could not have participated in the war himself. That would explain the difference in emotional shifts, passivity, urgency, and the difference in train horn samples by Part II, where the shift to the disturbing subject of the holocaust is channeled.

Reich, during the time of the war, was a young child taking trains throughout the US to visit divorced parents. He had realized when he got older that as a Jew, had he and his family lived in Europe at that time, he would have not been alive. His earliest memories as a child, six, seven years old, would have been spent in a concentration camp, either to be written into his deathbed before the time he was even allowed to grow up, or the impact of trauma running in his blood for the rest of his life if he were to survive. Because he was so young during the war, there was no way he could have processed all of this information, and not to mention, the guilt surrounding being a Jew living in the States during WWII. This is probably why it was written and completed 30 or so years after the war.

The recording may have had an especially sinister effect on me not just because of Reich's incredible ability to channel complex, dark emotions at a cinematic level, but because it reminded me of the history of my own family. The Berliners were German Jews that had narrowly escaped the holocaust by one generation due to Emile, my great great grandfather best known for his work on the carbon microphone and the Gramophone. He had immigrated from Hanover in the late 1800s to work on those very inventions in the States with the dream of starting his own company. And it all tells a mysteriously congruous story to Reich’s, albeit in a more metaphorical way. It seems Emile's choice to immigrate that would help our family avoid the jaws of the Holocaust in Europe, in some strange twist of fate, delivered a different kind of devastation in the States. The Berliner inventors, Emile and Henry (my great grandfather), were both phased out of incredibly important American history, enduring a string of lost patents, divorced parents, legal battles, financial devastation, and ending with emasculation and the pressure and/or guilt that they have all succumbed to in some form or another as the single thing that may have barred them from a great deal of their legacy.

One of the things I realized later in life is that I should have read about Emile Berliner in my American history books detailing accounts of innovative early sonic inventions. Emile had invented the carbon microphone before Thomas Edison and lost the patent in a legal battle that went on for years. While the federal court claims to “unquestionably” ruled Thomas Edison as the inventor, Emile had proof of working on the invention years before the patent was filed. This is seen in particular when Alexander Bell communicated with Emile, not Edison, to help invent the first telephone, and bought the patent from him to use the microphone technology inside the telephone. There has been speculation that Edison got precedence because he was an American and Emile was both a German immigrant and a Jew.

Emile had underestimated the importance of the device that would manifest in not just American, but international history – the Gramophone, something he did secure a patent for. He, however, eventually sold the patent to the Victor Talking Machine Company (now known as RCA) to be able to fund his own independent studio and projects before he knew how influential the device would be. His U.S sales rep sold unauthorized copies of Emile's records and reproductions of the Gramophone, eventually barring Emile from being able to sell his own products in the first place. Ultimately, he never got the money or recognition for his Gramophone or carbon microphone inventions that he really deserved.

In the process of the arduous legal battles with Edison and a calling for intellectual curiosity in pioneering inventions at the expense of his own notoriety, Emile suffered two nervous breakdowns, both which resulted in hospitalization. Emile did not die a rich man nor a righteous man, although he very much is to me and to the handful of folks who gave him his due in recording his history. (Thanks Smithsonian archives and the Grammy foundation). Yes, the Berliners didn't die in the Holocaust. But by choosing to live in the states, it's almost as if the karmic retribution may have been felt in other ways.

Where Emile began with aircraft engineering, my great grandfather Henry picked up. One of Emile's final inventions was a lightweight internal combustion motor that would later assist in operating early aircraft like helicopters, and he even flew one of the first free standing helicopters ever documented. It was the stepping stone for future inventions, and it's not a fault in documented history that Emile is not credited with the invention of the helicopter as much as just facilitating in its evolution. After Emile's passing, it appears that Henry eventually lost interest in inventions. I don't really know if this was because of all of the lost hope that Emile went through or because he genuinely was not passionate about it.

Henry eventually went to the managerial side of aviation companies, facing a stock market crash that shut down his first company, Berliner-Joyce Aircraft. They did build another one called ERCO, and Henry's tri-plane helicopter model is still the oldest surviving helicopter model in the U.S on display at the College Park Aviation Museum. But that is more or less where his documented history ends – where the Smithsonian or the National History Museum or any surviving documentations of American history believes Berliners to have lost their relevancy and historical significance. I believe this is where the element of private suffering and emasculation really comes to surface. What I learned from my dad was that Henry, who fought in both World War I and World War II as an American Jew, lost his arm in the second war. There was never the right treatment for that kind of injury at that time. He was on morphine until the day he passed away. He was assisted by a caretaker the entire time. He had become a shell of himself through no fault of his own.

My grandfather, also named Henry, was a successful lawyer and banker, working for the district courts of Washington D.C. There is some eventual cadence of loss - he had lost his fortune around the time his kids grew up, after the Second National Federal Savings Bank that he founded was caught up in the regulatory crises of the late 1980s. While he was a prankster and a smart, charming man just like my dad, he may have never shook off the impression of seeing his own dad fade away. The appeal of money and success, which never really manifested in the careers of Emile or Henry Sr., formed the basis of so many American men’s senses of self worth in that heady postwar period. Growing up in a household dominated by strong women and a fading father’s influence, Henry likely always harbored some amount of deep insecurity. Proving one’s manliness through material success was a key value not just for his generation, but particularly for his household. It was the elite form of motivation. This set of expectations and values was handed down to my dad.

My dad was encouraged to capitalize on his intellectualism and enrolled at Columbia and Yale for computer science and English, respectively. But as if to subconsciously undo the notion of emasculation altogether, he never really wanted  to assign his life to a world of corporate interest or masculine values. He did, however, play bass in punk rock bands and built a skateboard ramp that made it to Thrasher magazine while at Columbia, all while still graduating Phi Beta Kappa, Magna. He broke the Berliners’ generational residence in Washington D.C, moved to California, and fell in love with my mom. 

You might know him professionally today as a technology administrator or a coding and lego robotics teacher. He also surfs at Ocean Beach every week and keeps the photo of him surfing at Mavericks in his home office. He drinks sour beers and tends to an herb garden. He has recovered from every single bone injury you can think of. He opened up for Primus and Train at the Fillmore, probably shirtless. He can bike up any massive hill in San Francisco without breaking a sweat while openly roasting the millennial tech nerd transplants who can't. He has watched every David Lynch movie and listened to every Frank Zappa album and can complete the NY Times crossword and seven odd word puzzles in under two hours on a Sunday morning. He gets a rise out of telling the story of how he accidentally overdosed on Salvia - not when he was 24, mind you, but when he was 55 years old.

From a scholarly standpoint, sure. It may not leave the ideal impression – or at least the one his own dad may have wanted. But from a creative and curious standpoint, it rings a tremendous bell for the parts of life that have been buried under the shame of a great string of loss. An element of individuality, of unapologetic, endless curiosity that defined my dad as who he is – an element of invention in its colloquial, every-day kind of effort. And I believe that's part of what made my brother and I grow up the way we did.

My brother and I, in some crazy full circle kind of moment, seemed to have harkened back to Emile. Sure, we didn't go to engineering school or become inventors of sound transmitting devices, but we do invent sound every day as musicians. Unusual timbres, amalgamations of genre, soundscapes, improvisation, composition. And I can tell you right now that my brother is no more concerned with his masculinity or presence of superiority than I am becoming rich and famous. From Emile all the way up to my dad, I believe there is a through-line of curiosity for learning and discovery – the virtue that drove Emile's Ashkenazi heritage all the way to the United States in a decision that prolonged our family tree (albeit at the hands of hardship). I would like to say that it has driven us, then and now, whether or not we are considered underdogs or irrelevant by documented American history, Ivy League universities, or any other sort of American societal standards of affluence. If there's anything I can derive a Berliner signature by, it's that.

I'd like to revisit that word Steve Reich has coined in his music - “phase shifting”. Minor changes accumulate over time in the music to eventually create an entirely new piece. Sometimes the phases can shift back to what they once were, or never again. This is the life that was possible for Reich in America as a Jew. He, too, is an inventor of sound - an innovator in avant-garde classical and experimental music, and regardless of whether or not folks want to designate him as a crucial part of the American musical canon, has undoubtedly turned the concept of sound invention into a life of constant learning and passion.

In that way, I find that Berliner-isms have not been lost upon us. It's in every musician I know who commits themselves to being a student of sound for life. It's for every individual whose trauma or generational guilt has in turn enabled them to tap into a special kind of empowerment, humor, wit, and style without even trying. For every stroke of fate that dealt genius in the same hand that it delivered harm and foul, for every facet of emotion, power, given or taken, that defines the very dynamic of life – therein lies the avenues for different trains.