On a number of occasions, the American composer Steve Reich has suggested that his intensely personal brand of music-making works best in small-ensemble situations. But on today’s date in 2001, at the urging of conductor David Robertson, the Philadelphia Orchestra premiered a “big-band” string orchestra version of Reich’s “Different Trains.”

In its original form, “Different Trains” was scored for a string quartet and tape. As in many of his pieces, Reich based its musical themes on the rhythms and cadences of taped recorded speech patterns and pitches. “The basic idea is that speech recordings generate the musical material for musical instruments,” says Reich.

“The concept of this piece comes from my childhood. When I was one year old, my parents separated. My mother moved to Los Angeles and my father stayed in New York. Since they arranged divided custody, I traveled back and forth by train frequently from 1930 to 1942, accompanied by my governess. While these trips were exciting and romantic at the time, I now look back and think that, if I had been in Europe during this period, as a Jew I would have had to ride very different trains.”

Reich’s musical meditation combined purely instrumental sounds with interviews—clips from his governess, a Pullman porter, and Holocaust survivors—mixed with ambience sounds of American and European trains. In 1988, Reich wrote: “The piece presents both a documentary and a musical reality, and a new musical direction for me.”