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"Steve Reich's music struck me by its originality, directness and ingenuity.Its very simple building principles lead to a highly complex and rich music. Utterly enjoyable, it is by no means simple. On the contrary, it is in a very elegant way surprisingly sophisticated."
– György Ligeti, composer

Recognised as one of the foremost composers of our time, minimalist Steve Reich was, for many years, considered unashamedly avant-garde. His music is characterized by a strong, steady pulse and strictly diatonic and tonal harmonies. He is typically grouped together with other "first generation" minimalist composers such as Philip Glass and La Monte Young.

Much of his early work experimented with mind-bending tape loops, the earliest examples of "phasing," one of Reich's most used and most well known techniques. In this process, two tape loops are set into motion at two slightly different speeds, so that the tapes begin in unison and slowly shift "out of phase," creating a new set of harmonies and rhythms. Reich's later works, however, are less strictly predetermined and show a greater flexibility of compositional approach, his music is characterized by a considerably faster harmonic rate of change, and by a more diverse, though still strictly diatonic harmonic language.

By the eighties, Reich gravitated toward a more ambitiously scaled and expansive orchestral canvass which seemingly began to bring his music to wider, more accepting audience. Though still based on repetition, his increasingly grandiose sound stages and a more obvious progression of thematic material, lend his later work more color and substance than before.

Different Trains, released in 1989, captures Reich harnessing a return to using speech patterns in his work, with a spare though startling string accompaniment in the form of the Kronos Quartet. The 'Different Trains' theme originates from Reich's childhood, several wartime years spent travelling with his governess between his estranged parents, his mother in Los Angeles and his father in New York. Exciting, romantic trips, full of adventure for the young Reich but many years later, it dawned on him that, had he been in Germany during the ethnic cleansing by the Nazis, his Jewish background would have ensured that the trains he would have been riding on would have been very 'different trains'.
He collected recordings to effectively recreate and document the atmosphere of his travels to contrast with those of the unfortunate refugees. By combining the sound of train whistles, pistons and the scream of brakes with extracts of speech by porter Lawrence Davis. Reich creates music of great intensity and feeling.