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NCMF cycling jerseys are for sale in-store at Riverside Cycle with all proceeds going to the festival. Thank you, Riverside owner Tom Reinke! You can follow David live along the route and watch his pin inching along.
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We woke to dark skies and pouring rain. After donning every single item of clothing we’d brought, we headed out. What else could we do?
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The revelation of the day was the Farmington Canal Heritage Trail, part of the East Coast Greenway, which crosses Connecticut from New Haven all the way to Massachusetts. Even through sheets of rain, we could appreciate what a great route this is. We rode on it 30 miles before peeling off for Hartford.

The Farmington Canal Trail was built over abandoned rail lines, reminding me of minimalist composer Steve Reich’s Different Trains for string quartet and pre-recorded tape which we performed at NCMF in 2017 with Yuri Kamkung and Yonah Zur (violins), me on viola, and Claire Bryant (cello).

Reich writes:

‍“The idea for the piece came 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 travelled back and forth by train frequently between New York and Los Angeles from 1939 to 1942 accompanied by my governess. While the 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. With this in mind I wanted to make a piece that would accurately reflect the whole situation.”

Reich tells the story not just in music but with recorded voices of Holocaust survivors mixed with remembrances of Pullman train porters from the 1950s, and archival recordings of trains from Germany and America. He electronically mixed the voices so that they are used as instruments, while, in a stroke of genius, also asks the instruments to imitate voices. This creates a narrative made of fragments where the music, voices, and recorded sounds, come together to tell a story in a deeply affecting and powerful manner.  

The piece alludes indirectly to monstrous acts but isn’t morbid. On the contrary, while serving as a warning, it ends with a sense of hope in the common humanity of man.  

‍David Yang, Artistic Director