Regional Oral History Office University of California The

Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California
Berkeley, California
David Harrington
KRONOS QUARTET: MUSICIANS WITHOUT BORDERS
Interviews conducted by
Caroline Crawford
in 2004 and 2007
Copyright © 2009 by The Regents of the University of California
Since 1954 the Regional Oral History Office has been interviewing leading participants in or
well-placed witnesses to major events in the development of Northern California, the West, and
the nation. Oral History is a method of collecting historical information through tape-recorded
interviews between a narrator with firsthand knowledge of historically significant events and a
well-informed interviewer, with the goal of preserving substantive additions to the historical
record. The tape recording is transcribed, lightly edited for continuity and clarity, and reviewed
by the interviewee. The corrected manuscript is bound with photographs and illustrative
materials and placed in The Bancroft Library at the University of California, Berkeley, and in
other research collections for scholarly use. Because it is primary material, oral history is not
intended to present the final, verified, or complete narrative of events. It is a spoken account,
offered by the interviewee in response to questioning, and as such it is reflective, partisan, deeply
involved, and irreplaceable.
*********************************
All uses of this manuscript are covered by a legal agreement between The
Regents of the University of California and David Harrington, dated March 1,
2004. The manuscript is thereby made available for research purposes. All literary
rights in the manuscript, including the right to publish, are reserved to The
Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley. No part of the
manuscript may be quoted for publication without the written permission of the
Director of The Bancroft Library of the University of California, Berkeley.
Requests for permission to quote for publication should be addressed to the
Regional Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, Mail Code 6000, University
of California, Berkeley, 94720-6000, and should include identification of the
specific passages to be quoted, anticipated use of the passages, and identification
of the user.
It is recommended that this oral history be cited as follows:
David Harrington, KRONOS QUARTET: MUSICIANS WITHOUT
BORDERS, conducted by Caroline Crawford, 2004 and 2007, Regional
Oral History Office, The Bancroft Library, University of California,
Berkeley, 94720-6000.
L-R: Jeffrey Zeigler, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, David Harrington
Photograph by Jay Blakesburg ©
Kronos at Mills College, 1979. L-R: Hank Dutt, Joan Jeanreneaud, John Sherba, David
Harrington. Photo courtesy of Kronos Quartet.
v
Discursive Table of Contents—David Harrington
Interview 1: March 1 ,2004
3
Early Years in Seattle, Family and Important Influences—High School, Ronald
Taylor and Ken Benshoof, Playing with the Youth Symphony—Studies at the
University of Washington—A Contract with the Victoria Symphony, 1969,
Thoughts about Vietnam—Marriage to Regan, 1970—Veda Reynolds, Teacher of
a Lifetime—Creating Kronos Quartet, 1973—Lenox Quartet and a SUNY
Residency, 1975—Quartet Personnel—Settling in San Francisco, 1977—
Margaret Lyon and a Residency at Mills College, 1978—Hank Dutt Joins the
Quartet; Walter and Ella Gray Depart—John Sherba and Joan Jeanrenaud Join
Kronos: An Intense Schedule—Meeting and Collaborating with Terry Riley.
Interview 2: March 2, 2004
34
West Coast Premiere of Berg’s Lyric Suite—Managing the Quartet in Hard
Times—Terry Riley and the Reshaping of the Kronos Sound—Janet
Cowperthwaite: New Management, New Look, New Music—Thoughts about
Programming and Commissioning: A Kind of Serendipity—First New York
Performances and Morton Feldman’s Second Quartet—Residencies at the
Schoenberg Institute and Cal Arts—Darmstadt, 1984, Kevin Volans and African
American String Quartet Music—Exploring Intonations—Music for Space: the
Jimi Hendrix of Throat Singers and Other Phenomena—The Under-Thirty
Commissioning Program and Dealing with the Media.
Interview 3: March 3, 2004
65
Kronos Staff and Headquarters—Quartet Issues, Democracy and Creative
Freedom—On Tour: Howl at Carnegie Hall, 1994, and Other Special Halls—
Signal Albums, Requiem for Adam and Early Music, Caravan and Nuevo—
Thoughts about Instruments —Sun Rings and the Sounds of Space—Becoming a
Quintet: Steve Reich’s Different Trains—Osvaldo Golijov and Arranging—Joan
Jeanrenaud and Jennifer Culp—Thoughts about Audiences and Opening the
Imagination.
Interview 4: November 28, 2007
92
More about Kronos Staff and Programming for the Quartet—Kronos and Politics:
Alternative Radio and Howard Zinn—Music and the Internet—Terry Riley’s The
Cusp of Magic—Aleksandra Vrebalov and the Music of Serbia—Franghiz AliZadeh and the Music of the Azeri Culture—Carnegie Hall in 2010—Michael
Opits and the Music of Islam—Henryk Gorecki’s Third Quartet—Jennifer Culp
Leaves Kronos; Jeff Friedman Joins —Groundedness and Family and Quartet
Playing.
1
American Composers Series Preface
The American Composers Series of oral histories, a project of the Regional Oral History Office,
was initiated in 1998 to document the lives and careers of a number of contemporary composers
with California connections, the composers chosen to represent a cross-section of musical
philosophies, cultural backgrounds and styles.
The twentieth century in this country produced an extraordinary diversity of music as composers
sought to find a path between contemporary and traditional musical languages: serialism,
minimalism, neoclassicism, and back to some extent to neoromanticism in the last decades. The
battle of styles was perhaps inevitable, as well as the reverse pendulum swing that has followed,
but as the New York Times stated in a recent article, "the polemics on both sides were
dismaying."
The composers in the series, a diverse group selected with the help of University of California
faculty and musicians from the greater community, come from universities (Andrew Imbrie,
Joaquin Nin-Culmell and Olly Wilson) orchestras (David Sheinfeld), and fields as different as
jazz (Dave Brubeck and John Handy), electronic music (Pauline Oliveros), spatial music (Henry
Brant), Indian classical music (Ali Akbar Khan) and the blues (Jimmy McCracklin). Also in the
series is an oral history of John Adams’s Doctor Atomic, commissioned by San Francisco Opera
for the 2005 season.
The oral history of David Harrington, founder of Kronos Quartet, focuses on Harrington’s life in
music and the Kronos commissioning program, which, in recognition of the fact that classical
music is no longer an exclusively European-North American enterprise, set about engaging
composers from Argentina to Zimbabwe, producing more than five hundred new pieces in its
first three decades.
Forging past every possible genre barrier, Harrington formed an ensemble with a startling new
look (Rolling Stone has dubbed them “classical music’s Fab Four”) and a new sound. Kronos has
over the years collaborated with composers as diverse as Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq Gillis, whom
Harrington describes as “the Jimi Hendrix of throat singers,” and South African Kevin Volans.
At one of our interviews in the Ninth Avenue office of Kronos, we ran into the duo of Swedish
hurdy gurdy players with whom Harrington was currently working.
Various library collections served as research resources for the project, among them those of the
UC Berkeley and UCLA Music Libraries, The Bancroft Library, and the Yale School of Music
Library.
Oral history techniques have only recently been applied in the field of music, the study of music
having focused until now largely on structural and historical developments in the field. It is
hoped that these oral histories, besides being vivid cultural portraits, will promote understanding
of the composer's work, the musical climate in the times we live in, the range of choices the
composer has, and the avenues for writing and performance.
Funding for the American Composer Series came in the form of a large grant from art patroness
Phyllis Wattis, who supported the oral histories of Kurt Herbert Adler and the San Francisco
2
Opera and the San Francisco Conservatory of Music, and subsequently from the Phyllis C.
Wattis Foundation and the National Endowment for the Arts.
The Regional Oral History Office was established in 1954 to tape-record autobiographical
interviews with persons who have contributed significantly to California history. The office is
headed by Richard Candida Smith and is under the administrative supervision of The Bancroft
Library.
Caroline Cooley Crawford,Music Historian
The American Composers Series
Regional Oral History Office
The Bancroft Library
University of California, Berkeley
February, 2009
3
Interview 1: March, 1 ,2004
Audio File 1
Crawford:
The date is March 1st, 2004, and I am with David Harrington in Kronos’s
studio on 9th Avenue in San Francisco, for an interview for the Oral History
Office, University of California. David, my first question is about your first
exposure to music.
00:00:21
Harrington:
You know, it is hard to recall—the way I remember it now is that my Mom’s
mom was really a fan of violinists, and in fact she is the only person I have
ever met who was at Heifetz’s Carnegie Hall debut. This would have been, I
think it was just after the First World War. But that needs to be checked, you
would want to find about that for sure, when it was.
00:01:12
Crawford:
I can check that. [1917, ed.]
00:01:13
Harrington:
I remember I was very young, hearing about that concert, and also my
grandma had heard Fritz Kreisler, who became one of my favorite musicians.
00:01:35
Crawford:
Was she with you in Seattle?
00:01:36
Harrington:
Yes. She spent the later part of her life in Seattle. She was from Canada
originally and came to the United States at a young age to find work. I think
she was hoping to be in the theater and somehow that didn’t quite work out,
but I remember hearing stories that she used to go out walking in Central Park
in the middle of the night [laughs], and it was safe. After concerts and things
like that. So the idea of music was something that I at least knew about from
quite a young age. Another really important musical experience for me was
the Lawrence Welk show. I don’t know how much you remember about that,
but in the 1950’s—
00:02:38
Crawford:
—very vividly.
00:02:38
Harrington:
Yes. In the 1950’s they had a wonderful violinist on the show. His name was
Dick Kestner, and it was always Dick Kestner and his Stradivarius. Eventually
he died in a car accident, and then they got somebody else. But my earliest
memory of seeing a violinist is Dick Kestner.
00:03:33
Crawford:
What was it about him?
4
00:03:35
Harrington:
I liked the tone. I liked the bow. I also had a cousin who played violin. I never
heard him play, but I heard stories about him playing and he was the leader of
a movie orchestra—a silent movie orchestra. Eventually I inherited a lot of the
scores from what he used to play.
00:04:04
Crawford:
So you were playing from an early age.
00:04:09
Harrington:
I started playing violin when I was nine. Didn’t hear my first string quartet
until I was twelve. You probably remember in the sixties you could join the
Columbia Record Club for a penny. Well, I joined the Columbia record club
and I think you got to choose five or six LPs, and I remember there was
Leonard Bernstein conducting Beethoven’s Fifth. And there was a
Tchaikovsky—I don’t remember what Tchaikovsky.
00:04:52
Crawford:
You were in that club for life, as I remember. They followed you to
university—
00:04:57
Harrington:
Yeah, it seems like the kind of club that once you get in you don’t get out, like
the Roach Motel or something like that. But, one of the records I got was the
Budapest Quartet playing Beethoven’s Opus 127, the E flat major quartet.
00:05:12
Crawford:
I read that was very important to you.
00:05:13
Harrington:
Basically when I heard the sound of those opening chords I just had to try to
make that sound myself. So when I was twelve I started my first group. At
that point my family lived in the southern part of the Seattle area, outside of
the city limits in a place called White Center. So it took quite a lot for me to
get into the University district and by that point I was a member of the Seattle
Youth Symphony, which was a really wonderful organization.
The conductor was—there were several. There was the Little Symphony, the
Junior Symphony, and the Youth Symphony. And when I first started, Vilem
Sokol was the conductor of the Little Symphony and the Youth Symphony—
well anyway, in order to participate in that I had to come into the city.
So eventually I started taking the bus in the afternoons after school. There
were a lot of musicians living in the University area so I was able to get a
quartet together at that age. I remember the very first time we rehearsed. It
was in a practice room at the University of Washington and the first piece we
tried to play was Opus 127 [laughter].
00:07:00
Crawford:
How did you do?
5
00:07:02
Harrington:
Well, you know, I just remember enjoying it. I didn’t find out until many
years later that it was one of the most difficult pieces in the string quartet
repertoire.
00:07:14
Crawford:
It has got to be. So that was really signal to you, hearing Opus 127.
00:07:21
Harrington:
Absolutely. That was the first string quartet piece that I ever heard, that I
know of. And the sound of it made a very big impression on me. I feel like
basically I have been doing the very same thing since that time—if there is
something that magnetizes me as a listener then I try to find a way of
incorporating it into the work that I am doing.
00:07:54
Crawford:
Does it change for you as you play it? I know you don’t perform it, but do you
work on it, and are you where you want to be with it?
00:08:03
Harrington:
Well, I remember working on that piece for a long time, and basically from
age twelve for many years I was really involved in Haydn, Mozart,
Beethoven, Dvorak and Schubert.
00:08:54
Crawford:
Who was important to you musically in those years?
00:09:00
Harrington:
I remember being very impressed with Leonard Bernstein and the kids’
concerts that he did. You go back and listen to those and they are so good.
Nobody is doing that now. They are exceptionally wonderful, I think. I
remember seeing them on television and—you know, I forgot to mention my
first violin teacher. Her name was Ruth Cosby. I started studying with her
when I was nine years old, and she was a wonderful person, a wonderful
teacher. After a successful lesson I always got to have some peanut butter
cookies, and I am sure that those cookies have something to do with me
playing music today [laughter].
Crawford:
Well, how about your family—your siblings and your parents, were they
musical and did they encourage you?
Harrington:
My parents have been very encouraging for all these years. In fact, they were
just at our concert in Santa Fe last week. They are not musicians. My sister
played piano and a little bit of oboe as a kid. She loves music. My parents love
music too. My grandparents were not musicians either, but my grandmother
on my mother’s side was, I think, very important in my early years because
she was a gardener and she created a garden, and the memory is many years
old since I saw that garden, but the way that it remains in my imagination was
that it was such an amazingly beautiful garden and it was organized by the
6
texture of flowers. She grew her lilies, she collected lilies, and she grew them
from seeds, and I don’t know if you know, but it is rare to do that. Usually
they are grown with bulbs.
00:11:39
Crawford:
I thought they were bulbs.
00:11:38
Harrington:
Yes, well she grew hers from seeds. She planted the seeds and then nurtured
them very carefully and she collected lilies from all over the world and one of
the things that I remember was her stamp collection and I am sure that made a
very important image for me and I remember thinking many years later, I am
doing exactly what my grandmother did, only it is with music—collecting
musical experiences from many places and many people.
00:12:18
Crawford:
She is the first person you mentioned, so—a big influence.
00:12:21
Harrington:
Yes, a big influence. And I would say that my other grandmother, my father’s
mother, while she was not a musician or necessarily into artistic things in the
same way, there was something about her voice and her patience and her
outlook on humanity that was very important for me and I still carry her inside
of me all the time, and so for me, my grandparents were very important people
in my life.
00:13:07
Crawford:
Could you say their names?
00:13:05
Harrington:
Yes. My father’s mother’s name was Lillian Zenger. My mother’s mother’s
name was Alice Bettington.
Crawford:
Last year Musical America named Kronos Quartet musicians of the year.
00:13:41
Harrington:
That’s right.
00:13:41
Crawford:
And there is quite a wonderful statement that you gave to them or that they
picked up on, and I would like to have your reaction to it. It said that
Harrington as a youth growing up in Seattle had a fetish about string quartets
in a way that other teenagers in the early sixties had fetishes about rocket
ships.
00:13:57
Harrington:
[laughter]
Crawford:
But that Harrington was also caught up in the energy of sixties popular music.
7
00:14:06
Harrington:
Well I don’t recall hearing that before, but yes, I remember from the age of
twelve getting hooked on quartet music.
00:14:24
Crawford:
You weren’t thinking of a solo career ever?
00:14:24
Harrington:
No, I never thought about that. No, it is sort of like when I first heard that
Beethoven quartet. There was just a sound and that sound felt right to me. I
have trusted that instinct. If I hear a sound that feels right, sounds right, I don’t
have any doubts at that point. And that was the way it was—and also I
remember liking to put together music with other people. That was really fun.
I never really liked to practice that much, so it was more like you got to
practice with everybody else there. I am sure my life would have been much
easier if I would have practiced more when I was that age, but you know—
00:15:30
Crawford:
What about the string quartet you started when you were twelve years old?
How long did that last?
00:15:35
Harrington:
Well, let’s see. The thing is that it kind of evolved into other groups. I was in
junior high school at that point and I remember that there were other players
from the Youth Symphony that I would play with, and with one group we
would be doing Mendelssohn, with the other group there would be Haydn, and
so pretty soon the word got around that I liked to play quartet music and
anytime that anybody wanted to do that, I got a call. It was like every
weekend, from that age, I was always playing quartet music.
00:16:20
Crawford:
Professional gigs?
00:16:21
Harrington:
No, not at that point.
00:16:25
Crawford:
You studied composition in high school?
00:16:28
Harrington:
Ah, I did, yes. And by the time I got to high school, since I was spending so
much time after junior high school taking the bus from the south end of
Seattle to the University district and then getting home kind of late and all
that, my parents decided to move the family to the University district and I am
very grateful that they did that because it put me in touch with another really
important influence for me, and that was my high school music teacher, whose
name was Ronald Taylor.
By the time I got to high school I really didn’t want to do anything other than
play music. High school was a nightmare for me. It was, really—trying to deal
8
with geometry class and English, and you name it—anything—it just seemed
too difficult, for me.
So by the time I got to Roosevelt High School, which is near the University
district, and Ronald Taylor was the music teacher there, it was so wonderful
having him because somehow he just understood. There was one point where
I was able to take four music classes in high school and I am sure that is the
only way I ever got through high school. So he set up a string quartet class.
00:18:10
Crawford:
Just for you.
00:18:10
Harrington:
Yes, so I got to play quartet music. We established a chamber orchestra. There
was an orchestra, and then I played in the band. So I had four music classes. I
have always thought since then that every kid needs a Ronald Taylor in their
life and not enough of us get to have one.
00:18:38
Crawford:
It is unusual to have a passion at that age, isn’t it, and it is the lucky ones who
have passion, I think, because anything is possible at that age.
00:18:47
Harrington:
You know, I think that a lot of people can benefit from the kind of nurturing
that I was able to get. I remember—the physical education teachers were like
Marine Corps sergeants or something. They were so nasty, these guys, so I
was always able to get a cut slip. I don’t know if you know what a cut slip is,
a little green slip to get out of PE class. It was very important. “Oh, David had
a bloody nose today,” or whatever.
00:19:27
Crawford:
That is an exception in school though, isn’t it?
00:19:31
Harrington:
Yes, yes, it was great! [laughter] but he was an exceptional man—is an
exceptional man. I really benefited from that. Another important thing for me
in those years was the fact that there was a wonderful record store about two
blocks from Roosevelt High School. In those days we were able to go over
there on our lunch hour. It was Standard Records and Hi-Fi. And they had
listening rooms and they let some of us open whatever record we wanted to
and we could go in there and play it and listen.
That is how, without really having any money, I was able to hear Bartok for
the first time, and Edgard Varese, and Ives and Stravinsky and John Coltrane
and Thelonious Monk, and you name it. It was such a fantastic opportunity.
And then you combine that with the record collection that Ronald Taylor had
at Roosevelt High School, which also had a lot of music.
9
I remember the first time I ever heard music from Africa, from Ghana—
drumming. Vocal music from South Africa, for example. A lot of things that
Kronos has done since then, I know were seeds like those seeds that my
grandmother planted, but there were other seeds that were being planted—
these musical seeds. The question has always been the same. I want to make
sound like that. It might have been African vocal music, it might have been
music from China or something, so I really benefited from [that].
I didn’t have a budget to buy records, but somehow I was able to hear lots of
music. It was great.
00:21:57
Crawford:
And without this Mr. Taylor, would your interest have been so eclectic, do
you think? Would you have had the exposure to African music?
00:22:09
Harrington:
It is really hard to know. I doubt I would have at that point. But every
weekend I was playing in the Seattle Youth Symphony and then on Saturday
mornings we would have these very involved and intense rehearsals and then
afterwards there would be quartets in the afternoons on the weekend. And
then eventually when I was sixteen I got into a group that was pretty serious.
We rehearsed two or three times a week. This is when I met Ken Benshoof,
and let me spell it out because it is not pronounced—
00:22:51
Crawford:
I have it. It sounds like Benshoof.
00:22:55
Harrington:
Yes, some people say it that way. I have always said Benshoof. Yes, anyway,
he became my composition teacher but before that, this group that I was in
was putting together a program of his music and he was writing a piano
quintet at the time for us to play. This is the first time I ever played a piece by
a composer who had written something especially for a group that I was in.
I remember the first time we played the first movement. It wasn’t even
finished yet, and yet I got to be there to try it and play it and see what it was
like. Nobody else had ever heard it before. I thought this was so fantastic—I
loved it! Furthermore, after those rehearsals then he would give me a ride
home and he would talk about music. So he became my composition teacher.
We had amazing discussions about music and what might be possible.
00:24:24
Crawford:
Are you still in touch with these people?
00:24:26
Harrington:
Yes, yes I am. Yes. Ken Benshoof is a very close friend of mine. As you
might know, he wrote the very first piece for Kronos in 1973: Traveling
Music. In fact he started writing that before we had our first rehearsal. I can
get to that later.
10
00:24:43
Crawford:
Well, after high school, you went where?
00:24:48
Harrington:
So I sort of barely made it through high school. In fact I never went to the
graduation because there had been this audition and I remember I played the
First Rhapsody of Bartok in this audition. Anyway, the job was to go to
Fairbanks, Alaska—it was the summer of 1967—to play in the Centennial
Orchestra. So that was my first real professional job.
What happened is, we did Show Boat [laughter] And during the middle of that
run there was a very big earthquake in Fairbanks. The road split. And what
happened is that the cast, mostly from New York, got freaked and they took
off, and eventually the Centennial went bankrupt. I really liked it there, so I
decided to get on a forest fire crew and since I was seventeen years old at the
time I had to lie about my age. Anyway, I got on a forest fire crew and I made
quite a lot of money in about a month and then came back and started college.
00:26:47
Crawford:
In Seattle?
00:26:47
Harrington:
Yes. My experience in college is that I was mostly out of it more than I was in
it. It seems like anytime there was a test I thought it was time to quit. So
college was another difficult experience for me. [laughter]
00:27:07
Crawford:
Music faculty?
Harrington:
Yes. But I have neglected to mention my private teachers. That is very
important because for me there was Ruth Cosby, who was this nurturing
woman and a wonderful person to be a first teacher. Eventually then, after
several years I started studying with a conductor of the Youth Symphony,
Vilem Sokol, and was with him for I think about four years. I played with his
son, Mark, and Mark eventually went on to form the Concord Quartet. In fact,
Mark teaches at the San Francisco Conservatory now.
So I became very close with the Sokol family. But eventually I needed another
teacher. Mr. Sokol was from Czechoslovakia and he was a larger-than-life
presence, and a very big man, and it seemed like at a certain point I needed to
find another influence.
00:28:42
Crawford:
Did he agree?
28:43
Harrington:
I think he never forgave me.
00:28:46
Crawford:
It is sometimes hard.
11
00:28:46
Harrington:
Yes. Yes. Interestingly enough, when we played in Indiana, I can’t remember
what city in Indiana, one of his granddaughters came to our concert and she
had been a Kronos fan for years [laughing], so it was kind of a nice experience
to have his family enjoying some of the things that we have done. But so then
Mr. Sokol. Then I studied with Emmanuel Zetlin. And I think his name was
spelled E-M-M-A-N-U-E-L and Z-E-T-L-I-N. He had studied in Saint
Petersburg with Leopold Auer, and Heifetz had been in his class, and so there
was once again another European approach. And he was a wonderful man, a
wonderful teacher. I just couldn’t learn from him. I just couldn’t learn from
him, you know. I did my best, [laughter] but it just really didn’t work.
Crawford:
Very restrictive for you.
00:30:05
Harrington:
It was. So eventually I went through all the teachers at the University of
Washington. All the while I was playing string quartet music as much as I
possibly could. Basically, that is what I wanted to do. From when I was a kid,
I always wanted to do that. In the days when I was a student in the University
of Washington, officially, there was no way to get a degree or credit or any of
that for playing quartet music. It just wasn’t considered to be part of the
official student life there.
00:30:51
Crawford:
That is true of most universities, isn’t it?
00:30:53
Harrington:
I guess it is—
00:30:55
Crawford:
Did you consider going to a conservatory?
00:30:56
Harrington:
Yes, after high school I did have the opportunity to go to Eastman and to other
places.
00:31:05
Crawford:
You did.
Harrington:
Yes, and I didn’t do it. Somehow I think [it was] the idea of that big a move,
and I had heard things about living in New York City and going to Juilliard
and all that. It just never seemed like it was going to be right for me to do
anything quite like that, at that point.
So we are jumping ahead a little bit here, but eventually, when I was about
twenty-one—I am trying to remember at what year it was that I had the army
draft—I don’t recall. But there was a point where I had to go down to the draft
board and it would have been 1972, 1973, and that is when I played in the
Victoria Symphony. I had actually played in it once before because I was in
12
college for a while and it didn’t really agree with me, and I said, “Okay, I am
going to do something different.” So I found out there was an opening in the
Victoria’s Symphony, and I think it was about 1969, maybe it was 1970, and I
went up there for half a year.
So I played in the orchestra—but it couldn’t have been ‘70. It had to be earlier
than ‘70 because I got married in ‘70. So it would have been 1969—and one
of the reasons was that I was madly in love with this young woman and I just
wanted to be sure that it was right, because I had asked her to marry me and
we were really young, and I thought we should be sure we really liked each
other enough.
So I went up there for half a year and played in an orchestra, and then came
back and got married. Her name is Regan. Her maiden name was Blake. In
1970 we got married and I am just trying to remember all the different—when
I first got married I wasn’t really a musician. I played in the Victoria
Symphony and then I came back and didn’t have any money. So I worked in a
flower shop, I worked as a janitor. I have done a lot of different things. I
worked in a restaurant washing dishes. In fact, I met my wife when I was
working in a pizza place. [laughter]
00:34:31
Crawford:
She was working there?
00:34:33
Harrington:
Yes, she was working there, and actually her brother had been a close friend
of mine in high school. But she didn’t go to the same high school.
00:34:45
Crawford:
Is she musical?
Harrington:
I think she is very musical. She taught herself to play the recorder. The first
piece of music I ever played for her, I gave her a recording to listen to, just so
she could kind of hear some of the music that I liked. I gave her a recording of
the Lyric Suite of Alban Berg..
00:35:07
Crawford:
Wow!
Harrington:
She thought I was nuts! [laughter]
00:35:11
Crawford:
She stayed around—
00:35:14
Harrington:
Well, and she had grown up with Elvis and especially the Beatles and Bob
Dylan and Joan Baez, and that was the music that she knew the most. And all
of a sudden here was Alban Berg.
13
00:35:29
Crawford:
Why did you choose the Lyric Suite?
00:35:29
Harrington:
You know, I don’t know. I had always liked it—ever since I was in high
school I had loved that piece and it just seemed that she ought to know about
that piece. It was something that felt really important to me, and so if she
wanted to know anything about me she had to hear that one.
00:35:50
Crawford:
She said okay.
00:35:50
Harrington:
Well, she didn’t—she listened to it. I think she thought it was pretty bizarre,
but, you know, we have been together ever since. [laughter]
00:36:04
Crawford:
That’s great.
00:36:07
Harrington:
And after that is when I met my real teacher, the person that I think is the most
important influence on me as a violinist, and her name is Veda Reynolds. She
was, in those days, the first violinist of the Philadelphia Quartet, when in the
middle sixties they were all members of the Philadelphia Orchestra, and as a
group they left the orchestra and came to the University of Washington as a
quartet in residence.
There was a big lawsuit from the orchestra and all this, but eventually they
prevailed and they came to Seattle. I remember going to their concerts every
time—always—from when I was in high school. That is another thing that I
forgot to tell you, is that there used to be a great concert series in Seattle, of
quartets. When I was in high school I was always sitting in the front row for
every one of those concerts, whether it was the Italiano Quartet, the Hungarian
Quartet, the Fine Arts Quartet, the Juilliard Quartet—you name it.
00:37:34
Crawford:
Unusual.
00:37:35
Harrington:
You would find me in the front row.
00:37:36
Crawford:
Unusual for the West Coast, wasn’t it? I don’t think that we had a series like
that.
00:37:39
Harrington:
Yes, it was a really good series and it was at one of the churches there. It was
wonderful. So the Philadelphia played at the University of Washington and I
was always there. I remember when they did all the six Bartok quartets in two
14
concerts. It was a wonderful experience. But Veda was not an official teacher
at the University of Washington.
What finally ended my college education was when I realized that I could not
officially study with her if I was a student, because of her contract. She was
the only teacher, well she wasn’t really officially a teacher, but she was the
one that I began to think I really ought to check out. Eventually I had a lesson
with her and she remained my teacher for thirty years, actually until she died.
So, let’s see, where am I now.
00:38:46
Crawford:
You said she was first violinist.
00:38:49
Harrington:
She was first violinist. So eventually after my first contract with the Victoria
Symphony, I came back and I got married, and I started studying with Veda
Reynolds. All the while doing all kinds of odd jobs and playing quartets every
possible time I could. Then there was the draft. And I was absolutely not ever
going to be in the American army and go to Vietnam.
00:39:30
Crawford:
So you were political as a very young man.
00:39:33
Harrington:
I just remember thinking the army was not anything that I could possibly deal
with. I was not going to shoot a gun, and I was not going to be a part of this
madness. I remember thinking, if they want to lock me up, if they want to
whatever, if that is the way it is going to be, okay. I am not going. So
eventually what happened is, as I recall it, it was a very traumatic day when I
had to go down there and be interviewed for the draft. By that point I had
already signed another contract with the Victoria Symphony, so in case they
drafted me, I had a job in Canada.
Well, they didn’t draft me. I was underweight for my height at that point and I
had some problems with my wrist, plus I called them all kinds of names and
made them think I was totally insane. So they didn’t want me. But by that
point I had signed the contract.
So my wife and I went to Victoria for one more time. This turned out to be a
really important experience because of the conductor of the orchestra, whose
name was Laszlo Gatti. I think, you might want to be sure, you might want to
check the spelling, I think it is L-A-S-Z-L-0. And Gatti, I think it was G—AT-T-I. Anyway, he knew that my main love was quartet music.
Well, he called me up one day, this was early that year, it would have been
early 1972, fall of 1972, we had just come up. He said, “You know, they want
to set up a series of concerts at the Provincial Museum in Victoria. Would you
like to do this?” I said, “Oh, this is perfect, I would love to do it.” So what
15
happened is I basically contracted the musicians, other musicians, I set up the
programs, and I kind of learned how to form these groups and make concerts
happen.
00:42:14
Crawford:
Lots of concerts?
00:42:16
Harrington:
We had about ten of them that year. And we played a lot of different music
including a number of recent pieces from Canadian composers. It was
wonderful. So I got that experience.
00:42:35
Crawford:
Was there support for contemporary music?
00:42:37
Harrington:
Yes.
00:42:39
Crawford:
Fiscal?
00:42:39
Harrington:
Yes. Eventually what happened was in the late spring of 1973, we came to
Seattle and a little bit later in that summer is when I first heard Black Angels
of George Crumb, and that experience totally solidified my ideas of how to
define myself and what I wanted to do. Basically I was having a lot of trouble
finding music at that point that made any sense. I think part of it had to do
with what was going on in the culture and the war, and most music just didn’t
sound right.
00:43:34
Crawford:
Because Black Angels is focused on the war, and you felt other music was
irrelevant?
00:43:45
Harrington:
You know, I am not really sure. I just remember thinking Jimi Hendrix sounds
right. And I heard Black Angels—that sounds right. And that is about all I
know. I don’t think I defined it too much. At that point I thought, I have to
play that piece. That is all there is to it. I call up my friend Ken Benshoof and
I said, “Ken, I am going to start a quartet. This is what I am going to do for the
rest of my life. Would you like to write a piece?” And so he started writing
Traveling Music and eventually that was the first world premiere that we
gave. That would have been in the spring of 1974.
00:44:28
Crawford:
With the Crumb piece?
00:44:32
Harrington:
I don’t think they were on the same program, but we did Black Angels also in
that spring, and Traveling Music is a wonderful piece. I don’t know if you
16
have heard the box set of recordings we released but it is on that boxed set.
You should hear it because it is, I think, one of the things that was really
important in those earliest days of Kronos—just how great that very first piece
that was written for us was and is.
00:45:09
Crawford:
Do you still perform it?
00:45:09?
Harrington:
We haven’t played it for a while now, but we recorded it for the 25th
Anniversary—the boxed set. It hasn’t been released anywhere else yet, but it
is a fantastic piece! I haven’t really talked about Ken very much yet, but one
of the things that was so important, in those early days, was having him at our
rehearsals and just noticing how the music changed. He might say, “Try this.”
Somebody else in the group might say, “Well, let’s try it this way,” and I think
even from those very earliest rehearsals, we had the idea that the group itself
was a little bit like a composer.
We tried to experiment and find different ways of thinking about music. I
really attribute that sense of experimentation to my relationship with Ken
Benshoof, which, as you remember, goes back to when I was sixteen years
old.
If you look at the very earliest, somewhere we probably even have it in the
library, the earliest version of Traveling Music. The night before the concert I
was writing out the parts. He was late getting them to us, and so we really
[laughter] had to cram on that one. But the piece went through many, many
different versions and that first performance was one of them, and then there
were other ones.
00:47:16
Crawford:
That was recorded?
00:47:19
Harrington:
No, I don’t have a recording of that first performance. There might have been,
but I don’t have it.
00:47:26
Crawford:
Was that your first quartet performance?
00:47:29
Harrington:
No, the first quartet performance as Kronos would have been in November of
1973 in the North Seattle Community College.
00:47:40
Crawford:
What was programmed there?
00:47:42
Harrington:
Let’s see, there was a different piece of Ken Benshoof, a piece called Odds
and Ends. There was a piece called—actually I had played that while I was in
17
high school. And there was Webern’s Six Bagatelles. I think there was a
Bartok quartet. There might have been a Hindemith quartet. I am not actually
sure what else was on that program. For the museum, the Performing Arts
Museum, PALM. We did have that program on it, so it exists somewhere, I
just can’t remember what it was. But the focus from the first rehearsal was,
the first piece that Kronos started rehearsing was the Six Bagatelles.
00:48:45
Crawford:
So you pretty well knew where you wanted to start.
00:48:47
Harrington:
I always knew that I was one of four and at that point I was one of the younger
members. The violist in the group at that point was a couple years older than
me, and the second violinist was a couple years older than me. So it took a
while to kind of establish my viewpoint within the group, I would say.
00:49:16
Crawford:
Did you all speak up?
Harrington:
Oh yes, yes, yes.
00:49:19
Crawford:
What was the SUNY connection?
00:49:24
Harrington:
Well, that was a couple of years later. I don’t know how detailed you want to
get on all of this.
00:49:30
Crawford:
We want details.
00:49:33
Harrington:
One of the important things for me is that Regan and I came back from
Victoria. In August of 1973, somehow by accident, if there are such things as
accidents, I happened to hear Black Angels on the radio late one night, decided
I was going to start a group, and in late August or early September we started
rehearsing. Well, it probably would have been the next day, knowing me. The
next day was probably when I called up Peters Editions in New York and
ordered the score of Black Angels.
Eventually it arrived, all rolled up and it was the biggest score I had ever seen.
And I thought, Wow, this is cool, we are going to have to do this somehow,
sometime really soon. So I got a couple of people I had been playing music
with over the years and I said, “This is what I want to do. I want to find a way
of making this work and somehow making this my livelihood.
At that point Regan and I lived in a one-room apartment with a Murphy bed in
the University district. When the quartet first started rehearsing we rehearsed
in my parents’ living room. They were at work during the day and so we were
18
there in the mornings. In the afternoons I would come back to my one-room
apartment and get on the phone. Essentially I was the manager of the group.
00:51:35
Crawford:
Were you Kronos by then?
00:51:36
Harrington:
We were Kronos after a couple of weeks.
00:51:40
Crawford:
How did you come up with the name?
00:51:41
Harrington:
One of my interests in college had been Greek and Roman mythology and so I
had this dictionary of the Greek gods and goddesses. My wife and I got out a
great big piece of butcher paper and we just went through the whole
dictionary, because what I wanted was a name for this group that was
somehow old. It just seemed to me that if it had an older reference, it would be
able to propel things into the future that way.
My parents used to subscribe to the Reader’s Digest I remember growing up
and reading an article about the Kodak Company and how they got their
name. I can’t tell you when—it would have been when I was in high school.
But I remembered it. It just stayed in there somehow. And somehow there was
a committee that decided the letter “K” was more dramatic than “CH.”
Crawford:
I was going to ask you why you spelled it that way.
00:53:12
Harrington:
[laughter]. Well, that is why. When Regan and I were looking in this
dictionary, there was Kronos with a C-H-R-O-N-O-S. Time and timeliness
and all that stuff, and chronicle and chronometer. Those kinds of meanings,
which I really liked, and I thought about Kodak and how they got their name,
and I thought maybe it ought to be spelled with a K. So that is what we
decided on, and I would say it was my wife and I that named the group.
It wasn’t until, oh, a year or so later, when the quartet was playing Black
Angels at the Biltmore Hotel in Santa Barbara, that some guy had come up to
me. He was one of the teachers in the ancient history department at UC Santa
Barbara. He wanted to know if I knew what Kronos meant. I said, “Oh sure,
he is the god of time and the chronicles and chronometer and all that.” And he
said, “Not really.”
00:54:31
Crawford:
Cannibalism, is it?
00:54:32
Harrington:
[laughter] He said, “He is actually the father of Zeus. He is the one that ate all
of his children except for Zeus, and then Zeus castrated him and threw all of
the remains in the ocean that later populated the ocean with fish and life in the
19
ocean. So I spent many years telling variations of that story, trying to deny it
for years. Anyway, it is too late to deny it now [laughter].
00:55:09
Crawford:
Who knew?
00:55:09
Harrington:
[laughter] Who knew. But the original idea had to do with timeliness and
chronicling it. Things like that. But the spelling was chosen for its visual
drama and not because I knew enough about mythology. I must have missed
the class that day!
00:55:31
Crawford:
Well, now, the Crumb score. What did you make of it? I have no idea from
listening to the music what it must look like.
00:55:37
Harrington:
Well, I will show it to you if you like. [score is shown on video].
00:56:04
Crawford:
We should change the tape here
[audio file ends].
00:00:20
Crawford:
Let’s talk about personnel. Who was there and when did the quartet become a
more or less permanent foursome?
00:00:31
Harrington:
Kronos in the fall of 1973 was Walter Gray on cello. That is G-R-A-Y. Tim
Killian on viola. That is K-I-L-L-I-A-N. Jim Schallenberger on violin, and
me. Jim left the group the next year, no—that group was together for two
years. Then the summer of 1975 Roy Lewis joined and Roy went out to
upstate New York with the group.
00:01:31
Crawford:
Were you making a living?
00:01:31
Harrington:
We were. We were making a living. I mean—it was tough. It was really tough
and eventually we heard about this opportunity in New York. It was through
the Lenox Quartet and Peter Marsh, who had also been a student of Emmanuel
Zetlin when he was younger. Eventually Kronos auditioned for a member of
the Lenox Quartet, this would have been in Portand, Oregon, in spring of
1975. We were accepted as part of what they call the quartet program in the
SUNY, State University of New York system. But the Lenox Quartet had set
it up.
00:02:30
Crawford:
As residents?
20
00:02:31
Harrington:
Yes. The Lenox Quartet had this artists’ residency at SUNY/Binghamton, and
then they created this kind of satellite program and young groups got to have
an association with another SUNY college in upstate New York in association
with the Lenox Quartet. It was a fantastic opportunity for us, so Kronos owes
a lot to Peter Marsh and the Lenox Quartet.
That was a very important opportunity for us, and I’m sorry that that kind of
thing does not exist any longer. It took someone with the generosity of Peter
Marsh to allow that kind of thing to happen—generosity and energy, actually.
I mean there is not anything that I know of where a more mature group kind of
hosts these younger groups like that.
Basically our responsibilities were minimal. We just rehearsed all the time, in
fact one of the first pieces that the group started rehearsing when we moved
out to New York was the Lyric Suite and I will never forget that. Once again,
there was a Unitarian church in Binghamton, New York, and we used the
Unitarian Church and they let us rehearse there every day. It was fantastic. We
worked on Elliott Carter’s Second Quartet, the Lyric Suite, Ligeti—the
Second Quartet. We were doing some late Beethoven at that time. I had just
become a father. It was a magical year. Magical. It was great.
Crawford:
Then it was offered to you for one year.
00:04:34
Harrington:
Yes, and then it got renewed.
So actually my family lived in Johnson City, which is right next to
Binghamton. The Kronos residency was at SUNY Geneseo, quite far
northwest from Binghamton—a hundred miles north, I think. We went up
there several times a week. We taught and we did concerts there. The second
year we actually moved there. We each had some private students and then
coached groups and stuff like that.
00:05:29
Crawford:
Did you like the teaching?
00:05:30
Harrington:
I have always liked teaching. It’s not something that I did very much. Now I
only have one student. My student is John [Sherba’s] boy, and he is going to
college. Holland Sherba will be starting college next year. It has been a
magnificent three or four years that I have had with him. Really, really great.
00:05:59
Crawford:
You would need that in a sense too, as much as your students.
21
00:06:02
Harrington:
Yes. Yes.
00:06:05
Crawford:
Well let’s talk about the others in the quartet.
00:06:07
Harrington:
Well, actually there was quite a lot of turnover that before John and Hank and
Joan joined the group. Life was very, very tough. The early days of Kronos
were really hard. It is not something that we talk about very much because it
was so difficult that I almost want to forget it.
First of all, establishing the viewpoint of the group—what I wanted to do was
a little bit different than what I noticed other new music groups or their
quartets were doing. Part of it gets back to Ken Benshoof’s music. There are
some important early characters in the story and Benshoof’s music is an
important kind of character for me.
He was in those days a professor at the University of Washington but
somehow he was removed from any of the trends of atonal Europeaninfluenced music. His music was definitely tonal based and it was also
American in feel. The early years of Kronos, almost every concert we ever
played on the East Coast or when we were out here, his music was featured in
our programs.
I had always been attracted to various forms of American music: rock and roll,
jazz, country music. Partly through my conversations with Ken and my own
listening, I just didn’t have these separations between Benshoof and John
Cage-like music or Ligeti-type music, or whatever. I wanted to make music
that was the world of music as we knew it.
So finding people that wanted to do that kind of thing was tough. The first
year out in New York we kind of barely held on, actually. At the end of that
year Tim Killian left. He wanted to go back to Seattle. We needed a violist.
Also at that point Roy Lewis left. So we needed two new members.
We found Michael Jones on viola and we found Richard Balkin on violin.
They both lasted a year. Eventually then we needed other players. Let me see.
When the group came out to San Francisco is when Hank joined the group. He
actually joined us—he came to Geneseo, New York, and auditioned for
Kronos. That would have been in the late spring of 1977.
00:10:09
Crawford:
Is there a way you get the word out that you are looking?
00:10:12
Harrington:
I think it was Walter [Gray] who first heard about Hank, actually. Then
Richard Balkin wanted to stay in New York and the rest of us wanted to go to
San Francisco. I just felt like the group belonged on the West Coast.
22
As it turned out, Walter’s parents lived in San Francisco and as a matter of
fact they lived on 18th Avenue and one of the reasons that I think the group
ended up in this area, and certainly one of the reasons why my family ended
up living on 20th Avenue was because when we first came to San Francisco
we stayed at Walter’s parents’ house. We went out in the morning looking for
an apartment [laughter]. We just kind of radiated out from their place.
Walter’s wife Ella Gray became the second violinist when we came to San
Francisco. As I said, Hank joined and I think he joined in Springfield,
Missouri, because we came through there and we played a little concert for
my mother-in-law, Molly Rasmussen. That was the first time that Hank
played with Kronos.
So then we moved out to San Francisco, and I had heard about Mills College,
and somehow, I don’t remember where I got this address, but I got Margaret
Lyon’s name and address and I wrote her a letter before we came here.
[Margaret Lyon was chairman of the Mills College Music Department from
1954 to 1979].
We arrived—it was several days after Elvis died—we arrived in San
Francisco and that was one of the first meetings I had when I came out here—
basically I didn’t know anybody here. We had no work. No possibility of
making a living at all.
00:12:48
Crawford:
So you came here before you had a Mills College connection, really.
00:12:54
Harrington:
Oh yes.
00:12:54
Crawford:
Because this was somehow the center of what you thought might be suitable?
00:12:57
Harrington:
It felt—I had been to San Francisco once before. It felt like a place where we
could thrive. It just felt like home.
Crawford:
What in particular?
00:13:06
Harrington:
I don’t know whether it was the light, or whether it was the culture as I had
known it at the time.
00:13:14
Crawford:
The Tape Center was here. Did you know much about that?
00:13:17
Harrington:
I didn’t know much about that—no, I didn’t really know about that. I had
written to Margaret Lyon and she invited me to come over. Eventually we did
23
our debut, once again this was at the Unitarian Church down on Gough Street,
is it?
We had our debut there. Margaret Lyon came. We got a really great review in
the newspaper. We did music of Sculthorpe and Ligeti and Bohuslav Schaefer
and Ichiro Higo. It was a wild program. I can’t remember exactly everything
else we did that night. That would have been in November of 1977. By that
spring then, we did a series of concerts in the art museum rotunda . Do you
know where that is?
00:14:31
Crawford:
Veteran’s Memorial Building. Yes, that was the modern art museum.
00:14:41
Harrington:
We did Black Angels there. That first year, we had a really good concert
series, I thought.
00:14:58
Crawford:
That was very exciting. That was the first time I had heard you perform.
00:15:03
Harrington:
Was it really? Well, you might have been at the concert where we did
Bartók’s Fourth Quartet. We did Bartók’s Fourth Quartet and we had met—I
am going to space out on his name—he was the violist in the Pro Arte Quartet
who did the world premiere of Bartók’s Fourth Quartet. [Germain Prevost]
00:15:31
Crawford:
Khuner?
00:15:31
Harrington:
No. He was in the Kolisch Quartet. The Pro Arte Quartet was Belgian.
00:15:45
Harrington:
This was an amazing experience. Anyway, the thing that was so great for us is
that [Germain Prevost] sat in the front row when we played Bartók’s Fourth
Quartet at the rotunda room in the art museum. He was in his late eighties at
that point. He kind of handed us this music. It was such a fantastic experience
and I will never forget it. It wasn’t one of our best performances, but we
finished the last note, and he had a very deep voice, almost like a bullfrog, and
he yelled, “Bravo.” It was this old man who had played the premiere of that
piece and it was just such a great thing for us. We got this amazing review in
the newspaper. In those days concerts were covered by the local press. It was
possible for an unknown group to play a concert and have it make some sort
of an impression in the press.
00:17:14
Crawford:
It was a different climate, wasn’t it?
24
00:17:15
Harrington:
Oh yes, and it was really important for us. We were totally poor, totally
unknown, totally just doing our thing. At that point we were rehearsing in the
back room of a print shop below my apartment on 20th Avenue. That is what
we did. We didn’t have a place like this. This was before my second child was
born. We lived in like a one-bedroom apartment.
00:17:49
Crawford:
Did you move when the second child was born?
00:17:51
Harrington:
No, we didn’t move for some time after that. That first year in San Francisco
it was Walter Gray on cello, Hank Dutt on viola, Ella Gray on violin, and me.
Okay. And we played at various places like, what was it, 1750 Arch Street,
and we played at the Bach Dancing and Dynamite Society, and we played in
various colleges and universities.
I remember we did one program of short American pieces that were inspired
by various forms of pop music. We did that over at the University of San
Francisco. There were just all kinds of things that we were doing in those days
that we certainly never had done and that probably hadn’t been considered to
be a part of quartet music before. Anyway, Walter and Ella had two little kids
and the quartet would sometimes rehearse seven or eight hours a day, maybe
even more. It just got to be too much for them, as a couple and as a family.
Unfortunately what happened is that, well—or fortunately, depending—at the
time it seemed like an impossible situation, but Kronos had a concert at the
Dominican College in San Rafael. It would have been September 19, 1978,
because my son was three days old. I got a call in the afternoon from Walter
saying that he and Ella had to quit the quartet that day. Right then. And
[sighs], so—
00:20:00
Crawford:
What happened?
00:20:01
Harrington:
Eventually what happened is Hank and I went over—and the concert was sold
out, by the way—we went over to San Rafael and had to tell the people there
that the concert was going to have to be cancelled. For me it was a very
vulnerable time being a father for the second time and having this young baby
in the house and all that, and then all of a sudden not having a way of making
a living.
Kronos was Hank and me at that point. I have to say that it was Hank and
Regan that basically picked me up off the floor then. One of the most
important calls I had to make was to Margaret Lyon, because in the meantime,
she had invited Kronos to be artists-in-residence at Mills College. We were
supposed to start in October of 1978, so just a couple of weeks after this
event.
25
I will never forget what Margaret said. She said, “Oh, David, don’t worry. I
know you will solve this problem.” [laughter] So here I am calling Margaret
Lyon, there had been two other quartets in history that have been at Mills
College. One was the Budapest Quartet. Remember them?
00:21:34
Crawford:
Oh, sure! [laughter]
00:21:35
Harrington:
And the other was the Pro Arte Quartet.
00:21:37
Crawford:
The Griller was never there.
00:21:39
Harrington:
No. no. Actually, the Pro Arte violist of whom we spoke about a minute ago
was later [with] the Kolisch. So we were the third quartet and then all of a
sudden Kronos is a duo. So that was an incredibly difficult juncture in the
group. Both Hank and I started calling everyone that we could think of to see
who they might know, what players it might be possible to invite out here to
play with us and just see if there was a way of continuing Kronos.
I heard about this cellist who was from Milwaukee. I will never forget, Regan
was taking a bath. She called out and said, “Ask him if he knows a violinist.”
[laughter] Well I did. I did ask him that, and it turns out this cellist—we didn’t
end up with him, but the violinist was John Sherba, and he came out with the
cellist. Well, we ended up taking John, and we were trying out all kinds of
different people and Hank had gone to school with Joan Jeanrenaud—in those
days her name actually was Joan Dutcher.
She was planning to get married. But eventually she came out and we played
together, Joan and Hank and John and I. We played Bartók’s Fourth Quartet
and we played a number of other pieces.
Something felt really good about that configuration of people. Joan had been
planning to get married; she delayed those plans and eventually ended up
getting married on the first tour that the four of us did. It was at that very same
time that Harvey Milk and Mayor Moscone got shot. In fact that day that we
recorded a piece called The Dream Net by Warren Benson. It was in
Rochester, New York. That is when we heard about this event. So that would
have been the middle of October when we started rehearsing with Joan and
John.
00:24:48
Crawford:
Jeanrenaud was her married name.
Harrington:
She joined the quartet with that name even though I don’t think she was
married quite then, but she got married shortly after joining Kronos. So,
anyway, the quartet had all kinds of commitments. In those early days with
26
that foursome, we were rehearsing ten, eleven hours a day sometimes. It was
very, very intense. Once again, it was still in either my apartment, Hank’s
apartment, the back of that print shop, you name it. It was a lot of places.
Crawford:
Was that part of the hardship? You talked about how hard it was. Was it
financial hardship or—
00:25:39
Harrington:
There was financial hardship. I mean, we had commitments. There was a
festival of American music at Sacramento State—one of the first concerts that
Hank and Joan and John and I played together. It was up there. We did Black
Angels. I had already played it. Hank had already played it. But Joan and John
hadn’t played it and in addition there were all kinds of other pieces. The first
few months were—I don’t know how many pieces we played, but it was night
and day. It was really intense [laughter].
00:26:20
Crawford:
You found people who had the stamina to do that.
00:26:25
Harrington:
Somehow we all had the stamina to do it. I don’t know, at this point I don’t
know how I ever did it with two little kids and stuff like that. I really don’t
know. But anyway, we did it.
00:26:38
Crawford:
Who were they? What did they bring to the group?
00:26:41
Harrington:
Well, it is hard to know, because basically Hank and I had a lot more
experience than they did, at that point.
00:26:55
Crawford:
Had they been ensemble players?
00:26:57
Harrington:
In college. But you start playing—I mean, there was kind of a buzz around
Kronos in San Francisco at that point. I remember we played a concert, it
would have been in the spring of 79’, and it was at the Fireman’s Fund
Theatre. It was the San Francisco Chamber Music Society. That was going to
be one of our big things, you know, with Walter and Ella in the group. I had
mentioned that we had these very positive reviews. You go back and look at
them and you can’t even believe it. It is kind of that type of thing.
00:27:43
Crawford:
Was that Heuwell Tircuit?
00:27:45
Harrington:
One of them was Tircuit, one of them was Commanday. One of them was
Michael Walsh.
27
00:27:51
Crawford:
Time magazine writer.
00:27:52
Harrington:
Eventually, yes.
Crawford:
I think that there was kind of a receptivity.
00:27:59
Harrington:
Yes. Well, then there is this concert in the springtime of 1979, and this is after
we started playing at Mills and we did Sacramento State, we did all these
other commitments and then we had this big San Francisco debut. I will never
forget the poet Jack Hirschman was there. His girlfriend Kristen Wetterhahn
had made this beautiful poster for Kronos when Walter and Ella were in the
group for that series of concerts we did with Black Angels at the rotunda
room.
So anyway, Kristen and Jack were there. Jack was making all of these poems,
he was just handing out poems, and there was just this amazing kind of buzz
going on. I had never experienced anything like it before. That is a terrible
place to play. It was a really lousy place. And of course the initial reviews and
all that was, “Well, Kronos is not as—it is just not what it was,” and all this
and this.
00:29:13
Crawford:
Because of new personnel? Do you always get that?
00:30:18
Harrington:
Well, we certainly did then. So John and Joan had to work through all of that.
So it was tough. It was tough. At the same time then we had made some
recording agreements and I think it was in that spring, 1979, that we recorded
an album that didn’t come out for a few years, but recorded by a local
company named Reference Records. It was an album of music called In
Formation. I think I mentioned this concert we did at University of San
Francisco, these kind of short American pieces, and this album was of that
material. There has really never been a string quartet album like that. I am
very proud of that album even though no one has heard it or anything
anymore. It was fun and it was—
00:30:20
Crawford:
Local composers?
00:30:25
Harrington:
Well, there were a couple of pieces by Benshoof, a couple of pieces by people
I knew in Seattle, and other musicians I knew.
00:30:29
Crawford:
So West Coast Music.
28
00:30:44
Harrington:
Most of it was West Coast. Yeah. We recorded that over at the big white
church late at night. What is that big church? Saint Mary’s Cathedral, I
believe? Some people think it is a really good sounding recording.
Unfortunately—
00:30:54
Crawford:
It is cavernous?
00:30:55
Harrington:
It is cavernous, yes. And it was really cold. I just remember it being really
cold, because we had to record late at night when everybody was out of there.
So there were all these things the group was doing. A lot of people were
writing new pieces, and right about then I met Terry Riley at Mills College.
Years later I found out that it was Terry Riley—we had sent Margaret a tape
of Kronos, Walter and Ella and Hank and I in those days—and it was Terry
who helped advise Margaret that Kronos definitely should be at Mills College.
00:31:36
Crawford:
Oh really.
00:31:36
Harrington:
I didn’t know that for maybe fifteen years, actually.
00:31:39
Crawford:
I always thought it was the other way—that you pursued Terry Riley and said,
“I know you can write for us.”
00:31:46
Harrington:
Well, I did.
00:31:46
Crawford:
He already had his eyes on you.
00:31:47
Harrington:
Well, he helped bring us there to Mills and I didn’t know that for a long time.
00:31:53
Crawford:
Talk about Margaret Lyon here, would you, so that we don’t pass over her
importance.
00:31:58
Harrington:
Well, it is a very rare person who can have so much confidence in another
person, especially when her whole credibility was on the line in a way because
all of a sudden Kronos is a duo. What are you going to do? If this happened to
the Budapest Quartet and all of a sudden there was Joseph Roisman and Boris
Kroyt and that was it, there would be this—it would be impossible.
00:32:34
Crawford:
She knew.
29
00:32:40
Harrington:
I am glad she thought that I could do this, because I didn’t know if I could
[laughter]. Like I say, I may have gotten more credit than I deserve for it,
because Hank was really—I mean it was a very weakened moment for me to
have, all of a sudden, just the two of us. But Margaret believed in Kronos.
And she believed in us. That made all the difference.
00:33:09
Crawford:
Is she a musician?
00:33:12
Harrington:
She is a musicologist. I don’t know what her—I never heard her play music,
but she is definitely a musician. She has got such great instincts and loves
music so much.
00:33:24
Crawford:
And she was at Mills forever, wasn’t she?
00:33:27
Harrington:
Many, many years. Since the forties, I believe. [1942-1979, ed.]
00:33:30
Crawford:
So she really ran the department.
00:33:34
Harrington:
She was the head of the music department. She is the person who brought
Berio and Milhaud and a lot of people. Terry Riley and Pran Nath. She is
someone who really ought to be interviewed here—
00:33:52
Crawford:
I am trying. Maybe you could help me.
00:33:54
Harrington:
I would love to. Let’s try to do it.
She brought a variety of people. Dave Brubeck was there, I think, as a student,
but a lot of people were there. Morton Subotnick was there. We were also
very fortunate that first year. We had gotten a grant from a fledging
organization called Chamber Music America. I forgot to say that, way back in
1973, Kronos had become a nonprofit organization. The reason we did that
from the very first was so we could apply for grants.
I remember that fall of 1973, in Seattle, going down to the King County Arts
Commission and I have always been afraid of giving speeches, but I had to get
up and tell this group of high-powered people what Kronos was all about and
what we were going to do. Somehow, I just did it. And we got a bloody grant!
[laughter]
00:35:20
Crawford:
Amazing.
30
00:35:21
Harrington:
Yeah, it was amazing
00:35:22
Crawford:
It is nice to think it can be done that way, isn’t it? Right from the heart of the
quartet.
00:35:28
Harrington:
Yes. I didn’t know what I was talking about. I knew what I wanted to do, but
we hadn’t done anything yet. Somehow it was possible to do that in those
days.
Well, okay, so in the fall of 1978 we had gotten this grant in association with
Mills College from Chamber Music America that allowed us to become artists
in residence at Mills. Now one of the things we didn’t do was tell CMA that
all of a sudden Hank and I were a duo. So when the guy from Chamber Music
America came out to San Francisco, I think it was Joan or John that went out
to the airport to pick him up [laughs]. Here was this person that he hadn’t seen
before, but we just figured, “You know what, we will solve all of our own
problems and we will tell them about everything later.”
That is what we did. Like I say, Margaret was very supportive. We had this
wonderful series for concerts. We were able to bring composers in from many
different places and work with people who came through Mills College. We
really benefited a lot from that association. Of course the largest benefit in my
opinion is meeting Terry Riley and eventually convincing him to write music
for Kronos. Then we began rehearsing together. His influence on the group
was almost like, I would say, an extension of Ken Benshoof’s, really.
00:37:10
Crawford:
There is much said of Riley’s shaping your sound and of your shaping his
music.
00:37:20
Harrington:
I think that once again, it was the rehearsal as a laboratory. A place for
experimenting. It has been a really important part of our work from 1973 on.
But definitely Terry Riley encouraged that.
The first time we ever rehearsed together with him was up in his studio in
Grass Valley, California. It was an amazing experience. Basically he handed
us these little modules of music, fourteen-beat cycles. It was this piece called
Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector. We sort of put them together as a
group and decided on the composition and decided how many repeats we
would do of each module.
00:38:13
Crawford:
Was he writing notated music then?
31
00:38:15
Harrington:
Well, when I first met him, no. He had given that up. In fact, he hadn’t done
any notated music for about fifteen years. I think he stopped, I think the last
notated piece he did before that was In C. I remember the first time he started
writing for Kronos, he said his thumb really hurt because he hadn’t written
notated music for so long. His thumb was out of practice.
00:38:42
Crawford:
Was In C mid-sixties?
00:38:44
Harrington:
Yes. It was 1964 and I think he started writing for Kronos in 1979. But what
attracted me to him initially, in addition to his music, was his personality. It
just seemed to me that he had the personality of a quartet composer.
00:39:08
Crawford:
What does that mean?
00:39:09
Harrington:
For me it’s—there is a particular kind of personality that likes putting things
together as a group, that enjoys differing view points adding up to a composite
of people. I just kind of sensed that in him. I didn’t really know him that well.
I liked him and I liked his voice and I liked talking to him. Then I got more
and more of his records and got to know his music, and of course I had heard
In C. I had heard that in Seattle. It just seemed like this guy has to do
something for us.
00:40:02
Crawford:
Did it take much persuading?
00:40:04
Harrington:
It took quite a lot of persuading. That is something that I have been
consistently qualified to do. [laughter]
00:40:16
Crawford:
I should say so! You’ve commissioned more than four hundred works—true?
00:40:23
Harrington:
Close to 500 pieces now. But you know, it is a question of thinking you hear
something special and then seeing if there is a way to be sure that the other
person either hears it themselves or believes you enough that they will try it
for a while. I think that is what it was with Terry. I remember my wife and
kids went to Tahoe Forest. Our kids were very little at that point and Terry
and his family brought over the manuscripts of the first quartets that summer.
It would have been the summer of 1980, I think. So my son was two and
daughter was five. We just had a wonderful family kind of moment with his
family and our family. We have been very close ever since then.
32
00:41:27
Crawford:
What was it like being up in what they call the Tahoe Forest? I have no idea
where that is!
00:41:33
Harrington:
Oh, it was beautiful.
00:41:34
Crawford:
That is where he lives?
00:41:35
Harrington:
He still has the ranch up there but he is spending a lot more time now near
Richmond, California. His daughter lives near there, and his grandkids, and I
think it is just a long trip all the way up to Camptonville, which is the town
closest to where his ranch is. So he is not up there as much as he used to be.
00:42:04
Crawford:
What is it like?
00:42:06
Harrington:
Well, first of all, his studio barn was a magical place. Really magical. In the
mornings, early, there would be frogs in the pond right out near there. He
would get up really early and practice singing. The quartet spent a few days
up there early on and it was just such a magical experience for all of us.
00:42:38
Crawford:
And what was the process of putting that first music together?
00:42:41
Harrington:
Well, it was trial and error. He would present these little strips of fourteenbeat cycles and we would try it. Eventually we kind of took, as I recall, a kind
of bag of them back home and we kind of put it together. There was also a
piece called “G Song,”and I think that was more fully notated really, and we
figured it out. We worked on that there. As I recall, that first rehearsal up
there, it was a rainstorm. I just remember the roof leaking. So here we are
playing Riley’s piece, trying to figure it out, and I am dodging drops
[laughing].
Harrington:
There was just something whole about working with Terry. It was always
really very special—still is, but in those days it was just so special.
00:43:39
Crawford:
You have come a long road with him.
00:43:41
Harrington:
Yes.
00:43:46
Crawford:
You were at Mills two years, and when did he leave Mills?.
33
00:43:50
Harrington:
He must have left shortly after we did
But first of all we did the premiere performance of his three early quartets.
There was Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector,G Song, and Remember
This, Oh Mind. I remember we had a concert scheduled at the Green Room.
We had been rehearsing with him on and off for quite a while getting all of
this together. He had just come back from Mexico and all his equipment on
the day of our concert hadn’t arrived yet. There was this real panic. Eventually
the equipment arrived and we gave the concert and that was our first
performance together. He sang with us, I remember this, and there were the
two solo quartet pieces. He also played keyboard.
Crawford:
Well this is a good time to break I think. Thank you, it is a wonderful story.
00:45:40
Harrington:
Great.
34
[Interview 2: March, 2, 2004]
[Begin Audio File 3]
Crawford:
This is interview number two with David Harrington for the Regional Oral
History Office. I would like to begin by finishing up with Mills College and
ask you about the composers and the people like yourselves that Margaret
Lyon sponsored and helped?
00:00:19
Harrington:
I wish I could give a complete list. I am not certain that I could give you a
complete list. There are people that were there when Kronos was there. Terry
Riley was there. Pandit Pran Nath, the great Indian vocalist. I know that
Charles Shere was there, and there were many visiting composers. Their
visiting composer program was really great for Kronos. We ended up working
with the great English soprano Jane Manning.
But anyway, there are a lot of seeds that got planted for us very early on at
Mills, and one of them was that we did the West Coast premiere of Alban
Berg’s Lyric Suite with the soprano part, which we had just recorded. We did
that with Jane Manning back in about 1979 and it was for me so clear that that
was the way that the piece had to be recorded.
But then there were legal problems with the Berg family estate and then also
with Universal Edition and there were all kinds of reasons why this didn’t
happen for many, many years. But eventually we did get a call from Universal
Edition asking us if we would do the first authorized recording of the hidden
soprano part of the Lyric Suite.
00:02:28
Crawford:
Had it not been done before?
00:02:30
Harrington:
It had not been done it that way, no.
00:02:33
Crawford:
And how did you come to Dawn Upshaw?
00:02:37
Harrington:
You know, Dawn Upshaw was introduced to Kronos by Bob Hurwitz, who is
the president of Nonesuch Records, and she recorded for Nonesuch as we did,
and that is how we first met. We have worked with Dawn now for fifteen
years, I think.
I didn’t really answer your question. I know that Berio was there and I also
know that another person that we worked with was Marcello Panni, who is an
Italian composer and conductor. We also worked with Madame Milhaud, in
fact we performed with her once, which was a tremendous experience.
35
00:03:29
Crawford:
She was a great narrator and actress in her own right.
00:03:31
Harrington:
Yes, and she narrated one of Milhaud’s pieces. Milhaud was at Mills for many
years, of course.
00:03:37
Crawford:
Do you think Margaret Lyon brought him?
00:03:40
Harrington:
Yes, she was definitely involved in that. I don’t know the history of that, so
we can’t quote me on this.
00:03:48
Crawford:
You never knew him? No, he left in about 1970, didn’t he?
00:03:54
Harrington:
Yes. I am not sure when he died, but I think it was about 1973 or 1974.
00:04:01
Crawford:
Could you say something more about Terry Riley? Technically what you did
together. Did he shape your sound in a real way?
00:04:16
Harrington:
The first time I ever met Terry Riley, interestingly, we were rehearsing. And it
was in the Mills concert hall there. We were rehearsing Traveling Music of
Ken Benshoof. Terry just came in and sat down. Eventually Kronos took a
break, and here is this man out there and so I went out and somehow we
introduced ourselves and that is how we began to know each other. Turns out
that Terry Riley and Ken Benshoof were classmates at San Francisco State.
Terry hadn’t heard any of Ken’s music until about thirty years later—when he
heard Traveling Music. So that was kind of a nice connection and then I got
Terry’s phone number and address and I started calling him once in a while.
We got to know each other. As I mentioned yesterday, it was just clear to me
that this guy, there was something about him, it just seemed like he ought to
write for us. I always felt I wanted that, you know?
He wasn’t sure. He hadn’t written down music for fifteen years. In fact, he
had consciously decided that his music was going to be improvised. That was
how he wanted to present his music. My argument was, “Well, that is fine, but
how is Kronos going to play it?” [laughter].
Eventually I think it was—and it would be nice if you could talk to him, too—
but I think it was my persistence that won out in a certain way and by then he
had come to numerous of our concerts and I think he got the confidence that
he could do something with and for us that would be an addition to our music.
36
00:06:43
Crawford:
Is it true that he didn’t like the standard bowing techniques and showed you
revised ones?
00:06:48
Harrington:
Well, the thing about working with him is that he had a very specific idea
about the sound that he was hearing inside and his music in its inspiration
didn’t necessarily come from the Western classical music tradition. So the
sound that he heard inside for the string quartet came from another part of the
world, and it was closer to India, probably.
I have always thought of him as an incredibly expressive person and his music
is very tactile and very wonderful and the rhythms are so much fun to play
and they are so human. The sound that we initially started working on with
Terry Riley was quite different for us. We had all played non-vibrato before.
That is something that you can do. You just stop your vibrato.
But there is something that is deeper and more significant about what ended
up occurring with our work with Terry. That is, we began collectively within
Kronos, contributing a different sound and a different viewpoint. I think he
helped teach us more about how each person can think of themselves as
building the piece together.
That is something that we started with Ken Benshoof and that has always been
part of our work with Ken Benshoof. I think with Terry Riley it even moved
into probably another dimension because of the inspiration for Riley’s music
coming from India. Of course Pandit Pran Nath is from a vocal tradition
where there is no vibrato.
So it is a little hard to describe this accurately, but there was a moment that I
remember when the sound that Kronos made was significantly different than
any other sound I had heard before. You could hear it. It is when we believed
in the sound. It wasn’t only stopping the vibrato. That is the surface of it. It
was much different than that. It was that we built this sound together and
everybody knew that they were finding something that they hadn’t found
before, together. We have worked on this for, how many years now, almost
twenty-three years with Terry, something like that. Twenty-four, maybe
twenty-five! [laughter]
What we begin to find is that there is a great deal of expression in the bow. A
lot of times in Western classical training, the expression all comes with the
left hand and you do it with a vibrato and all that. What we were doing with
Terry was that the expression came from the bow and thinking of the bow
much more as a singer. So the bow becomes the breath and you create
expression with the intent of the bow and the speed of the bow. When there is
vibrato, it is a beautiful color that is added, it is not something that is kind of
37
pasted on the sound all the time. Now that is very different from what you
normally hear and the way we had thought of vibrato earlier.
00:11:20
Crawford:
So the coloration is maybe coming from the—
00:11:22
Harrington:
Coloration is coming from over here [bow arm]. Actually, coming from here
[points to head], but it is not coming from the left hand. But it was a
significant change for us. Really significant. Like I say, just stopping the
vibrato is only the beginning. There is something that took weeks and months
and years to arrive at that has allowed us to enlarge our vocabulary and I just
remember that first time when I could feel the group really believed in this
new sound that we were exploring together.
00:12:07
Crawford:
Did you talk about that?
00:12:08
Harrington:
Oh yes. Yes, and I mean I have talked about it with Terry a lot. I didn’t talk
about it with the members of Kronos too much because I didn’t want us to get
conscious as a group, overly conscious. I felt us finding this thing and I just
felt that it was this large part of our vocabulary that we could explore. So,
there are some things for a group to do that if you talk about them too much,
then you won’t be able to just kind of do it. You will get too self-conscious.
Crawford:
Were you aware of other things going on? Did you have time to be aware and
to enjoy the scene?
00:12:56
Harrington:
Well, that is one of the reasons we wanted to come to San Francisco. I came
down here in the sixties during the student riots at San Francisco State just
because, living in Seattle, I wanted to know what was going on here. So I
spent a few days in San Francisco and went down to Steinbeck country and
slept on the beach on Cannery Row, that kind of thing. That was when I was
probably eighteen or something. I just remember thinking there is an energy
here, people are thinking about various approaches to life, and I like it here. I
remember that.
00:13:52
Crawford:
So it wasn’t just that you had read about it.
00:13:53
Harrington:
No. And then after Kronos came here, of course, I was saying earlier that
trying to keep Kronos together was a seventeen- or eighteen-hour-a-day job
for years and years. And addition to playing in the group, I was also the
manager for quite a few years.
00:14:20
Crawford:
How did you survive? Did you think about cashing in?
38
00:14:22
Harrington:
You know, I don’t know—I never, never have thought about cashing in. No.
First of all, I have had a great deal of support from my wife and from my
family. They have been critical to everything that I have ever been able to do.
Those first few years when we were in San Francisco, I think I said, we came
here, we didn’t know anybody, and we didn’t have one job. So it was on a
dare. I will never regret it, but for the first couple of years my wife was
supporting the family.
00:15:08
Crawford:
What was she doing? You said she studied Russian.
00:15:12
Harrington:
Yes, she has never done that professionally. She worked, oh boy, various jobs.
She worked at the UC hospital. She also worked at San Francisco Opera for a
while. She worked at various other jobs downtown. I can’t recall all of them.
Crawford:
That was before the children came.
00:15:36
Harrington:
Well, no. This was after our first child. The first year we were here, in 1977,
that was incredibly tough. Then we talked about the departure of Walter and
Ella Gray. That was a crisis. I think it had to do with saving their family and
their marriage. I am sure.
00:16:12
Crawford:
It was too much.
00:16:13
Harrington:
Yes. And you know, at the moment things seemed impossible for Hank and
me, and then Joan and John became members of Kronos and we got this
infusion of incredible dedication and energy. It felt to us like the group was
stronger than ever at a certain point. It took a while. But we arrived at
something that felt really great to us, I think.
Before that point, we played quite a range of music from Morton Feldman to
Xenakis to a lot of the earlier Europeans, and so we were just kind of right at
this point in the fall of 1978, and the library was in my living room. So here
we’re living in a small one-bedroom apartment in San Francisoco and the
library just stretched around the whole living room [laughter]! And at a certain
point I think Hank realized he was going to have to take over the library. I was
just getting music day and night.
00:18:06
Crawford:
You were manager at that time, right?
00:18:09
Harrington:
Oh, yes. If we played the concert, I had been involved with setting it up, and
this happened for quite a few years. It wasn’t until around 1981 or 1982 that
our manager Janet Cowperthwaite started working in our office, and our first
39
office was right above a restaurant known as Stoyanof’s. In fact, I think our
office was there before the restaurant, but the building was owned by our
friend Angel Stoyanof.
Initially she was answering the phone for us, she was still in college. Janet
didn’t really start out as our manager, she started out as our secretary, and
gradually her opinions and her ability became very clear to us over a number
of years and she has become absolutely indispensable to our work.
Crawford:
Everybody was talking about Kronos when you were leaving Mills, as I
remember. I was involved with the Contemporary Music Players, who always
struggled—and who played much of the same music—but something just
caught on about you and your music.
00:19:44
Harrington:
Well, we have spent, what, thirty-one years now experimenting with what it
means to be a musician, what it means to give a concert and what might be a
part of a concert, what could be included in a concert that hasn’t been there
before. We have had a lot of fun.
00:20:08
Crawford:
How did you develop the distinct look that you have? When did that happen?
00:20:13
Harrington:
You know, everything that Kronos has ever done has happened over a period
of time, over a long period of time, and even in 1973, the group didn’t wear
business suits or tails or anything like that. We just didn’t do it. Didn’t want
to. I think it has always felt like our music was –I didn’t like to be like any
other string quartet. I never wanted that.
I can appreciate the individuality of many different groups and I appreciate
quartets wherever we might find them. One of the great quartets now is Sigur
Ros, a group from Iceland. They are amazing. I think the Beatles were a great
quartet. I think there has been a lot of great quartets that have inspired us over
many years and there have been other string quartets.
As I said yesterday, I grew up listening to the Fine Arts Quartet and the
Hungarian and the Juilliard and the Italiano. I remember when I was a kid
there was a certain point where I could tell you name of any string quartet that
was on record.
00:21:53
Crawford:
You could identify them?
00:21:54
Harrington:
Yes. I was really up on this stuff. Really up. And then there became a point
when I was more interested in music that I had never heard before, not music
that I had already heard, and I was hearing more and more different
interpretations. I would hear about this, or someone would recommend that, or
40
someone would send something I didn’t know about. That process has
continued now.
So in terms of a look, it didn’t just start out, well, we are going to wear certain
clothes, or we are not going to do this or that, it didn’t really work that way. I
remember the first time the quartet played at the Great American Music Hall
in San Francisco. I don’t know if you have ever been there, but it is a neat
place for music. We designed an entire program of music that we could play
at this place. I remember thinking that hadn’t happened in our field before. I
was really proud. It was pushing this kind of boundary.
Eventually, at a certain point I asked a friend of mine to arrange something.
This was when there was this big fear that all the orchestras in America were
going to fold. There was a time when it seemed like this whole culture is
going to collapse. I thought, God, I have never played The Rite of Spring yet.
I have got to play that. I cannot go through life and not play that piece.
John Geist was writing for us a lot at that point, and I asked him to make an
arrangement for us of The Rite of Spring, and eventually we played it over at
Mills College, and so we played The Rite of Spring, and then I thought, Well,
what if they want an encore?What do you do after the Rite of Spring?
Another friend and I were walking out in the park here and I thought, Well,
you play Jimi Hendrix, that is what you play. So actually that is how we
started playing Purple Haze of Jimi Hendrix, because we needed an encore
following The Rite of Spring. People have thought of this as some plot that got
hatched here. We have been accused of a lot of things over the years
[laughter], and a lot of them [have to do with] totally subverting the string
quartet as an art form and bringing in elements that don’t belong, that are not
part of the tradition and should never be a part of the tradition and—
00:25:07
Crawford:
Where is the criticism coming from?
00:25:08
Harrington:
It has come from many, many, different places. If we recorded Thelonious
Monk, it might come from the jazz purist. If we were playing the The Rite of
Spring it might come from the classical purist. It might come from other
performers, composers—I remember one time there was a very well-known
American composer who was so upset with me because we played a rock-androll piece inspired by Gene Vincent, after his quartet, as an encore. His wife
even talked to me. This was at Aspen, the Aspen music festival.
00:26:03
Crawford:
Kind of conservative, aren’t they?
41
00:26:05
Harrington:
[laughing] Yes! This is one of our major composers, I was even getting it
from his wife. My attitude was, You know what, there is no composer in the
world that owns the space around their music. They don’t own it. The
performers and the audience own that space. We have tried to be true to
certain ideas, and that is one of them, I think. But we work with composers.
Everybody who has written for us—I think without exception—every
composer who has written for us, we have worked with. They have been to at
least one of our rehearsals, and that has been an important part of our work,
just hearing the voice of each individual composer. Being able to ask
questions, being able to get a sense of them as people and as spirits, that is
really important. That kind of information ends up getting into your bow arms.
It gets into your imagination. It is really important for us.
But when we are out there in front of an audience, music doesn’t belong to the
composer anymore. It doesn’t even belong to us. We are there to play the
music for the audience, and people come to see a concert. How many times
have you heard people talk about seeing a concert?
There was a certain point where we thought they didn’t want to see four
different colors of chairs and four different music stands and a sloppy
approach. So we began to think about the presentation of what we do. At the
same time, people were writing pieces that involved some theatrical elements.
There was a point where Kronos was commissioned to do a visual evening
and we ended up calling it Live Video. That was the first visual representation
of our music that we did. It really got us thinking. We had three or four
different changes of clothes, we had these large music stands that flew in from
the ceiling, and we had a rope forest that we played in. It was wonderful. I
really enjoyed it.
00:29:04
Crawford:
I bet audiences loved that.
00:29:05
Harrington:
Yes. This was back in the early eighties.
There was a concert we did in LA. I will never forget it. We were playing all
kinds of different music, but we were surrounded by paintings of Mark
Rothko and there was a quality to the sound. I will never know if it was us or
the paintings or it was looking up and then seeing a Rothko painting—just that
blurring of colors where one thing turns into another. It is so musical. His
paintings are so musical. Anyway, that really affected, to me, our
performance. In a big way.
So, we have experimented with these kinds of issues and asked “What is a
concert?” Most recently we have been playing music from a great musician
from Ethiopia and I am sure that we wouldn’t have done that if we hadn’t
42
have done hundreds of things before that. I feel like everything that we do is a
direct result of every other thing that we have done.
00:30:33
Crawford:
When you take on Thelonious Monk, for instance, or Willie Dixon, what do
you want to do and why did you pick that jazz, that blues piece?
00:30:47
Harrington:
Well, Thelonious Monk, I was asked to be on an advisory panel for the
California Arts Council. This was many, many, years ago. This had been
about 1983, I think. I ended up making friends with another member on that
panel whose name was Orrin Keepnews. Orrin gave me a ride back home, you
see. I don’t drive. I have had a lot of very great experiences happen because I
don’t drive.
I will tell you why I don’t drive. The reason I don’t drive is because when I
first was courting my wife-to-be, I drove a motorcycle. I had this big leather
jacket and a helmet and the whole thing. One morning as I was going over to
her home to see her, it was icy and I turned the corner and I fell off the bike.
That happened in the morning. Later in the afternoon I was going to pick her
up from her job and I was driving through the Arboretum in Seattle and I went
around a corner on some wet leaves and I went flying into the bushes.
Fortunately she wasn’t on the bike with me. But I just decided I was not cut
out for this. The world would be a safer, more healthy, better place if I didn’t
try to drive anything. I have never driven anything since [laughter].
00:32:38
Crawford:
Impressive.
00:32:40
Harrington:
So, on the way from Sacramento, Orrin gave me a ride home. I found out
Orrin had produced these great recordings of Thelonious Monk, Bill Evans,
Cannonball Adderly. You name it, he was there on some of these amazing
recordings. He wanted to start a record company and I said, “You know, I
would love to play the music of Thelonious Monk.” That is how that album
started, from that conversation.
00:33:16
Crawford:
What did you do with that music, though? How did you translate it, first of
all?
00:33:22
Harrington:
Well, the first thing that we did is that we as a group got to know the original
recordings as much as we could. The reason that I wanted to do Monk in 1984
and 1985 was, at that point, Thelonious Monk could not write a piece for
Kronos. I would have loved it if I could have had Thelonious Monk write a
new piece for us.
43
There are many ways that people can communicate music to each other. So
yes, he would have been able to, definitely. I would have found a way
[laughter]. Actually, I had talked to Bill Evans about writing a piece for
Kronos and so it was kind of a natural extension after the Thelonious Monk
album that we would do an album of the music of Bill Evans. Orrin produced
many of his greatest recordings also. Orrin became kind of the connecting
point between Kronos and Thelonious Monk and Kronos and Bill Evans.
00:34:42
Crawford:
You have had a lot of serendipity, which your zeal has a lot to do with.
00:34:42
Harrington:
Yes. You try to be in the right place at the right time, and I am sure we will
get into talking about other relationships that we have had, with Steve Reich
and other people.
I can tell you exactly how that happened [laughter]. One of the things that I
started doing when I was very young was talking to composers and as I
mentioned, Ken Benshoof was the first one that I ever talked to, and we
became really close friends. In fact, today, his phone number is the only phone
number that I can remember of any composer in the whole world [laughter].
So that’s just the way it is.
00:35:50
Crawford:
But the idea is that you always wanted to know what they might do for
Kronos.
00:35:56
Harrington:
Yes, and trying to sense when it was the right time for someone to write for
us, when they might peak at a certain point. They might do something really
extraordinary that we have never been able to be a part of, or that maybe our
art form had never been able to be a part of before. I have wanted Kronos to
take a leadership role in this field of the string quartet.
To me it seems very natural—I can still hear those E- flat major chords inside,
but there are a lot of other things I can hear as well. What the string quartet
could be and what it might be, and different issues in our world and our
society that we might be able to touch on in our concerts.
00:36:56
Crawford:
A kind of reinventing of the string quartet.
00:36:57
Harrington:
Well I hope so. I hope we have had a hand in some of the developments.
00:37:04
Crawford:
Let’s talk about some of the signal things that happened in the eighties. Big
halls, new management, recording, new work.
44
00:37:16
Harrington:
[We made a conscious decision to wait a long time before we played] in New
York. We didn’t play in New York until about 1983 or so, and when we did,
we got a lot of publicity and the concert was sold out. We played in many of
the capitals in Europe before then, we played in new music festivals around,
and that was a conscious decision.
What I had found was that a lot of young groups think they have to do their
debut somewhere in New York, and they hire a manager and they pay all this
money out there, and then nobody comes to the concert and all you have done
is gotten frustrated and wasted your money. We didn’t have any money to
waste, so how could we do that [laughter]? So basically we took a different
approach and I remember that when we finally did play in New York, we
ended up going there three or four times that first year and five or six times
the second year. It was an important step for us then.
0:38:54
Crawford:
What halls?
00:38:56
Harrington:
Well, we ended up doing a series at the Carnegie Recital Hall and that is
where Bob Hurwitz first heard us. That is where Astor Piazzolla first heard us.
Elliott Carter and his wife—in fact there was a really amazing concert when
Sting was sitting next to Elliott Carter [laughter]. We had some good shows.
00:39:21
Crawford:
What a wonderful juxtaposition.I wonder what they talked about.
00:39:23
Harrington:
Yes, I don’t know.
00:39:25
Crawford:
So after that Piazzolla and others would approach you.
00:39:29
Harrington:
Well, that is a bit later, actually, that is not the early eighties. Piazzolla would
have been about 1988. There was an amazing point in our work, and within
six months—you mentioned Salome Dances for Peace—well, we had
recorded that a couple of weeks earlier.
A couple of weeks later we recorded Different Trains of Steve Reich and
Forbidden Fruit by John Zorn. And then Kaija Saariaho wrote a wonderful
piece for us—the wonderful Finnish composer. We had the second quartet of
Kevin Volans. There was a period, I will always think of that as like this
magic period where our music was just amazing.
00:40:39
Crawford:
When was that?
45
00:40:39
Harrington:
It is just like every piece was greater than the other one. I think it was ‘88—
the summer of ‘88.
00:40:50
Crawford:
Had you started getting grants as well as concert fees?
00:40:53
Harrington:
Oh, we were getting grants all along. The first grant was the one I mentioned
yesterday, ,the one where I gave that speech in front of the King County Arts
Commission. Then when we came out to San Francisco, then we were able to
get that Chamber Music America Grant that helped us be established at Mills
College and we began to be able to apply to the California Arts Council and
the National Endowment for the Arts, and these things slowly began to take
shape.
00:41:36
Crawford:
Has the NEA been always favorable?
00:41:37
Harrington:
No. Not always.
00:41:40
Crawford:
Because you are controversial?
00:41:46
Harrington:
Well, I don’t even know. It is made up of panels of peers, and sometimes
peers like you and sometimes they don’t. It depends on what else is in the
mix, too. In the end, if you look at the whole trajectory, I could say the
National Endowment for the Arts has been incredibly supportive of Kronos, as
have a lot of different organizations. We have been very, very fortunate that
way. The thing is, we have needed it, because our work is something that we
do every day, and we have always believed in. Ever since we could—we have
commissioned our composers. You probably know the story about the Ken
Benshoof, about the donuts?
Well, I didn’t have any money. When you don’t have any money, you have to
find out what the composer’s favorite food or drink is. I found out that Ken
liked, I mean I knew that he liked donuts and coffee, so I got a bag of donuts
and we ended up sharing them [laughter].
00:43:06
Crawford:
That period when you said everything was just exploding, what happened?
00:43:14
Harrington:
You know, even before Darmstadt, the first time Kronos went to Darmstadt
was in the summer of 1984. I hadn’t experienced partisan politics in music
before, until I went there. It is like when you played a German piece, all the
German contingent was happy. When you played an Italian piece, all the
Italians were really happy. When you played an American piece, well, some
46
of the Americans were there and they were happy. It was so counter to what I
wanted to do in music, which is kind of make an experience that would be an
international experience of creativity and music and thinking and approaches,
but kind of finding a way of working together.
00:44:23
Crawford:
So that disturbed your programming?
00:44:24
Harrington:
No, no. what it did is it made me kind of realize, this is not for us. We ended
up going back one other time, I think it was in 1986, and a significant event
happened for us there. That is when we played Morton Feldman’s Second
Quartet , which is the big long one [laughter].
00:44:50
Crawford:
The one that takes two weeks to recover from?
00:44:54
Harrington:
Yes, yes, it does. It does for me, anyway. Well, the thing about Feldman is
that we played his piece called Structures in the late seventies, and then in the
early eighties we played his ninety-minute piece, the First String Quartet. We
did that for the first time at Cal Arts. Then several years later, he started
writing the Second Quartet for us. I don’t know if you want me to get into the
entire story for that, because there is—
00:45:57
Crawford:
It is a four-hour-long piece, right?
00:46:00
Harrington:
Well, there has been a lot of distortion of facts about that piece and I would be
very happy to set the record straight on this, if you would like.
00:46:13
Crawford:
Please.
00:46:13
Harrington:
Okay. Kronos first met Morton Feldman in one of the June Buffalo concerts.
It was at that concert that we did his Structures. After that concert I met
George Crumb. The way Morton talked about music and the way he talked
about sound was really very tactile and very beautiful. He would say
something like, “It should sound like Schubert.” He had a Brooklyn accent
and it was just fantastic. Somehow you knew exactly what he meant. The way
he would move, the way he used his body to express his musical thinking.
So we did the First Quartet and we had never played a piece of that length, a
ninety-minute piece. It was a big challenge for us. It was huge. It was really
complex and difficult to do, and we persevered and we did it, and it became
something that we did a few times, that piece. Of course it is a concert in
itself. At that point I think Morton’s music was kind of expanding.
47
I got a call one day from him and he said that he had been invited to write a
second quartet and that the CBC in Toronto was involved with commissioning
the piece. They wanted to record the premiere. This seemed great. After the
ninety-minute piece I was concerned that it might be long [laughter], and
asked how were we going to be able to do it and he said it would be long, but
we could do it. A week or so later we got the first twenty-five pages of the
piece. We played through it at his tempo and it was about an hour and a half
long.
I called him up and I said, “It is beautiful. It is—slow, it is long.” He said,
“Well, you know, I am still writing.” A couple of weeks later we got another
twenty-five pages. Played through that. It was about another hour or so. About
this time I got a call from CBC, wanting to know more about the piece. I said,
“Well you know, it is not done yet, and we don’t know how long it is going to
be.” And they said that they had a slot, a broadcast slot, and it was going to be
from eight until twelve. At twelve o’ clock, the national anthem, “God Save
the Queen,” was played on the CBC, no matter what happens. No matter what
happens.
So I called up Morton and I said, “I know that you are not finished with the
piece, but I just wanted you to know that there is a limitation here. The
premiere will have to be over by twelve o’clock.” He said, “Oh, okay, good.”
I don’t remember the exact words of the conversation. Anyway, a few days or
weeks later we got another twenty-five pages. Now the piece is up to seventyfive pages. The dimension of this piece is beginning to take shape. And
eventually, I think the piece is a hundred and nineteen pages long—I could be
precise if you want, we have the scores in the library.
So we worked on it a lot, tried to build up our strength and our endurance. We
got to Toronto and worked with Morton and he was very generous with his
praise and he just loved it in the rehearsals. Unfortunately, one of the things
we should not have done, we rehearsed six or seven hours the day of the
premiere, which was really not a good idea [laughter], but we were trying to
get it as good as we could.
Before the concert we had this conversation and we knew the piece had to be
over in four hours and yet it was clear that at his tempo, it couldn’t be over in
four hours. I think it was Joan who had her watch where she could see it. I
said, “Just let me know, just look up and give me a little nod when we are
about at an hour and then do it again at two hours. There is a certain point
where we are just going to have to step on the tempo, because it is going to be
six or seven hours if we don’t.”
00:51:53
Crawford:
No breaks.
48
00:51:54
Harrington:
No breaks. You don’t even put your instrument down once. I can tell you
about the premiere—I had never been involved with an experience like that
before where it was so physically painful. Even thinking about it, I have this
pain in my back right now, even talking about this piece [laughter]. There is a
little place in my back where it hurts. I am sure that every one of us in the
quartet had something like that.
00:52:33
Crawford:
Had you already gone through it non-stop?
00:52:35
Harrington:
We had not gone through it, no. We had gone through it like twenty-five or
thirty pages at a time and we tried to learn to pace ourselves by doing it that
way, but the premiere was literally the first time we had ever gone from the
first note to the last note. Anyway, we communicated, because I didn’t have a
watch in front of me, and it was clear that at a certain point that we were just
going to have to just move the tempo. That is what we did. Fortunately we
finished the piece in about three hours and fifty-eight minutes. So there was
about time for about two minutes of applause, and of course anyone who ever
knew Morton Feldman knows he loved applause.
But we somehow finished and there was applause, and we tried to stand up.
You sort of have to unfold yourself after an experience like that, and I
motioned to Morton to stand up and take a bow. People were cheering and all
this. He didn’t do it. And I thought he had hated it! Composers frequently
don’t realize what performers have to do to make the music happen. I knew
we had to change the tempo or the national anthem would have come on, right
then. It would have been—
00:54:15
Crawford:
But you hadn’t talked to him about that?
00:54:17
Harrington:
Not quite in those terms. We just figured we were going to solve the problem
and then we would talk about it later. So here is the audience applauding, we
are motioning, and Morton didn’t stand up. There was a party later and so we
saw him at the party and I said, “Morton, I hoped you liked the Second
Quartet.” He said he loved it. I said, “Well, how come you didn’t stand up and
accept the applause and come up on stage?” And he said, “David, I had to pee
so bad I was afraid that I might have peed in my pants.” And I said, “Morton,
maybe you should take that as an indication that your next piece should be
shorter.” He said, “Maybe that is right.” [laughter] Well, the last piece that he
wrote for Kronos was Piano and String Quartet, which is a comfortable
eighty-three minutes or something like that.
00:55:27
Crawford:
What has been the performance history of the Second Quartet?
49
00:55:32
Harrington:
I think Kronos played it eight times. Then we were going to do it one more
time, and this would have been in about 1997, and we started rehearsing it.
We realized we could no longer play the Second Quartet. But when I
explained it publicly, I just said it was simply that I didn’t know if I was going
to be able to do it and that I thought that it would be career-threatening. I do
feel that. At a certain point, if you have too much tension in the way that you
use the instrument or anything, you can really damage yourself.
So we ended up canceling the concert in New York, and of course that
became a bigger deal than if we had played it [laughter]. For several years we
became known as the quartet that didn’t play Morton’s Second Quartet in
New York, and that was a drag.
00:56:48
Crawford:
Isn’t that asking an awful lot of an audience, too?
00:56:52
Harrington:
That first performance was the first time I could recall people leaving one of
our concerts. But what happened was that they also came back. Morton was
probably the only one that didn’t get up and take a pee [laughter], other than
us! Actually there is a kind of a feeling in that piece. I remember when we did
it at Darmstadt and there was this feeling like the whole audience is in this
experience together. We don’t know how long it is going to be, but we are
going to stay until the last note. There was this kind of camaraderie among all
of us.
There is that kind of a quality to it. It is also the only piece I can recall going
through so many emotions and even feeling incredible anger at the
composer—real anger. I remember just thinking, God damn it, this makes me
mad. Why did he do this? This is just awful, it is so painful, it is disgusting!
Then you work your way through that. I have talked to marathoners about
dealing with pain, and I think it must be similar, and then there are moments
in that piece that are so beautiful, and especially after a great deal of physical
pain or even during the midst of that, and you are playing this music—
00:58:19
Crawford:
So you can justify it.
00:58:20
Harrington:
Yes, oh, yes. Absolutely. It is an amazing experience. I am very glad we all
had it. I don’t want to do it right now [laughter], but, you know.
00:58:31
Crawford:
You would have to be in good health.
00:58:37
Harrington:
Good health, good shape.
50
00:58:38
Crawford:
And then of course, you are tired after that, and that affects what you are
doing next, doesn’t it?
00:58:43
Harrington:
Oh, yes. There is a definite recovery period that is needed after that, and the
way we tour now doesn’t really allow for that.
00:58:53
Crawford:
How do you recover?
00:58:57
Harrington:
You mean after the Feldman? You take a shower for about two hours, for one
thing. You kind of practice stretching exercises and things like that [laughing].
Crawford:
Something else about the eighties that you want to discuss?
Begin Audiofile 4
00:00:15
Harrington:
Well, there were other experiences that we had where in the early eighties,
Kronos was in residence at the University of Southern California at the
Schoenberg Institute. That was a really important focus for us as a group. We
had a really nice series of concerts there and many different composers from
various parts of the world came through LA and got to hear us and we got to
meet them. It was very important, and we met Schoenberg’s sons. I remember
we did the world premiere of a piece that was written in during the Holocaust.
[Viktor Ullmann’s Third String Quartet]
00:01:04
Crawford:
What years were those?
00:01:05
Harrington:
That would have been, I am thinking ‘80 and ’81. A little bit later we were
also the artists-in-residence at Cal Arts, north of LA., not far from Ojai.
Crawford:
How did those things come about?
00:01:43
Harrington:
Boy, that is a good question. I think that we played once at the Monday
Evening Concerts in Los Angeles and I think someone from the Schoenberg
Institute heard about us. Probably. I think when we did Morton Feldman’s
First String Quartet at Cal Arts that somehow the director there thought that
we might be able to add something to their faculty or their concert series or
something. I think it developed pretty organically, probably.
00:02:27
Crawford:
Are there teaching functions when you do the residencies?
51
00:02:28
Harrington:
We haven’t done anything like that since. At a certain point we began touring
a lot. I think it was 1984 when we toured something like seven months and
played something like 150 concerts. It was really, really intense [laughter].
Who knows how many new pieces we played. It could have been thirty that
year. It could have been more. I don’t know.
00:03:07
Crawford:
What do you like to play that is new in a given year in terms of numbers? Is
there any guide?
00:03:13
Harrington:
I don’t really even keep track of that because I would have to go back and
think about how many new pieces we played last year. I don’t even know. It is
not something that we would plan out because a lot of times it depends on
what is being written and when it is completed, and when it arrives. Normally
what we have done is that we have planned our premieres around a certain
concert. Like when we did Terry Riley’s pieces, I think it might have been the
final concert of a certain year when we played at the Green Room here in San
Francisco. It just seemed like we wanted to end with this amazing new
experience with Terry. And we needed a lot of time for those pieces. We
probably worked for four or five months before we even played them
publicly.
00:04:17
Crawford:
When you look at a score, can you imagine what you are going to need in
rehearsal hours, for instance?
00:04:24
Harrington:
Well, usually I don’t trust myself to be able to just look at a piece of music, a
score, and know exactly what it is going to sound like. I can generally get a
pretty good idea, but I like to try it out in the group. There is a good example
of that in Darmstadt in 1984, that summer after John Cage had written for us,
and Feldman, and a lot of major works had been written, a lot of Terry’s early
pieces including Cadenza on the Night Plain, which is such a great piece.
At Darmstadt I was able to meet a number of composers including Kaija
Saariaho who later wrote for us, and also Kevin Volans. For me ,as long as I
can remember, there have always been some incredibly large gaps in the
world of the string quartet. I remember at age sixteen looking at a globe and
thinking, I know music from Vienna, Austria: there is Haydn, there is Mozart,
there is Beethoven, there is Schubert, there is Brahms, and there is Schumann,
and all of these people lived within about twenty miles of each other, and they
are all guys, and you look at the world, and you think, there has got to be
other interesting music. I remember thinking that as a kid, and this is the same
year when I was in high school and I was able to hear African music, and
Asian music, and American music.
52
Well, for years and years, I didn’t know any string quartet music from Asia.
There was none from Africa, as far as I knew. I spent most of my days and
nights investigating these kinds of things and I was not able to find anything.
Then slowly, very slowly when we were at Mills we started playing music
from Asia and Japan. Eventually we toured in Japan and we got to know more
and more composers and then eventually people started writing for us.
In 1984 at Darmstadt, I met Kevin Volans, the first African composer that I
had ever met. I asked him to write a piece for us. A few months later what
arrived in the mail was this nondescript piece called White Man Sleeps. We
started trying to play this piece and it was incredibly difficult to play. We
could play it at a quarter tempo, if that. So we had to just work it up over a
period of time and eventually we played it. We did the premiere at a bar in
Cotati, California [laughter], and I remember that concert because we also
played music of a young woman who we met at Mills College whose name is
Jin Hi Kim, a Korean composer.
She is out on the East Coast now, but I guess one of the things that is
important to know is just how long it takes us to do our things. In 1992 we did
the album called Pieces of Africa. I will never forget the first interview I did
right after that album came out. We were on tour and it was in Switzerland.
The first question was, “How did you feel about being a cultural imperialist?”
That is the first question I was asked!
00:09:25
Crawford:
What does that mean?
00:09:26
Harrington:
Well, I didn’t know. I didn’t know! [laughter]
00:09:29
Crawford:
That you stole music from Africa?
00:09:30
Harrington:
That is what this guy was saying. And I proceeded to explain to him the
process. I said, “Well look, Kronos went to Darmstadt,” and Darmstadt had
this reputation after World War II as a kind of place where the avant garde
met and convened in the summertime. It became a place where Stockhausen
and Cage came. Well, one of the things that should be one of the proudest
moments that Darmstadt has ever had is that is where I met Kevin Volans, and
that is the beginning of African string quartet music [laughter]! I am very
proud of that, because all of a sudden—not all of a sudden, but over a period
of time—there began to be this body of work that had never been a part of the
string quartet repertoire before.
00:10:40
Crawford:
And in these chance encounters, you commissioned pieces?
53
00:10:44
Harrington:
We did with White Man Sleeps. And then Volans came to—I can’t remember
where we were—I think it was Ireland. By that point he was teaching in
Ireland too. I think we ended up rehearsing with him in Ireland for the first
time. He had a student from Uganda named Justinian Tamusuza who was
writing a string quartet piece for his doctoral dissertation. Well, the day we
left Belfast, we got up really early and sight read Justinian’s piece really
slowly. This would have been about ‘86 or so. Terry Riley had introduced me
to Hamza el Din and by that point Hamza was living in Japan.
One day he came over to our office and he played a number of his pieces for
me, and he said, “Which one do you think should be the string quartet?” And I
said, “This one,” and it was Escalay. So he and a friend of his in Japan ended
up making this arrangement of Escalay for us.
Then we were in Anchorage, Alaska, in about 1989, doing a concert. I went
out to a record store and I picked up this album of music by Obo Addy, a
drummer from Ghana, and I found out that he was living in Portland, Oregon.
After I listened to this, I thought, this is tremendous music. And I called him
up after that and he ended up writing a piece for us. Then we met Foday Musa
Suso, who was introduced to us by Philip Glass.
00:12:31
Crawford:
These are all from Pieces of Africa?
00:12:33
Harrington:
Yes. I am just kind of going through the different composers.
00:12:36
Crawford:
Was there an African focus during that time?
00:12:38
Harrington:
Well, but that period of time was eight years. The perception that some of the
audience and certainly a lot of the critics have of our work is that it was put
together to make an album. Pieces of Africa never was that until about 1991.
Then we began to put a couple of these pieces together on a concert and
everything. And I thought: This sounds different to me. We haven’t done
anything quite like this. Then it became an idea of making an album. But it
didn’t start out that way.
00:13:17
Crawford:
But you were searching for African pieces.
00:13:20
Harrington:
I had been searching for African pieces since 1973. Yes. I wanted there to be
African music. I didn’t know how to do it. I didn’t know any musicians from
Africa at that point. There are so many divides in our culture and the world
that some of these things take a long time to accomplish.
54
But it was when we started playing White Man Sleeps that it was really clear
that Kevin Volans had a sound that wasn’t like any other string quartet music
that we knew. Then we started playing it on concerts and people like Terry
Riley heard it and other composers and they said, “Wow, there is something
here that is very special.” By that point, Kevin had written another piece for
us, and then another. In fact, just yesterday we looked through the fourth piece
that Kevin Volans had written for us. It is going to be a really good one.
Crawford:
Have you studied the way these are performed in Africa?
Harrington:
I have made it a hobby of mine to explore the world of African music. I have
got hundred of recordings from all over Africa and some of my very, very
favorite music that I have ever heard is from Africa.
There are all kinds of music—for example, there is Central African
polyphony. That is where each person in the ensemble is responsible for a
note and a rhythm. So if someone dies or someone gets sick, they can’t play
their music. It is whole. It is very social music, and there is this incredible
recording—one of my very favorite recordings in the whole world is—there
are like eighteen horn players and they are playing these amazing hackets, and
it sounds like Cecil Taylor on LSD [laughs], or something like that. It is so
incredible.
The world of African music is so diverse and so wonderful, from the music of
the North all the way to pygmy music. Some of the most beautiful music I
have ever heard is from a tribe of pygmies. This wonderful recording of
funeral music, essentially, and you know, you sense this whole village of
people singing. You can hear these kids, these little kids, and they are being
taught how to celebrate and how to mourn through music. It is so beautiful,
and there are so many lessons that we can learn from music. To me, what is
not in the string quartet world is so vast that we are never going to run out of
ideas.
00:16:46
Crawford:
How much have you done with Native American music?
00:16:50
Harrington:
My mother sent me this article, it would have been in about 1996. There was
this musician in Mesa, Arizona, named Brent Michael Davids. Well, he is
from the Mohican tribe and he is an instrument-maker. She sent me this
fascinating article about him. So I found out his phone number and called him
up.
He ended up writing wonderful, wonderful music for us. In fact, John and I, in
one of Brent’s pieces, we both play the Apache violin and some people think
it is the first bowed string instrument of the Americas. Other people think it is
a version of the violin that was kind of emulated or copied by the Native
Americans after they saw what the Spanish had brought to the, quote, New
55
World. But it is really hard to know, because those instruments would
disintegrate fairly quickly, so it is hard to know. Anyway, the Apache violin is
the Native American violin from the Southwest.
00:18:32
Crawford:
How did you communicate with him about the instrument?
Harrington:
We started working together, he introduced me to a man named Chesley
Wilson who came to one of our concerts when we were playing in the
Southwest who made Apache violins. The instrument is a part of the piece that
we played. In the end, Brent Michael Davids has written three or four pieces
for Kronos, and he invented different kinds of rattles and different instruments
that we twirled that are part of his music. So, trying to fill in the blanks. And
there are enormous blanks to be filled in. It is probably that way with any field
of music.
How many musicians in Africa have played Webern’s music? Or Bartók’s, or
music from India, or—I mean, you think about it, and I feel I am in an
amazingly privileged position to be able to have the opportunity to
communicate and work with people from many different cultures and
viewpoints and religions and backgrounds. Through the wonder of musical
notation, to be able to assemble musical experiences from a lot of different
places and times.
00:20:27
Other voice:
Do you mind me asking one thing? What is your first experience with oddtempered or ill-tempered tuning, Egyptian or Middle Eastern tunings with
quarter counts and eight tones—you talked about music from other parts and
experimenting, and that seems to be one thing which folks that I know with
bow instruments really got into when they were trying to learn music outside
of the—
00:21:09
Harrington:
Yes. Well, one of things that you find about bowed stringed instruments is
that you can spend a lot of your time trying to figure out where the notes are
[laughs]. A lot of people are amazed that you play this instrument that didn’t
have any frets. The common question is, “How do you find the notes?”
I remember one of my favorite violinists, Fritz Kreisler said, “There is no note
that is really in tune.” That is another thing that my teacher Veda Reynolds
always said, “The great thing about music, it always can be better.” This is
after a lesson that I had with her and we worked for six hours on one note of
the Lyric Suite [laughs].
But getting back to the question about altered pitches, I think it was in the late
17th, early 18th century that Western music came into tempered tuning and we
began to have access to tempered keyboards that allowed music in different
keys and still remained sort of in tune. One of my really very favorite sounds
56
is this harp from Ethiopia called the “beguena.” It is a fantastic sound. All the
music on that instrument is played in one key. The instrument only has one
key. I am sure that every instrument is in a slightly different key—
00:23:10
Crawford:
Do you play the instrument?
00:23:11
Harrington:
No, I haven’t, but I am saying that that instrument is limited to one key. So
someone like Bach wanted to be able to go into many different keys and play.
One of the things that you notice when you start working with different
tunings is how quickly the entire culture and the meaning of the sound can
change.
The most dramatic example of that that I have experienced is when we played
music of the Lebanese composer Ali Jihad Racy, a great musician who is in
the ethnomusicology department at UCLA. He wanted John and me to change
the tunings of our instruments so my E string is tuned to a D and my A string
is tuned to a G. So essentially what you have is two Gs and two Ds. We
recorded that piece, it is called Ecstasy, and it is on the album Caravan. But
when you do that to your instrument, it just changes, it comes from a different
country, a different culture. It is shocking what happens. It is great!
00:24:36
Crawford:
Not unsettling for you.
00:24:39
Harrington:
Well, the first time we ever did it was really unsettling. Then when you do it
in a concert you have to—so, okay you are playing your music and it is kind
of, even if you are playing music from China or South America, or whatever,
you are playing the instrument as you know it, and then you play Jihad’s
piece, and before that you have to change the tuning and all of a sudden you
are in some place where you have never been before. It was a fantastic
experience.
Earlier than that, we played a piece by Terry Riley that we had worked on for
five or six months that we had to have—he had to make tapes for us of the
scale, because he wanted a totally different kind of scale where we were really
in the middle of, between pitches, where we always tried to avoid playing and
some places where we never thought there was a resonating point. A little bit
later I will show you one of the notes that is so resonant, and it does not exist
in Western classical music—does not exist.
00:25:59
Crawford:
What was his scale like? Terry Riley’s scale?
00:26:01
Harrington:
Oh, it was all, about six of the notes were in entirely different places and it
was so hard for us to play it.
57
00:26:07
Crawford:
You would have run into that with Harry Partch, wouldn’t you?
00:26:10
Harrington:
Well, we didn’t play Harry Partch’s music until the nineties, so that was much
later. We were working on this in the eighties. Harry Partch never wrote string
quartet music. That is a whole other issue—the Harry Partch Society hates me
for what we have done with Harry Partch’s work. Literally hates me.
00:26:34
Crawford:
Really?
00:26:35
Harrington:
Oh yes, I have gotten hate mail.
00:26:37
Crawford:
Is it because they don’t think it is authentic?
00:26:41
Harrington:
Umm—, right. In a word.
00:26:44
Crawford:
But Harry Partch is a lot better known because of you, so that is a plus isn’t it?
00:26:48
Harrington:
Well, you are talking to the guy who would think it would be a big plus.
But so we were talking about intonation. We have explored various forms of
intonation and it is something that composers are increasingly doing now,
probably more than ever. One of the most amazing pieces that we have played
that used alternate tunings was written for us by LaMonte Young. LaMonte is
someone who has been very close to Terry Riley. I should say that we have
been fortunate that some of the most wonderful composers have introduced us
to some of the most wonderful composers.
Terry Riley introduced me to Hamza El Din, who ended up writing for us, to
Jon Hassell. He wrote a wonderful piece for us, and to LaMonte Young,
Pandit Pran Nath, all of these people we have worked with very closely, and
these relationships have been really important in kind of establishing our
palate.
One of the things about LaMonte’s piece, which is called Chronos Crystalla:
it is all made up of natural harmonics. I think there are only a total of about
eight pitches in this piece and there are all these long tones and combinations
of different tones. At the very least, it takes an hour to tune the instruments
before the concert. And you kind of have to keep retuning because they go out
of tune, and you find that even the speed of the bow changes the pitch. It is the
most sensitizing piece of music we have ever played, and it is about eighty
minutes long.
58
00:29:12
Crawford:
Where is this from?
00:29:14
Harrington:
LaMonte Young. It is all harmonics, it is absolutely beautiful and you find,
your ears get so sensitized and the music is so quiet and so pristine and
beautiful. And so in tune, and it is in just intonation. It is in like the most
ancient form of intonation, where the resonances are so consonant. It is not
like a piano where basically everything is out of tune. If you really listen to a
piano after you play Chronos Crystalla, it will sound foul [laughs]. I can tell
you that for sure! All the music that we hear on the radio—all of it—on
Western pop radio is in tempered intonation.
00:30:02
Crawford:
So is there any kind of music that you want to stay away from? Makes you
uncomfortable?
00:30:11
Harrington:
[long pause]. Hm. I have never really thought of it that way.
00:30:18
Crawford:
You haven’t done any hip-hop yet, have you?
00:30:20
Harrington:
Our music has been sampled in hip-hop and, in fact, just before you came
today, one of the major DJs, Paul Oakenfold, asked us to be a part of his next
record. That is not hip-hop, necessarily, it is electronica. And I am going to be
seeing DJ Spooky in a couple of weeks, who is an incredible musician—that
guy is great. Actually, we have done a piece where we have done beat boxing,
the vocal technique of using the voice in a rhythmic way that a lot of young
urban musical people have used. Like I say, there are so many things to do.
There are so many things to do—
00:31:23
Crawford:
Limitless, isn’t it?
00:31:25
Harrington:
It is. It is. And it is one of the great things about music is that I feel, more
certainly than I have ever felt, that none of us own it. We get to share it for a
short time. By building on the experiences that we have had for all these
years, Kronos can try to be sure that doors are opening and not closing to this
medium. There are so many people that have never really heard our music and
haven’t heard where it has come from. How great it would be to hear Black
Angels and then go back and hear Opus 130 with the Fugue. You know? And
to know a little bit about the early history of the string quartet.
Think about it, the Haydn and Mozart and Beethoven. What other art form can
you think of that has such an amazing platform to be able to stand on? Like in
seventy-five years, just think of what was accomplished in that one little
city—Vienna—within twenty miles of each other. It is amazing what was
59
accomplished. And for me, what I have wanted to do is to take advantage of
that platform that these composers from Vienna established and to just bring
the rest of the world into that, if that is possible.
00:33:18
Crawford:
Voyager Two took a lot of that music into space—What will you place in
space?
00:33:40
Harrington:
If they asked me right now? Well, let me put it this way to you. Next week in
Boston I am working with the person that I consider to be the Jimi Hendrix of
throat singing. She is Tanya Tagaq, a young woman from Northern Canada. I
don’t know if you have heard throat singers.
00:34:00
Crawford:
I just heard throat singing on KPFA.
00:34:03
Harrington:
Well, there are Inuits—if you listen to our album called Night Prayers or if
you listen to Early Music you will hear the throat singers from Tuva. Many,
many years ago I first heard Inuit throat singers, and the first kind of Inuit
throat singing I heard was performed by two women who would sit together
very closely and use each other’s throats as bellows. It was this throaty,
guttural, sensual, alarming sound, and they would always end up just
laughing, and the laughs would be so fun and joyous.
Then you find out later that it tickled so much that they couldn’t take it
anymore [laughs]. Because it was like [blowing sounds], blowing into each
other’s throats like that.
Well, okay, about a year ago I heard this recording, once again, by accident,
and here was this woman who was doing this amazing throat singing. It was
like she had taken this art form to this whole other place. She was doing what
two people, or maybe even three or four people, could do. She was doing it as
one person.
About two weeks ago we had arranged that I would be able to meet her in
Spain and she came to our concert. Anyway, she and her boyfriend and her
little baby are coming to Boston, and Osvaldo Golijov and I and Tanya are
going to plot out how Kronos and Tanya are going to make music together. I
have always been attracted to musicians that have kind of redefined their
instrument or their voice or their work, people who have found a very
individual and kind of expansive way of defining themselves musically. Those
are the people that attract me the most, and Tanya is one of those. I think she
is twenty-seven now. She literally is the Jimi Hendrix of throat singing.
00:36:26
Crawford:
So what would you do with her?
60
00:36:27
Harrington:
We are not sure yet. All I know is, I am absolutely certain something
incredibly bold and exciting is going to happen from these four days we are
going to have—we are doing Sun Rings in Boston, and I am going to be able
to stay there for an extra day and work. So there will be, I think, four
occasions where we are going to put this piece together. So in answer to your
question, I would definitely send some of Tanya and Kronos to outer space,
but it might take a few months [laughing].
We are working on this piece by the Chinese composer Guo Wen-Jing, and I
don’t know if I told you this yesterday, but a few years ago we played in
China for the first time. It was in 1997, I think. I met him there. It was clear
after hearing some of his music that he had to write for Kronos.
Several years later he sent us his Second String Quartet. Well, the first thing
you notice on Second String Quartet is that it is actually a quintet, and the fifth
part is for all these Chinese percussion instruments. And so, we have not
played this piece. It was written in 1998.
We are going to give the world premiere at Stanford in April. We are working
on that right now. It is a fascinating piece. Really fascinating. We won’t get to
play it with a percussionist until about three days before the show. So we are
just trying to put our parts together right now. But it is really going to be a
wonderful piece.
00:38:15
Crawford:
Okay. Anything else for space?
00:38:19
Harrington:
Well, you know, I am always kind of curious: what is the next experience?
Right now there are a number of people writing new pieces for us. We have
been talking about Terry Riley, his fourteenth piece for Kronos he is working
on right now, and it is going to be for Kronos and the great Chinese pipa
player, Wu Man.
00:38:51
Crawford:
Ghost Opera.
00:38:54
Harrington:
Yes. Yes. Terry was at the premiere of Ghost Opera and I think it was always
in the back of his mind that he wanted to write something for Kronos and Wu
Man. She is a musician who has just continuously surprised and delighted me.
She is one of the great virtuoso musicians, on any instrument. Fortunately, it is
being done. We haven’t done it for a while, but we will get back to it for sure.
But getting into outer space, let’s see—I might have to keep answering that
question over the next while [laughs], because other things will keep coming
to mind, but at any point these days I think it is safe to say that there are
thirty-five to forty-five pieces being written for Kronos at any point. There are
61
men and women from all over the world right now from many different genres
of music and many different outlooks. One of the things that I have wanted to
do is talk about the Under Thirty Commission.
00:40:25
Crawford:
Yes, I wanted to get into that.
00:40:26
Harrington:
The recipient of our first Under Thirty Commission was a woman named
Alexandra du Bois. At the time that she wrote her commission for us she was
twenty-one years old. Now I think she is twenty-three perhaps. She came over
to Paris for the European premiere of her quartet in November. I was having
dinner with her and I had just been in Amsterdam and a friend of mine gave
me the collected writings of this woman whose work I first read back in 1983
or 1984. My wife went to the local store, the drugstore, owned by these Dutch
people. It was called Vaupens. Do you remember that drugstore down on
Irving Street?
They had this book in there and it was called An Interrupted Life. If you ever
get a chance to read this, it is one of the most musical and beautiful books that
I have ever read in my life. It was written during the Second World War by
this Dutch woman named Etty Hillesum. She had died in Auschwitz in 1943.
This book is a diary, essentially. When the Nazis controlled the movements of
Jewish people in Amsterdam and in Europe more and more, it was at that
moment that her writing began to flower and her inner life expanded.
I have always wanted there to be a piece of music that would somehow be
about her or about her writing. Anytime I thought of it, I didn’t want to use the
words. It shouldn’t be an opera.
Anyway, a friend of mine gave me the newest version of Etty Hillesum’s
work when I was in Amsterdam. The next city we were in was Paris, and that
was when we were doing the premiere of Alexandra’s piece last November.
I was having dinner with Alexandra and we were talking about life and music,
which is what I do with every composer I meet, and all of a sudden it occurred
to me, she is the right person to write the Etty Hillesum piece.
After twenty years I had finally found the right person. Just yesterday I got the
beginning synopsis. She went home after Paris and immediately ordered this
book. She hasn’t been able to put it down for the last three or four months. I
just have this instinct about her work and the work of Etty Hillesum. It is the
right match. They are the right two people to get to know each other. I know
there is going to be a wonderful piece.
00:44:31
Crawford:
And she didn’t hesitate.
62
00:44:33
Harrington:
The minute she started reading the book she couldn’t put it down.
00:44:37
Crawford:
And she is so young.
00:44:40
Harrington:
Yes, she is so young. She is still in college, even, and yet she is the right
person. There is no question in my mind. So I am very excited about that
piece. She hasn’t started writing yet, but she has chosen some sections of the
writing that will be the inspiration for the music.
00:45:09
Crawford:
What is her writing like?
00:45:09
Harrington:
Alexandra du Bois? I feel that she has this youthful voice of great depth, and
the piece that Kronos heard that inspired us ask her to be the first recipient of
our Under Thirty Commission was a very beautiful piece. It was for bass, two
cellos, and two violins.
When I heard it I had to hear it again. I just wanted to keep going back to it
and that is the way that I feel about her quartet. She titled the quartet An Eye
for an Eye Makes the Whole World Blind. That is a Gandhi quote if I recall.
But she also had it translated into Latin and, so, as I said, that was written
during the U.S.military buildup and the whole furor over the invasion of Iraq.
But how to describe it? Definitely she has heard the music of Górecki. She has
heard Osvaldo Golijov’s usic. She is exploring her palette, but there is
something very, very special in her work I feel, and I want to be there when
she writes her next great piece.
00:47:29
Crawford:
Do you all listen?
00:47:30
Harrington:
Yes. In this case one of the things that I did on—my wife and I took a little
vacation in Eastern Washington and I ended up listening to 300 composers
[laughs] on that trip. One of them was Alexandra.
00:47:51
Crawford:
You got three hundred submissions?
00:47:53
Harrington:
We had 350, I think, for that. So that is how we did it that first year. The
second year we divided it up a little bit more, only because in addition to the
Under Thirty composers, everyday I listen to five or ten composers that I
haven’t heard before. It is what I do every day.
63
00:48:12
Crawford:
You don’t look at the score first.
00:48:22
Harrington:
I would only use my ears first, yes. For me the score is a way of transmitting
information. It is not where I would get the information. I would get it audibly
first. I do this every day of my life and have since I was a kid. It is like—there
is a beautiful quote from Kafka, and he says “Writing is a form of prayer.” I
have always loved that quote and more recently I was thinking of that.
For me listening to music is, or could be thought of as, a form of prayer as
well. Receiving information from other people and other places and trying to
find ways of allowing that new information into your life. That is a form of
contemplation. It is something that for me is very important and I spend a
good part of my life doing that, and if we go out on a tour I will have 300 to
400 CDs with me [laughs].
00:49:52
Crawford:
You don’t party a lot when you are on tour.
00:49:59
Harrington:
Well, if there is an opportunity to cut loose and meet a few musicians and
stuff I might do that, but in general, for me, I have a little sound system I take
with me everywhere and I listen to music.
00:50:17
Crawford:
Your enterprise is such a huge one. And when you go to a new city there are
so many people who probably want to talk to you. Does it make you nervous?
00:50:27
Harrington:
Well, today my first interview was at 6:30 a.m. I had it at home, somebody
called me from the Netherlands. I had another one at 8:30 here. For me talking
about our work and getting the word out is a part of our work. So that needs to
be done. There are a lot more people who don’t know about our work, or the
string quartet as an art form, than do know about it. So it is a constant process
of getting the word out, I think.
For me, I think we said this yesterday, there are some experiences and there
are some composers and there are some people that you feel magnetized to. I
can’t explain that. I know as little about it as anybody else. I can feel it
though, and I trust that absolutely.
00:51:38
Crawford:
It has never let you down, would you say?
00:51:43
Harrington:
I would say it hasn’t let me down, no. When it comes to my inner sense of
when something is magnetized and when I am magnetized to something, and
when there is something that I think would be really important for Kronos to
do—I think we are batting a pretty high percentage on that.
64
00:52:05
Crawford:
Let us stop there for today.
65
Interview 3: March 3, 2004]
[Begin audio file 05 3-3-04]
Crawford:
March 3rd, interview number 3 with David Harrington for the Oral History
Office. I would like to begin by asking you how you work together and what
particular issues arise in preparing a concert.
00:00:11
Harrington:
Well, if you can imagine it, I am sure that it has arisen! We work in a
dynamic, human way, and we are dealing with realities. For example, I can
remember the very first time Kronos had to have a translator at one of our
rehearsals because we were working with a composer who spoke no English,
and we spoke no Azeri or Turkish or Russian. This has become something that
is now quite normal for us, the need for translators. The evolution of the use
of a sound system and our own engineer, and the way that our own concerts
have evolved to the point where we use our own lighting designer and have
for the last twelve or thirteen years.
00:01:32
Crawford:
So you have a lighting designer traveling with you as well?
00:01:35
Harrington:
Yes. There are generally at least six of us on the road. And then occasionally
there will be guest artists, and then occasionally Janet Cowperthwaite, our
manager, might join us, or our associate director, Laird Rodet. When we get to
Boston this weekend, Sidney Chen will be joining us. I think that I am
working with Tanya Tagaq, the Jimi Hendrix of throat singers this weekend.
Sidney will be there for that.
00:02:15
Crawford:
What is his work?
Harrington:
Well, there is a lot that goes in to putting new pieces together, assembling our
recordings, deciding on record covers, program notes if we might want them,
and the different production schedules. Sidney—in addition to a lot of the
other things that Sidney does, he helps assist me in a lot of the artistic
correspondence that I need to take care of. He coordinates all of the interviews
I do.
00:03:00
Crawford:
Is he the most constant person in the office?
00:03:04
Harrington:
No, I would say Janet Cowperthwaite is. Janet has been there for twenty-two
years.
00:03:09
Crawford:
So there is somebody to arrange your travel, to take care of all those things
that you used to do?
66
00:03:13
Harrington:
Yes, we have somebody who is handling all of our itineraries now. We have
somebody new now, her name is Anna Balkrishna. So, yes, there is a lot that
goes into what we do. It is complex. Then occasionally we will be working
with a composer who stays here at the studio, and this functions as an
apartment. Many composers have lived here for a number of weeks.
00:03:48
Crawford:
Was it your choice to stay in this neighborhood?
Harrington:
I think initially we probably came here because I don’t drive, and this is right
on the N Judah line. We all like the neighborhood here, too. It is a great
neighborhood—plenty of nice restaurants for lunch, it is a good place for
having meetings. I mean, we have seen a lot of changes in this neighborhood
since we have been here.
00:04:22
Crawford:
When you are rehearsing and performing, what are the things that come up,
and how do you resolve them? I am thinking everything from tempo to picket
lines to terrorism. Do you know what I mean? The four of you.
00:04:37
Harrington:
Well, for example, today we were rehearsing this new piece by Guo WenJing, a Chinese composer, and we were dealing with all kinds of issues. We
were practicing really slowly, trying to get the pitch just exactly the way we
wanted it. There are a lot of stylistic issues. We are basically trying to get
ready for the rehearsals with the percussionist, who will join us in a couple of
weeks, for this piece.
Then later, we were rehearsing Alfred Schnittke’s String Quartet No. I, which
is a piece that was written in the 1960s. He has been one of our favorite
composers for many, many years, and there is a concert, a memorial concert,
for Schnittke in Moscow that we are doing in September, and because of the
complexity of the schedule, we have to be rehearsing his pieces right now.
Since the concert opens with the First String Quartet, we want to be sure that
we really have it as solid as we can. So we are working on this right now, and
actually we were working on these various cadenzas from Schnittke’s quartet
today. So we were critiquing each other and trying to make it sound better.
00:06:04
Crawford:
Are you democratic?
00:06:06
Harrington:
You know, if you can define democracy as the leader being any one of us at
any point, then yes. And whoever seems to have the most clear vision of
whatever we are talking about, would probably be the point person for the
moment. And whoever has the most energy that day concerning each
67
particular issue. I have always thought that in a quartet everyone has to be
able to be a leader at any point.
For the last thirty-one years, I have been the talent scout. So basically, if we
have gotten into it, I have probably gotten us into it in terms of a relationship
with a composer or a new kind of approach, or a lot of the different artistic
ideas that we have been a part of—that has been something that basically I
spend all my time thinking about, so that is kind of my area. Then again, there
are all kinds of possibilities, and we try to remain open, and I would say—it is
interesting, we just had this meeting a few minutes ago, and talked about an
idea of a future piece that I had been thinking about. Well, it turns out Hank
had been thinking about the same thing too. It was kind of this nice moment of
coincidence.
Crawford:
If one of you felt very strongly against a piece, what would happen?
Harrington:
If someone felt really strongly against something, we would not do it. For us
to get out on the stage and play our music in concert halls all over the world,
we need everyone’s total absorption and commitment. There are so many
things that are possible to do that if someone really doesn’t like something in
Kronos, then there is no point in doing it. There are plenty of other things to
do.
But the other thing is that we try to remain very open-minded, and if
something doesn’t work the first time, maybe we can find a way of
approaching it differently. I am thinking of a specific piece—if we play a
piece on a concert and it just doesn’t quite work for us, then maybe it needs to
be in a different setting. Maybe the music that surrounded it wasn’t right, or
maybe the interpretation needs reexamination. I think that it is important,
especially when you are doing music that no one has heard before, and that
you haven’t done before, to give it some time. And keep going back.
Revisiting some of these new experiences, when you are in a different frame
of mind and a different mood. It is always good to work it out.
00:09:33
Crawford:
Do you have reservations based on politics about venues or repressive
governments, or picket lines, that kind of thing?
00:09:39
Harrington:
We were invited to South Africa many, many, times before the fall of
apartheid and we never went there. There have been other invitations that we
have had that we just didn’t feel that we could accept. [laughing] We just got
an invitation in the mail from the Republican National Party to play in New
York!
00:10:16
Crawford:
The Republican convention.
68
00:10:17
Harrington:
Yes! As there is no way in hell I would go anywhere near that!
00:10:21
Crawford:
Oh, I think you must go! You could do some major good.
00:10:22
Harrington:
[laughing] I am not going there!
00:10:25
Crawford:
Perhaps a piece in collaboration with Howard Zinn.
00:10:27
Harrington:
Yes, there we are. Well, the kind of stuff that we would do there, they
wouldn’t want, probably.
Crawford:
What about creative freedom when you are rehearsing? Is that something that
comes into play? Does someone ever go into great flights of fancy?
00:10:50
Harrington:
Well, hopefully everyone goes off in great flights of fancy. We work on an
interpretation and we work out our parts. We work out the coordination, but
ultimately each person has to have this total confidence and total freedom, and
yet we rely on each other so much.
00:11:23
Crawford:
I guess my question was more about correction during performance. The
Guarneri in their book talked about doing a lot of correcting during
performances.
00:11:35
Harrington:
Oh. Well, I haven’t read that, so I don’t know precisely what they might be
thinking about. But, for example, if I am giving a cue and we are not together,
the next time I give a cue I try to give a better one to engage everybody a little
more. Maybe my cue wasn’t good, if that is what you mean—something like
that.
00:12:08
Crawford:
Yes.
00:12:08
Harrington:
We are constantly making adjustments. I mean, playing music together is not
dissimilar to dancing together or a team sport. There is a lot of athletics
involved in what we do—a lot of keeping in shape. We are dealing with our
bodies, you know. Most often we don’t have a drummer. We are keeping the
pulse ourselves. Most music groups, if you think about pop groups or jazz
groups, or most music in the world, there is someone whose sole
responsibility is to keep a beat. In a string quartet that is something that you
share, usually. It is a communal beat. It is not like it is only Jennifer’s job, or
Hank’s job, or John’s job, or my job, it is something that we all share. So we
69
spend a lot of time thinking about the beat. For me, I think of the beat as kind
of a round object right in the middle of the group. It is almost like a pulsing
heart or something. It is something that we relate to together. That takes a lot
of coordinating. When I watch team sports like basketball or—recently I was
watching ice skating. When we were in Europe I was seeing some of this
champion ice-skating. I can really relate to what goes into a lot of what I have
noticed.
00:14:01
Crawford:
Precision.
00:14:03
Harrington:
Precision, and the amount of dedication. It is inspiring for me every day to
work with John, Hank and Jennifer. I get a lot of energy from the commitment
that I feel from everyone else.
00:14:23
Crawford:
Is performance enough to keep you fit?
00:14:24
Harrington:
Ah—well, you know, I wish I took more time for swimming and stuff like
that. I just don’t—I should do more of it. Well, we only have twenty-four
hours a day, it’s just [laughs]—
00:14:41
Crawford:
When you are traveling like that, do you get jag lag?
00:14:45
Harrington:
I have had jet lag for thirty-one years, and I don’t think I would know what
life felt like if I didn’t have jet lag. It is part of the occupational situation, I
think [laughter].
00:14:59
Crawford:
You said that you don’t socialize when touring.
00:15:05
Harrington:
Well, when we go out on tour I generally do most of the interviews—probably
95% of the interviews. I am also constantly meeting with composers and other
performers, and so, every tour we go on, I have many different meetings set
up. It is the social aspect of being a musician. But when it comes to kind of
hanging out after a concert and going to a bar and all that stuff, I just simply
cannot do that. I don’t have the energy. I am not really interested in drinking
or any form of social drugs or anything. I just don’t do that. For what I want to
accomplish, I just need too much focus to have the luxury of blunting it. Plus,
I don’t like the way music sounds if I have had anything to drink, or anything
else. It just doesn’t sound right to me.
Occasionally there will be something that we might all do together after a
show, but in general a lot of times we have to leave early the next morning for
another concert. So you want to keep yourself kind of ready, and one of things
70
that I personally do a lot on tours—I think I mentioned—I listen to a lot of
music. You know, I was thinking about it—this is something that I hadn’t
mentioned—there’s a resource that I use all the time: the daily newspaper.
You can get all kinds of musical ideas in the newspaper.
Many years ago, I had a wonderful idea that came out of a newspaper. It was
this amazing biography of J. Edgar Hoover. And I just thought, “This guy is—
this guy has got to be heard to be believed. I want our audience to hear his
voice.” [laughter] So I called up a friend of mine, and he got into the National
Archives, and he was able to find some voice samples of Hoover’s voice, and
we made this piece called “Sing, Sing, J. Edgar Hoover.” It was pretty
amazing. This happens all of the time. Something will be suggested from
events.
We might put together a program for a special event, and one of those was
when Kronos made its Carnegie Hall debut. When a performer has their debut,
an American performer especially, it is a big deal for us, and I realized that
this was kind of a significant event. I was just thinking, it was a symbolic
event.
And what should Kronos do? This was January 20th, 1994. I remember the
date very clearly. So I thought we should do a piece with America’s greatest
poet, and we have got to do his greatest poem. And so I thought it should be
Allen Ginsberg, and we have got to do Howl [laughter]. So that is what we
did. We did a new version of Howl that was set to music for us by a composer
named Lee Hyla. It was a fantastic experience to go out there and do Howl at
Carnegie Hall. It was a really wonderful experience. So I will always have a
good feeling about that concert. We also did the world premiere of the Fourth
String Quartet by Sofia Gubaidulina, a Russian composer.
Crawford:
What are your favorite halls?
00:20:13
Harrington:
Well, for me that was such a symbolic event, really. Yes, it was a nice hall. It
is a nice hall. We have been fortunate to play in some great ones: the
Tchaikovsky in Moscow is a great one. The Teatro Colon in Buenos Aires.
When we played there, it was one of the most inspiring concerts for us. We
had never been to Argentina before, and we get into this hall, and there are
five or six balconies. When the audiences start applauding there you feel like
the heavens are applauding you. You look up and as high as you can you there
are people applauding you.
00:21:03
Crawford:
Lively people.
00:21:06
Harrington:
Oh, it is wonderful. Astor Piazzolla, the great bandoneon player and tango
composer, had written for us. We have had this opportunity before, a feeling
71
that we were able to take some music back to its origin, so it was great to be
able to play Piazzolla in Buenos Aires. We met him in New York, we
rehearsed with him in Germany, we recorded in New York, but then shortly
after he died we were able to play his music in Argentina. It was just a
fantastic experience.
I just was reading in the newspaper today, the Philadelphia Orchestra was
playing Piazzolla. I think we recorded with him in 1991. Such an inspiring
experience to play with him. It is something that I should mention, that we
have been so fortunate to work, in addition to the composers, with many of the
guest artists that we have played with. Like the great gypsy group Taraf de
Haidouks. That was just a fantastic experience, it was—it was like twelve or
thirteen wild men from Romania. It was just astonishing. You can hear that on
the Caravan album.
00:22:48
Crawford:
The Caravan album is a favorite. We should discuss recordings, such a huge
number, but you could perhaps talk about the most important ones.
Harrington:
Well, it is hard to know where to start on that. This would probably be a larger
discussion about our albums and how they began to be formed. I think I
mentioned that first album we recorded way back in the late seventies was
called In Formation, which was a collection of ten rather short American
pieces.
Then there were several other recordings that we did early on: the music of
Warren Benson, and quartets of Dane Rudhyar. Then we started working with
Orrin Keepnews and we did the Thelonious Monk album, and the Bill Evans
album.
In about 1985, we signed with Nonesuch records. The first album that we did
had music that had been very close to us. It was music of Peter Sculthorpe, in
fact his Eighth Quartet was almost a theme song for four or five years in the
late seventies, early eighties.
Then there was the first quartet of Conlon Nancarrow, a great expatriate
American composer. We did the world premiere of that piece in about 1982, I
believe it was. For the first time in forty years, he came back to the United
States to hear the world premiere of his String Quartet No. 1. He came to the
Cabrillo Festival. It was a wonderful experience for us to be able to play that
music for him, and have him hear it, finally, after writing it in the forties.
[laughter] It was amazing.
Then there was music of Philip Glass and Aulis Sallinen from Finland, and
then we did Purple Haze of Jimi Hendrix. I had asked Conlon Nancarrow to
write another quartet for us, but when he heard that his music was next to the
music of Philip Glass, he decided that he was not going to write for Kronos
72
anymore. I think I mentioned this to you earlier, that some of our composers
have very, very, protective ideas about how their music should be presented
and what music it should be next to.
00:25:43
Crawford:
This is fair?
00:25:45
Harrington:
It is fair, and it is really shortsighted, in my opinion, because music doesn’t
work that way. People go to a concert and they hear whatever they want. They
go to a record store and they hear what they want. A composer has no control
over when a member of an audience is going to come in contact and really
focus on their music.
I think strong opinions are great. I just felt that it was too bad. He felt his
music ought to be next to the Grosse Fugue of Beethoven. We had a
discussion about this, and eventually he did write another quartet and he
called it String Quartet Number Three, and you will notice in Conlon
Nancarrow’s music, there is no String Quartet Number Two, which was the
one that he was going to write for us [laughter].
oo:26:47
Crawford:
This didn’t discourage you, though.
00:26:49
Harrington:
Absolutely not. I love his music- I love it! And then of course we have been
playing The Boogie Woogie Study #3A for our Visual Music concert. I have
got all kinds of ideas for the future with Conlon’s music.
00:27:04
Crawford:
Eva Soltes used to work with his music.
00:27:16
Harrington:
I don’t think she does any more. We are directly in touch with Trimpin in
Seattle, the man who digitized all of Conlon Nancarrow’s piano studies, and
so he helped us put together our version of the Study #3A, which is actually,
rather than player piano, Player Kronos. So every sound you hear on that—
you will hear it in May if you come to our concert in May.
So anyway, as you can see when I am talking about the albums, they begin
developing a little bit. Then the next album we did for Nonesuch was called
White Man Sleeps. And we ended up doing two movements of Kevin Volans’
piece along with Amazing Grace of Ben Johnston, and many other pieces.
All the while I was puzzling, how do we organize this mass of musical
information into coherent experiences? With our concerts in those days, in the
mid-eighties, there were just so many ideas that we were experimenting with.
Then it was the same way with the albums. I think the album after that was
called Winter Was Hard, and if you go back and listen to that album, what I
73
love about that album is that you never know what is going to happen next on
that [laughter].
00:28:42
Crawford:
Pieces of Africa is a platinum recording?
00:28:54
Harrington:
That has been one of our most successful albums to date. After that there was
Different Trains of Steve Reich, there was Salome Dances for Peace of Terry
Riley. Eventually then, there was Night Prayers, which was done in the fall of
‘94. We dedicated that to the memory of Joan’s stillborn baby.
The year before that Kevin Freeman [Hank Dutt’s partner], had died, and we
made an album called All the Rage, which was a piece about AIDS and about
the gay riots in San Francisco. That was an album we dedicated to Kevin
Freeman. So in the space of two years, a little less than two years, we had
three major tragedies in our group. The third one was the death of my son in
April of 1995. And, the experience of [pause] losing Adam is something that I
will never, ever recover from. The next day we were supposed to be in
Macedonia. This was a Sunday—actually, it was Easter Sunday, April 16,
1995—and my family was on Mount Diablo and then he just—died.
What happened is that, for me, there was all of a sudden absolutely no sound
inside of me. My inner being was dead. I really didn’t know if it was going to
be possible for me to ever play music again for quite some time. A few weeks
after that I was able to start rehearsing, and the group was incredibly
supportive of me and my family, as were hundreds of people and composers
and presenters. And friends, of course. But I wasn’t really certain that I was
going to be able to do it, because there wasn’t anything to create a magnetic
attraction to the music—the silence was too profound for me and too awesome
for quite some time.
I remember that very first concert that we played was in Orange County,
California. It was so weird to play music a month or so after Adam died. But
slowly, very, very slowly, music began to kind of reappear, for me. We were
working on an album called Early Music, and that became a total obsession
for me, for about a year and a half after that. Eventually that album came out
in, I am thinking it was 1996, in fact it was. It was Adam’s birthday on 1996,
and it is dedicated to him. It is really not the album that I wanted to make in
memory of him. But I just simply didn’t have the strength to do what I really
would have wanted to do.
So anyway, the Early Music album came about as an idea about sound and
about listening to music and how at one moment you can think that you are
hearing something from the past that sounds modern, on the other hand,
hearing something that is very modern that could sound very old. I felt that
74
there is this kind of web built around a listener and around a listening
experience to the point where you won’t know what time it is.
That became this image of—it was almost an image of perhaps responding to
grief, maybe. I am not really sure. But it became the only sound that I could
hear for quite a while. When you listen to that album now, or when I listen to
that album now, I am so reminded of that time and that experience. It was
very important, to me, actually, to make that album, and I hope that it was for
the rest of that group.
Previously we had done other albums where we had thought of the theme, like
for example, Black Angels. For me that was our statement about war, and our
antiwar record. Later there was Howl USA, and that was Howl plus the I.F.
Stone piece, plus Harry Partch, and it was different ways of dealing with
words and dealing with some of the issues of our country.
Then along came Early Music. I felt that the group had attained something in
the way that we put an album together that we hadn’t had before. Eventually
that led to the idea of making a trilogy, and the trilogy really came about, at
least in my mind, because of my son, and the second part of that trilogy is
called Caravan.
I will never forget the day I was in Prague, Czechoslovakia, and I went out to
a record store, which is something I do in every city I go to, and I came back
with some amazing recordings. One of them was these Czech gypsy
orchestras. I started listening to this music, and I was hearing these notes—I
guess I believe in notes, the value of a note—a great note. I was hearing some
really great notes.
On the one hand they were ecstatically happy, so there was this pull, like this.
On the other hand, they were so tragic. It was like looking through—I don’t
know if you have ever done this—but as a junior high school student or
something like that, you could look into these little drops of water and you can
see all of this life, from a swamp or something. It was almost like looking into
these drops of human tears, seeing happiness and seeing tragedy. It was
incredible. And I thought, okay, we have got to do an album that explores that
issue. That eventually became Caravan.
00:37:37
Crawford:
As vigorous as music can be.
00:37:40
Harrington:
I think it has done well. So has Early Music. Early Music has done well. But
one thing that led to the conclusion of the trilogy that Christmas of 1995, well
earlier than that—on the Day of the Dead, November of 1995, a close fried of
ours introduced my wife and daughter and me to the Day of the Dead. We
celebrated in Mexico. It was a wonderful experience that we had—
remembering Adam and eating some of his favorite foods, and telling stories.
75
00:38:30
Crawford:
Had you gone to Mexico as a family?
00:38:32
Harrington:
No. Not at that point. But I resolved on that November day that that was
where Regan and Bonnie and I should go at Christmas that year. So we went
to Mexico City and we spent about ten days there. It was the first time since
that previous April where we began to feel like we might be able to find some
happiness again. It was an amazing experience.
We stayed right on the Zócalo, which is the main square in Mexico City. The
sounds that you can hear from your hotel room day and night are
unbelievable. You will hear most of them if you listen to the Nuevo album.
Because for me it is a personal thank-you note to the culture of Mexico for
saving my family.
Every sound that is in there is a sound that we experienced together, whether
it is the sound of Carlos García playing the musical leaf, or whether it is the
bells at the end, where there are a million people having a party in the Zócalo.
That actually is from September 16, 2001, which happens to be my son’s
birthday. It also is Mexican Independence Day. So there are a lot of reasons
why I began learning more about Mexico. There were so many coincidences,
it was just too striking not to throw my whole being into this.
00:40:22
Crawford:
Had you known all these different musics?
00:40:24
Harrington:
No, no. For me it is interesting how many American musicians have been
influenced by music from south of the border. It is amazing—George
Gershwin, Aaron Copland. Just think of those two musicians, and Leonard
Bernstein. Bob Dylan. A lot of American musicians have been influenced by
Mexican musicians. Kronos had visited there quite a few times throughout the
years and I was aware of being in a place that was so different than what we
could experience sonically here.
00:41:23
Crawford:
But we all know that music. Especially West Coast people, you grow up with
it.
00:41:26
Harrington:
Yes, there is a lot of contact. So Nuevo became this kind of personal
investigation. Fortunately, all of the members of Kronos were as delighted as I
was to make this album. That is really how it happened. I could tell you, if
you want any specifics about any of the pieces, I could tell you anything that I
might know about any of them.
76
00:41:56
Crawford:
Maybe we can put some liner notes into the volume. The writer for the Nuevo
album explained the sixth beat—that distinctive Mexican beat—for the first
time to me. It is so typically Mexican, but how to explain it.
00:42:35
Harrington:
Right, right, that is right [laughter]. That is right.
00:42:39
Crawford:
So Nuevo is a signal album for you.
00:42:42
Harrington:
Well, yes, for me, of anything that the group had done up to that point, in
terms of expanding the palate of musical colors, working with the sound in the
recording studio to become so many things that it hadn’t been before. We had
never done anything like it before. Even in the first track, El Sinaloense, I
wanted Jennifer to become a tuba player, and I wanted Hank and John and me
to be trumpet players, and then I wanted there to be a moment where it
sounded like we were at Carnegie Hall. Then I wanted to go back on the street
[laughter]!
00:43:27
Crawford:
You do have a brass sound. How did you do that?
00:43:31
Harrington:
We worked a lot in that. On that album, it was almost like making a movie,
really. There were more than thirty days in the mix of that album, in the
studio. Then we learned how to do those kinds of transformations live too, so
when we play El Sinaloense now, we do sound like a tuba and three trumpet
players. I have always wanted our music to be able to just change, and our
instruments to be so flexible that they could be different instruments.
00:44:09
Crawford:
Never heard that before.
00:44:11
Harrington:
No. Well, you know, it is interesting because I probably have a much different
concern about my instrument than most other quartet players you would ever
talk to. Basically, I found the instrument that I played when I was about
twenty-two, when I first started studying with Veda Reynolds, and it has been
the instrument I have used ever since. A lot of people spend a lot of their lives
worried about their instrument, trying to get a better instrument, worrying
about their bow, trying to get a different bow.
Basically, I just decided on these things kind of early on, and what I wanted to
do is teach my body how to make this instrument become something different.
I am not too worried about the instrument itself. I just found one I like, and
then I use it. You can’t even read the name of the person who made it inside
my violin, and I play on a bow that is made out of graphite, because it is really
strong and really balanced, and I like it.
77
I guess I am very particular, but I just decided on something that made me
happy early on. I would say that if you talk to Hank or John or Jennifer, they
would be much more concerned about their instrument and their bows, and all
that stuff, which is fine.
00:45:58
Crawford:
Do they have several they can use?
00:46:00
Harrington:
Oh, Hank will bring three or four bows out on the stage with him. That would
drive me nuts. There is no way that I would ever do that [laughter]. So, you
know, everybody is different.
00:46:10
Crawford:
Different ideas.
00:46:12
Harrington:
Sure. And I like the fact that we have totally different ideas about a lot of
things. That is fine. I don’t know how they put up with me [laughter].
00:46:24
Crawford:
Well, we have about seven minutes. We haven’t really gotten to Sun Rings,
something very new for the quartet.
00:46:35
Harrington:
Well, in order to talk about Sun Rings, we have to talk about Riley’s work as a
whole, in a way. Sun Rings came about because we got a phone call from the
arts program director at NASA. And his question was, “Would Kronos be
interested in including some of the sounds recorded on the Voyager
expeditions in our concerts?” And when I heard about this I thought, I’ve
never heard those sounds. I didn’t know there were those sounds out in outer
space. Let me hear them! [laughter] So they sent us a tape, and I thought I was
hearing part of nature that I never heard before.
00:47:20
Crawford:
Describe it.
00:47:21
Harrington:
It is hard to describe. I have heard sounds of insects and I have heard sounds
of whales, and I have heard a lot of different animal sounds, and somehow,
these sounds were related to those sounds in a very strange way, and I wanted
to know more. At that point we were in the process of recording a piece that
Terry Riley wrote in memory of my son, called Requiem for Adam.
00:47:57
Crawford:
We haven’t talked about that.
00:48:00
Harrington:
Well, part of the reason that I began to think that Terry was the right composer
to do the piece from the Voyager expeditions was that in the second
78
movement of the Requiem for Adam, he created this amazing kind of sound
collage. It was almost like he created this band from Tibet or from somewhere
up high in the mountains—in Asia. It was incredible, that kind of sound. It
just seemed like this guy’s imagination is so amazing. I bet he could take
these Voyager sounds out of this world somewhere.
I decided to wait until I was going to see him. It was during those recording
sessions, I think it was August of 2000, and I asked him if he would be
interested in doing this. I could tell right away that he was really interested.
That began the process. Eventually Terry and I went to a launch of the
Challenger and we ended up visiting this amazing scientist-physicist in Iowa
City, the man that invented the plasma wave receptor.
00:49:34
Crawford:
What was his name?
00:49:35
Harrington:
Dr. Donald Gurnett. And as Terry said, “You felt like you were in the
presence of somebody like Galileo or Isaac Newton, or Einstein, or
something. For a minute you felt like you understood the entire universe.”
Once Terry said, “You know, I think that this piece is going to need to have
some visual elements.”
It was Janet Cowperthwaite, our manager, who thought of Willie Williams,
the great stage designer, who has worked with U2 for the last twenty years,
and David Bowie, and REM, and many different, very successful, pop groups.
She had seen a U2 concert where he was able to make this very large space
feel very intimate. That is kind of what we wanted to do, to take elements
from the Jet Propulsion Lab, visual elements that were available to us, and
somehow give our audience a sense of intimacy and immediacy.
00:50:56
Crawford:
Is that the largest Kronos production?
00:51:01
Harrington:
I would say it is either Sun Rings or Visual Music. Those two productions that
we did in our thirtieth-anniversary year, those were probably the biggest
productions we have ever done. I should step back a little bit. He began
writing the music in August of 2001. After September 11, many of us were
just stunned and silenced for quite a while. That certainly happened to Terry
when he was composing Sun Rings.
Basically after that, when he got back into the composing, the piece took on
an entirely different direction. Eventually he realized that he would need a
large choir. So Sun Rings also features an eighty-voice choir [laughter].
00:52:05
Crawford:
Isn’t that unusually large?
79
00:52:06
Harrington:
It is rare. We are going to do it in Boston on Sunday afternoon, and we are
going to do it in a couple of other places, a few other places in the spring, and
we are going to open the Brooklyn Academy Next Wave Festival in October.
We have done it in London and Paris and various other cities around the
country here. It is a big production for us, very big production. But he
definitely is this amazingly creative composer, kind of at the height of his
imaginative scope, writing this incredible music.
00:52:58
Crawford:
Where is he going from here?
00:52:59
Harrington:
Where he is going from here is the piece with Wu Man [The Cusp of Magic]. I
thought the scope would not get any more vast, would become incredibly
more intimate. I spend a lot of my time, as I said, thinking, what should this or
that composer do next? What could I suggest that just might be the right
thing? I thought something with Wu Man would be very good as a piece after
Sun Rings. But as I mentioned, there are thirty-five or forty new pieces being
written all the time.
00:54:03
Crawford:
You’ve said you don’t keep playing all the larger works, but what about
something like Lyric Suite, with which you have such a history.
00:54:07
Harrington:
Yes. We might not ever play that publicly again.
10
Crawford:
Having won the Grammy [for that], aren’t you often asked to do it?
00:54:16
Harrington:
What I wanted to do was make the recording of that piece where every note
was the best that I could possibly play, and I know that all of us felt that way.
We got as close as we could. And the group has played that many, many times
over the years. It is interesting, after we recorded [Dmitri] Shostakovich’s
Eighth Quartet [for Black Angels], we never played it publicly again.
We thought we found something for that recording that we wanted. And I can
feel that way about the Lyric Suite, and how often would we be able to work
with Dawn Upshaw in that way. That doesn’t make me sad, actually, I just see
that recording as something that we were able to all do together, and I think
we reached a level that we are proud of, and I am looking for—what I want to
do is encourage composers to write the next Lyric Suite, the next Grosse
Fugue, the next—
00:55:41
Crawford:
You obviously are.
80
00:55:43
Harrington:
I almost feel like that is my responsibility in my work. So we are doing Sun
Rings right now, and Visual Music. We have got a lot of new pieces that we
have put together, and I am excited about the future. There are so many
possibilities. We are living in what is almost like a platinum age of creativity.
No matter what is going on in the world, no matter how many bombs are
getting dropped, or whatever, there are musicians who are finding beauty and
finding connections in many different places in the world, and this is
something to celebrate, and I intend to do that.
00:56:46
Crawford:
What a good way to look at the state of things. Well, you must be the
wealthiest string quartet in Western history, right?
00:56:55
Harrington:
Every time that it seemed like we could get a little bit ahead, then we added
another employee. When we started doing Different Trains in 1998, then we
began to need a sound engineer. That is when we first started with a sound
engineer. So then there were five in Kronos.
00:57:13
Crawford:
Is that when you started overdubbing?
00:57:15
Harrington:
Well that piece has a total of four Kronoses going on. When we play them live
there are three of them in backing tracks. Then several years later it began to
seem as though when we showed up at a concert we didn’t like the lighting. It
is kind of like, what the audience was getting seemed haphazard to us, in
concert halls all over the world, and we decided to do something about that.
We got Larry Neff to do some lighting designs for us, and he became our
lighting man. So now we have six people traveling, plus a cello, so it is really
seven. So as I said, the whole thing about money—we have a lot of overhead.
It takes a lot of people to keep all of this going.
00:58:21
Crawford:
What is your annual budget?
00:58:23
Harrington:
It is around a $1,500,000, I think—something like that.
Crawford:
Well, we haven’t talked about Steve Reich, an important composer for
Kronos.
0:00:05
Harrington:
Okay. Each of the hundreds of composers that we have worked with has a
story, and there is a history to the relationship, and there is a way that we got
to know each of the composers. Now, [with] Steve Reich, it happened in this
way; I had been aware of his music for a long, long time. Of course I was a
big fan of his piece called Music for Eighteen Musicians—a fantastic piece, a
81
really great piece. There was one time when Steve Reich was coming to San
Francisco and so I wrote him a letter, and arranged that we could meet.
At that point then, we started talking about string quartets, and he said the
string quartet just seemed like a prehistoric kind of ensemble for him. He just
didn’t seem too interested in it at the time. So I kept staying in touch with him.
Then one time I had this idea. We were doing a concert here in San Francisco,
and we decided to open the concert with a piece of his called Clapping Music.
I don’t know if you have heard it [claps out beat], you know that? It is a great
piece. It is inspired by the flamenco clapping, actually.
So, what happened is that after that concert I wrote Steve a letter and told him
that we had just played his First String Quartet, which was Clapping Music.
Somehow he got sort of intrigued by this.
So we got to know each other more, and eventually he, along with Ligeti,
came to the New York premiere of Terry Riley’s Salome Dances for Peace,
and we just got to know each other better and better. Eventually he accepted a
commission from us to write a new piece. That became Different Trains.
Many people think of it as his masterpiece. It is certainly on of his most
personal pieces, and really, through the use of prerecorded voices, it gives a
sense of his early life and some of the issues he is concerned with.
00:02:50
Crawford:
The music is documentary, isn’t it?
00:02:51
Harrington:
Yes, it is. It really deals with train trips, imaginary ones and real ones.
00:03:01
Crawford:
Didn’t he interview his governess about childhood trips he made?
00:03:04
Harrington:
Yes. His governess, and about real trips that he had been on across the country
and there was also survivors of the Holocaust. If he would have been living in
Europe, the train trips that he would have been taking during that same time
would have been to Poland. Anyway it was an interesting process because in
order for us to play the piece publicly, we had to record it before we could
ever play it. That is because it is written for four quartets. It has to be done in
a recording studio incredibly precisely. Some of the tempo markings are so
precise, you can’t believe it. It is like 89.2 beats per minute. Things like that.
So it has to be done electronically, with an electronic metronome and things in
the studio. We did this in a studio here in San Francisco. We spent nine days
recording the piece and eventually what we ended up with is the finished
recording that you can hear on the record. And we also ended up with the
three pre-recorded parts. So when we gave the world premiere in London,
England, we played the solo part over the top of the three backing quartets.
82
And that is how Different Trains happened. And it has been one of the real
landmark pieces, certainly in the 1980s, of any string quartet music, I would
say. I think it is fair to say that.
We did a piece once with twenty pre-recorded quartets in the earlier eighties,
but nothing that was quite as monumental in its scope as Different Trains.
Different Trains affected our concerts in a very profound way. In order to play
the piece you have to be amplified. The group has to be amplified.
Before that we had played Black Angels of George Crumb, which is for
electric string quartet, and there had been a few other pieces where we used
amplification. But with Different Trains, the group pretty much decided that
our concerts needed to have a sound system.
Eventually through bizarre experiences of when we didn’t have our own
sound engineer, we learned that we needed our own sound engineer, someone
that knew the music really well and knew what we needed. So the experience
of performing Different Trains all over the world really changed Kronos in a
big way. And we became a quintet.
00:06:46
Crawford:
Are you going to say something about the sound person?
00:06:47
Harrington:
Yes! We have had some wonderful sound people in our career so far. There
has been Jay Cloidt, who is also a composer, there is Scott Fraser, and he
works with us a lot. He is also a composer, and Mark Gray is a composer.
Basically I would say that musicians all over the world began to hear this
piece [Different Trains] and it really began to change how quartet music was
written. It has had a very big effect on music. As I said, it really took Kronos
into another dimension.
00:07:42
Crawford:
Is there another collaboration as important as that of Reich or Riley?
00:07:47
Harrington:
Oh we have had a lot of strong collaborations. There is also, I mentioned Ken
Benshoof, whose music comes from the kind of European-American tradition
of music. But the collaboration with him was very strong. I think I mentioned
Piazzolla and Feldman, and Kevin Volans—
00:08:11
Crawford:
Górecki.
Harrington:
Oh, Górecki is an amazing composer. He has been working on his Third
Quartet for twelve years now. I am so looking forward to that piece when it is
completed.
83
00:08:30
Crawford:
Who else is writing for you?
00:08:33
Harrington:
Steve Reich is going to write a third quartet, actually. The second one was
called Triple Quartet and we have been playing that all over at many of our
concerts around the world in the last couple of years. In 2007 Steve is going to
write his third quartet for us.
Terry Riley is writing a new piece. Rahman Asadollahi, the wonderful
Azerbijani composer, and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh. She has written three
wonderful pieces for us. Aleksandra Vrebalov from Yugoslavia is writing a
new work, as is the musical inventor and Nancarrow specialist, Trimpen. He
is doing a piece. There is a musical instrument inventor called Walter
Kitundu, who is doing a new piece— a fantastic composer.
00:09:46
Crawford:
Is he African?
00:09:48
Harrington:
His family is from Tanzania, yes. We are doing music of Rahul Dev Burman,
the great Indian film-soundtrack composer. There are many young composers,
Alexandra duBois, I mentioned her—the recipient of the first Under Thirty
commission. I mentioned the piece that she is doing. D.J. Spooky, an
electronic composer, will be writing for us, as will a great Icelandic group
Sigur Ros and Mogwai. from Scottland, and Amon Tobin,who is one of the
most creative electronic composers. He is doing a new piece for us.
00:10:56
Crawford:
Did you ever ask Boulez?
00:10:57
Harrington:
You know, we have met him, and he has heard us, and I am sure he has
trouble tolerating 95% of the music that we like to play, but I found him a
charming man.
00:11:13
Crawford:
I have wanted to ask you about the composer who arranged Nuevo.
00:11:29
Harrington:
Oh, Osvaldo Golijov. Osvaldo Golijov is a composer that I first got to know
when Kronos played at Tanglewood, and I just happened to be looking
through their summer program, and one of the things that I do is I notice the
way composers talk about their music. The way they write about it, if there is
a program note or something. I always notice that. I was very moved by some
of the things that he was saying about one of his pieces—just the way he said
it. I thought I had to hear his music. So I tracked him down and we have been
friends ever since.
84
Osvaldo has been involved in our work for more than ten years now—more
like twelve years I guess. It was very clear that following his work on the
Caravan album, it seemed like he would be just he right person to do some of
the—really it is like translating—is what it is. It is called arranging, but it is
more than arranging because it is trying to find the essence of something and
finding a form to maintain the essence and yet change the instrumentation. So
there is a lot of very creative thinking that goes into this kind of work.
With Osvaldo’s translations or arrangements, there is usually a lot of work
that we have to do to make them sound right. We have to translate the
translation [laughter]. He is a very creative and thoughtful person and
sometimes we spend a lot of time working with him and reworking what he
has done. Basically with all of his work on Nuevo—with each of the pieces,
there was a very specific idea, a very specific image that I had in mind, and I
tried to find a way of communicating that. Then Osvaldo would give us a
notated version of some of these ideas and then we would find a way of
dealing with the notation. Then later on, with Gustavo Santaolalla, who was
the main producer, the two of us basically mixed the album and worked with
the sound and tried to find the essence of certain sounds that I was looking
for—that is basically what it was. But I feel like Osvaldo was the one that
gave us the raw material.
00:14:57
Crawford:
What he had heard probably wasn’t written down initially?
00:15:02
Harrington:
Right, that is right. A lot of times it was music that had never been notated.
00:15:09
Crawford:
Amazing.That had to take a long time to put together.
00:15:13
Harrington:
It was. It did take a long time. These albums, as we speak right now, there are
about four or five albums that I am currently working on, some more than
others. Early Music took three years. And Caravan was a couple of years, and
Nuevo was a couple of years. Black Angels, I have said that album took
sixteen years to make because I always knew that Kronos would record that. I
also knew that had to be the first piece on the album. So the questions that
took sixteen years to answer was, what should come after Black Angels?
00:16:16
Crawford:
How about Arvo Pärt? I think of his work as being special for the quartet.
00:16:22
Harrington:
Yes, we have had a wonderful relationship with Arvo Pärt’s music for many,
many years. He is just an amazing composer. The first piece that we ever
played of his was called Fratres, and you will hear that on Winter Was Hard
album.
85
00:16:44
Crawford:
Is he working for you now?
00:16:45
Harrington:
Not directly, but you never know about that. He is someone that I hope will
soon.
00:16:56
Crawford:
You have had Barber on a couple of albums, Adagio for Strings. What is it
about that work?
00:17:04
Harrington:
I feel that Samuel Barber’s Adagio is one of those very rare pieces that has the
ability to absorb grief and radiate light [chuckles]. I think that piece is an
exceptionally wonderful piece of music. It is hard for me to even imagine that
he was twenty-one years old when he wrote that piece. How could anybody
ever write anything greater than that piece? Kronos only played it twice,
publicly, and we will never play it again. We played it last time on Hiroshima
Day at a concert at the University of San Francisco, many, many years ago. It
is not the kind of piece that I want to play, live.
We recorded it and I felt we had obtained something that we needed to obtain
and I like where it is on the album, and I want to leave it right there.
00:18:26
Crawford:
Who are the composers you want to work more with—for instance Glass?
Harrington:
Oh, Philip Glass’s music, we have been playing his music for twenty years at
least. We did the Mishima recording. He wrote his Fifth Quartet for us and we
gave the premiere of the Fourth Quartet. Then he wrote Dracula, the
soundtrack to the silent film Dracula.
But we have a really nice relationship with Philip Glass. Someone that I had
hoped would write for us was Alfred Schnittke and he wanted to write his
Fifth Quartet for us but he just didn’t live to be able to do that.
00:19:55
Crawford:
What is it about Schnittke?
00:19:59
Harrington:
For me, if a person sits down and listens to the four quartets of Alfred
Schnittke in one sitting, it is one of the most amazing biographical documents
that there is in music. By the time that you get to the last page of the Fourth
Quartet, it is so personal, and as if you have been through this journey inside
this man’s creative being. It is just amazing. I think it is one of the great
sequences of string quartets that there is.
Today we were working on the First Quartet, polishing that, trying to get it
ready for performance. The piece comes from the sixties, and it is slightly
86
abstract in ways that his other quartets aren’t, and yet there are elements in all
of the other quartets that are straight out of the First Quartet.
In fact the Fourth Quartet, there are a lot of elements of that in the First
Quartet. It is like his creative life is this circle. He is able to see through this
circle to various points of his life. It is amazing what he did. We are now
playing the Quintet with Irina Schnittke, his widow. She is a fantastic piano
player. We recorded it too. It is not out yet, but it has been recorded.
There are a lot of younger composers that are writing for us. We mentioned
Osvaldo Golijov. He is doing several other original pieces, not only
translations and arrangements, and there is Michael Gordon from New York.
He is a very instinctive and insightful composer. I hope someday that Sofia
Gubaidulina will write again for us. She is a great composer.
00:22:34
Crawford:
Ever look to David Lang?
00:22:36
Harrington:
Sure, David has written for us. When ACT theater reopened after the
earthquake he did the play The Tempest. It was for Kronos.
00:22:47
Crawford:
We haven’t talked about Joan Jeanrenaud, and her leaving the quartet, which
is really your only personnel change in many years. That is amazing.
00:22:58
Harrington:
Yes. When she announced that, of course we were surprised and shocked. We
all knew what she had been through three years before, which was a
devastating experience. We also knew that there were other health issues that
were making the schedule more and more complex and difficult. We played
together just about every day for twenty years, so the thought of making a
change at that point—and of course you always wonder can the organism—
should it continue? For me personally there were so many things that I simply
had to do musically that I knew that there was no way that I could quit.
If I wasn’t in Kronos I wouldn’t be a musician. I wouldn’t even play the
violin. It is too much work [laughter]. I decided that thirty-one years ago, that
I was very single-minded about this and have been ever since. So basically for
me, at that juncture, the decision was, “Yes, I want to continue, and the group
has so many things that it hasn’t done yet that we need to do.”
I remember going down to the record store and getting all these cello records,
because I hadn’t even thought about the cello as separated from Joan or
Kronos from nearly twenty years. Then the idea of auditioning someone else
came up. We started that process and it was very strange, surreal, for quite a
while. Then I think we invited seven or eight people from all over the country
to hear—
87
00:25:57
Crawford:
Did you have hundreds show up?
00:26:02
Harrington:
We didn’t announce it publicly. We did it very privately and very quietly.
There were only a few people who knew at this point that we were looking for
someone else. And eventually what happened is that we got a
recommendation that Jennifer Culp might be someone that we should
consider.
It turns out at that point Jennifer Culp was living about ten blocks from here,
and I had never heard of her and had never met her before. So one day she
came over and we had a pile of about eighteen or twenty pieces that we had
each of the cellists play with us. Apparently it scared them to death [laughter],
I don’t know. I guess it was kind of awesome.
There was Webern, there was John Adams, there was Terry Riley, and there
was Schnittke, and there was all kinds of stuff, and there were a couple of
pieces that ended up being on the Caravan album. There was a quality. The
group had a certain quality that all of us liked. There was a sound that felt
right at that point. I don’t know what else to say except that Joan contributed a
great deal to Kronos over all those years. We had an amazing number of
fantastic experiences in exploring music and it was great fun.
00:28:10
Crawford:
When you searched for her replacement, did you want a woman because that
had been the chemistry before?
00:28:20
Harrington:
We didn’t set out to choose a woman or a man. We just set out to find the best
cellist that we could find, and somebody that complemented the group. I have
to say that with several of the male cellists—it ended up feeling like there was
too much testosterone in the room or something. I didn’t quite recognize it as
Kronos. So I have no idea. It is almost a question that I don’t know the answer
to, except that we found the best cellist. I know that. And that is what we
needed.
00:29:06
Crawford:
She just stepped right in?
00:29:07
Harrington:
Just stepped right in. It is kind of unbelievable what Jennifer has
accomplished. It is really amazing.
00:29:11
Crawford:
What was her background?
00:29:14
Harrington:
I think she had done a lot of freelancing in the Bay Area and I don’t really
know a whole lot about it. She had played in a piano quartet, and had done
88
things with the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, I think. She had
gone to the New England Conservatory when she was a student. She has had a
lot of experience with music. I don’t think she had ever been in a group that
spent as much time focusing itself as Kronos does, but she has really adjusted
really well. She has done really well. She has had some marvelous
suggestions. We have benefited a lot from her being in the group.
00:30:09
Crawford:
In terms of composers?
00:30:11
Harrington:
Well, not necessarily composers so much as ways of approaching our
instruments. We are always trying to improve and it is great if you feel like
you learned something new. I always feel better if I feel like I learned
something new.
00:30:33
Crawford:
Someone said of the quartet that you play with total innocence. What does it
mean?
00:30:44
Harrington:
Well you will have to ask whoever said it.[laughter] I don’t know.
00:30:47
Crawford:
Is that your sense of your playing?
00:30:49
Harrington:
That would be nice. That would be great.
00:30:55
Crawford:
You have made an astonishing number of additions to quartet music. I read
that for the last thirty years you have produced a new work every three weeks.
Can it be true?
00:31:06
Harrington:
Well, let’s see. If you think there are over 500 new pieces at this point, I don’t
know. How do we do the math on that? It feels like it is probably more than
that actually.
00:31:47
Crawford:
Will you be able to do that for the next thirty years?
00:31:51
Harrington:
I need about fifty more years. I need them. I need them, yes. I am going to be
a really unhappy dead man if I don’t have fifty more years to do this
[laughter].
00:32:08
Crawford:
Well, is there anything else you want to say?
89
Harrington:
When I think back to that very first concert that I ever played, and it was
music of Webern and Bartók and Ken Benshoof, I feel that our music has
almost been, and the relationships that we have been able to create have
almost been like a spiral. It started out Ken Benshoof was my teacher when I
was in high school. My composition teacher. He was the first composer that I
ever worked with as a high school student, and then he became the one that
wrote the first piece for us. Then slowly we got to know more composers.
Eventually then, at a certain point there was a woman who wrote a piece for
us. I hadn’t played any music by any women composers. Then later on there
was music by a composer from another country.
00:33:20
Crawford:
Who was the first woman?
00:33:22
Harrington:
That is a good question. [pause] The first woman that wrote for us, I believe,
was Ann Silsbee. She taught music at Cornell University. I met her in upstate
New York. She wrote a really good piece for us. Over the years there have
been now forty or fifty women composers. Eventually then, there was an
African American composer. I remember we did a concert once in New York
in the early ‘80s of all African American composers. I was so proud of that, it
was like, “Finally, this medium was getting some perspective.”
00:34:19
Crawford:
Early on?
00:34:21
Harrington:
Yes, it was in the very early eighties, it was like 1982 or 1983 or something.
00:34:26
Crawford:
Who were they?
00:34:27
Harrington:
There was Anthony Braxton. There was Leroy Jenkins. Leo Smith. Eventually
we found ourselves playing with the Modern Jazz Quartet. That Quartet was
such a great group. There was a quote from Connie Kay, the drummer,
because we were just sort of in awe of their ensemble, and just their
quartetness, and one of us asked him about working as an ensemble, and what
it was like to be around each other for like fifty years or whatever it was. He
said, “Ah, we have been together so long, we can tell when one of us is
getting ready to fart.” [laughing] And I thought, “That is a good definition of
ensemble.”
I remember when we started, the first time we went to Canada and the first
time we went to Europe, and our music—it is great to be able to play music in
different places and different cultures, because it sounds different. The
audience is almost like an instrument. You get an audience of Russians in
Moscow or wherever, and the world I think must sound different to Russian
people than it would to people in San Francisco. And what a concert means
90
and the whole history that they have lived through and the whole history that
we have lived through. You find yourself playing music in that environment,
in a different environment, and the audience becomes almost like a speaker
that you are playing into.
00:36:43
Crawford:
You get some feedback.
00:36:45
Harrington:
Oh yeah! I found our audiences to be really inspiring. I have always felt that
they want the best from us. They want us to play better than we ever did
before. You begin feeling like that is what you have to do for the audience.
Recently I’ve started running into people who heard us when they were in
junior high school and now they have kids, and they are bringing their kids to
the concerts [laughs]! It is fantastic, you know, I really love it. I love it when
families come to our concerts with little kids. I think our music ought to be
able to work for any age group—the only thing for me is if you are curious
and want to have a musical experience, then I think it would be great to come
to a Kronos concert, because that is what we want to do too [laughter]. We are
curious and we want to have a musical experience too.
00:37:56
Crawford:
That first exposure can change a life.
00:37:58
Harrington:
Yes, and as a performer you never know. You might be luckily enough to
provide that for somebody. You might just be able to do that.
00:38:08
Crawford:
Have you?
00:38:09
Harrington:
We have been told that we have. For me that is a very satisfying thing to
contemplate. If we have been able to open up someone’s imagination and
curiosity to the world of music. For me that is what it is really all about.
00:38:37
Crawford:
When you go to Japan, say, which is a culture so different from ours, how
does the audience see you?
00:38:44
Harrington:
First time we played in Japan we played in this really cool festival called the
Interlink Festival and we played the first piece and I wondered, gee, do they
like us here? Then we played the next piece and there was a little more
applause and, after the third piece, a little more. By the end of the concert I
think we did six encores [laughter]. They literally wouldn’t let us go! But at
first you just wondered if everything was okay? Do we sound all right? What
is going on here? We have found that every time we have ever played in
Japan. That is the way it is.
91
00:39:25
Crawford:
Do you create your programs thinking about what is going to be perfect for
the audience?
00:39:34
Harrington:
You really can’t do that. You never know what is going to be right for
somebody. You can’t try to second guess what somebody else is going to like,
or what another culture might like or anything. Basically the way we look at it
is that we haven’t done it yet in San Francisco, let’s try it in San Francisco.
We haven’t done it in Japan? Let’s try it there. We are constantly
experimenting with our music and seeing how it feels to play—like we
haven’t done Sun Rings in Boston. Well let’s see what it is like Sunday night.
We will find out [laughs]!
92
Interview 4: November 28, 2007
Begin Audio File 07 11-28-2007.mp3
Crawford:
November 28, 2007, interview number four with David Harrington of Kronos
Quartet for the oral history office. Today we’ll talk about things we covered
briefly in the first interviews.
07-00:00:09
Harrington:
The business of the quartet, and the office and the staff and all that. I noticed
in there that we had started on it, and that somehow I got totally sidetracked.
Crawford:
Good. Well, let’s start there. Something more about Janet Cowperthwaite.
07-00:00:24
Harrington:
Right. Janet has celebrated twenty-five years with Kronos. Are we running?
Crawford:
We’re running, yes.
07-00:00:34
Harrington:
And so it’s an unusual and longstanding, and very important part of our work,
which is the structure of our office and our staff. A lot of people are kind of
amazed that we have quite a few employees.
The quartet started in 1973, and I was essentially the manager at that point.
That lasted for seven years, I think. Maybe six years. And by that point, I had
two small children, and was getting calls all day and all night at our little
apartment here in San Francisco, and having the library there. It became an
absolutely impossible situation. And I think it was Hank who realized at one
point that the library needed to be somewhere else.
And so Hank ended up taking the entire library, which now is in this other
room back here, which you can look at later if you want. Hank has been the
librarian since about 1979, probably. And so in a way, that was the beginning
of decentralizing, or finding another center, rather, for kind of the structure of
the group, out of my own apartment. [laughs]
And then I think it was in 1981— We had tried several different forms of
management. We had someone when we were over at Mills College, and then
we tried someone else earlier than that. We actually rented a room above the
restaurant right here that used to be Stoyanof’s. It’s now Park Chow. And we
had a little room. And I think we started that in about 1980. And we had a guy
who was our manager at that point, and it just wasn’t working out.
Crawford:
Why?
07-00:03:16
Harrington:
He didn’t know what to do, and didn’t know how to do things. Well, there
were several of these people. We went through different people.
93
Finally at one point, we got a call from a close friend of ours who owned a
bookstore down on Irving Street. She had just interviewed someone, a young
woman who was going to San Francisco State and was looking for a job. Our
friend didn’t need that help at that point, but she thought maybe Kronos could
use her intelligence. And that’s how we first met Janet Cowperthwaite.
That would’ve been in 1981, I’m pretty sure. Janet started answering the
phone for us and responding to a few letters and stuff, kind of in the
afternoon, after going to San Francisco State. And what happened is, it soon
became clear that she could do many more things than that. And so slowly,
over a period of several years, more and more of the administrative work of
Kronos went to Janet.
Crawford:
What about travel? Your travel was so complicated.
07-00:04:36
Harrington:
It’s kind of amazing. We used to have a car, and we drove all over California
and the West Coast in this car, all together. But slowly—and everything has
happened very slowly in Kronos, actually—it became impossible to maintain
the schedule of driving everywhere. So then it became something where we
would start to fly.
And then at a certain point, we needed help arranging flights. And all the
while, the group has been a non-profit organization since 1973, in Seattle.
And so we were applying for different grants. And initially, those were written
by— initially, it was me. And then when Joan became part of Kronos, she
took on a lot of that. And as Kronos got busier and busier, then Janet took on
some of that; and then as Janet got busier, then we had to have someone else.
So slowly, it’s kind of evolved like that. And the same thing happened with
the travel, with every aspect of the group. And at this point, like today, over at
the office, there are six employees.
Crawford:
Sidney is full-time, isn’t he?
07-00:06:30
Harrington:
Sidney is there, Christina is there, Lucinda, Laird, Leslie and Janet. And then
we have Scott Fraser, who’s our sound engineer, and Larry Neff, who’s our
lighting designer.
Larry does a lot more than lighting design. He also does a lot of the travel, he
does a lot of the tour management, and pre-tour arrangements. So if we’re
doing a theatrical piece or something like that, Larry is intimately involved in
all of the details. For example, in Mexico, we’re doing our visual piece called
Visual Music. I don’t know if we talked about that the last time? Well, trying
to do something like that in Mexico is a big deal, and involves a lot of freight,
a lot of setup time and all that. So the staff of Kronos is called on to do all
kinds of different things.
94
But getting back to the way it evolved, so then in 1981 there was Janet. And
then a year or so later, Teresa Byrne joined us. I can’t remember all the
different people who have been associated with Kronos, but it’s quite a large
family of people. And basically, we’re pretty much in touch with everybody
that’s worked with us.
Crawford:
That’s great. They stay a long time; that’s a plus
07-00:08:17
Harrington:
Yes, and they keep coming to the shows. So if they’ve moved out of the area,
we may see them once a year or whatever. But it’s been kind of an amazing
experience to share this with so many talented people.
Crawford:
Has your budget grown a lot since we talked?
07-00:08:42
Harrington:
Well, I think it has, yes. Janet would be able to tell us what it’s at right now,
but it’s getting quite a bit bigger.
Crawford:
Is there a lot of competition now? You were unique for a while. You still are,
of course, but there are quartets springing up.
07-00:09:00
Harrington:
Well, I don’t know if we talked about this. I can’t remember everything we
talked about three years ago. [laughs] But the quartet, at this point, has
commissioned over 600 pieces. And I’m aware of over 250 of them that have
been recorded by other groups.
Crawford:
Isn’t that something?
07-00:09:26
Harrington:
I’m really proud of that. That’s almost half of the pieces that have been
written for Kronos are not only played by other groups, but they’re being
recorded by them, as well. I’ve got quite a large collection of these recordings.
And you notice that our commissions are popping up on programs in every
part of the world now.
I think that there are a lot of groups, and even orchestras, some orchestras are
playing our pieces, I’ve noticed. Different Trains has been played by the
Philadelphia Orchestra.
Crawford:
Was that performed a lot for Reich’s seventieth birthday?
07-00:10:26
Harrington:
When we played Different Trains at Carnegie Hall on Steve Reich’s
seventieth birthday, that was definitely one of the high points for him—well,
and for Kronos, too. It really was fun. And it was a major occasion. I’m sure
we mentioned earlier the influence of that piece on our sound system and our
touring. I think I did mention that before.
95
It’s interesting how certain pieces—Black Angels is another one of them—that
not only musically have influenced our work a lot, but also the way we tour,
the way we think of our concerts. Another one is Ghost Opera by Tan Dun.
And then later, some of the visual pieces, such as Sun Rings. Had we even
done Sun Rings?
Crawford:
You were just going to do it in Boston, when we finished the first interviews.
07-00:11:30
Harrington:
Right, okay.
Crawford:
So that’s had quite a history.
07-00:11:35
Harrington:
Yes, and it’s continuing. Recently, we played it in South Korea, and we’ll be
playing it in Germany. Well, I think it’s an amazing piece.
Crawford:
How much of the programming is by request, and how much is your doing?
07-00:11:56
Harrington:
People hear about various aspects of our work. We’ll be playing Sun Rings in
Dresden, in Germany. I think the people who are bringing us to Dresden heard
Sun Rings in London. And that’s how it happens.
More recently, Visual Music—that’s been played not only in London and
Paris and various places in Europe, but it’s also been played in Australia and
quite a bit around the United States. And there are some video elements that
are available, so people know about this.
We were invited to play Visual Music at Belles Artes, which is the concert
hall in Mexico City, an amazing place. Really looking forward to that very
much. And then more recently, the concert that we call Awakening, which was
first done at Herbst Theater on September 11, 2006, the fifth anniversary of
9/11.
Most recently, we did that in Switzerland, just a few weeks ago. And we’ll be
doing it in Los Angeles next year, and we did it in Maryland, and at Duke
University in the fall. It’s been requested quite a bit. In a way, that’s a Kronos
composition, really. I spent eight months planning that program. And it’s the
same with Visual Music.
Crawford:
That brings up two questions that I have. You’re more political than any
ensemble I know of. Does that ever hurt you? For instance, the I.F. Stone
piece, which is so strong an antiwar statement, was in part an NEA grant.
Does [the politics of arts organizations] stop you, ever?
96
07-00:14:39
Harrington:
Well, there are a few issues here. If anything, just music by its nature is
getting more political. It’s not only Kronos music, but music, and concerts.
Crawford:
Is it?
07-00:15:02
Harrington:
I think it is. I think it is. And part of that is, today, we can play music from
Iraq and Iran. We can play music from every hotspot you can think of in the
whole world. And as a matter of fact, I’ve made it one of my fields of study to
kind of try to keep track of where the hotspots are.
Crawford:
That’s a great thing.
07-00:15:35
Harrington:
I’ll tell you exactly how I think of it. The U.S. is, through its power and its
greed, creating a lot of trouble in a lot of places. I tend to think that it’s part of
my responsibility to try to listen to music from as many of these places where
there’s incredible suffering and sorrow and environmental destruction. To me,
that’s part of my responsibility, to know the music from these places. So
whether it’s Iraq or Iran, Pakistan—
Crawford:
There’s no trouble spot you haven’t hit, as far as I can think of.
07-00:16:25
Harrington:
Yes. Well, at this point— I mean, I’m not looking for a fight, but it’s like—
[laughs] I guess what I feel is my responsibility is getting larger.
And then we did a concert that I might’ve— I don’t think I talked about,
actually. But at that point, it was something that was in my mind. We’ve
called it Alternative Radio. Well, this concert has been conveniently ignored
by the American press. [laughs] Now, when they ignore you, you know you’re
on to something.
Crawford:
My very thought!
07-00:17:13
Harrington:
[laughs] It wasn’t quite ignored in New York. We premiered it at Carnegie
Hall, in the spring of 2006. We had Howard Zinn as our guest artist on the
stage. And we had David Barsamian, who’s the host of a really amazing
network called Alternative Radio.
It was when I realized that David Barsamian was using—he’d requested this,
but he was using the first track from our album Pieces of Africa as theme
music for Alternative Radio. And I was so happy to know that that music,
which is so buoyant and just beautiful, I think, that that music is being heard
in this context— I’d have to say that Alternative Radio, David Barsamian’s
shows, are probably the largest and best collection of dissenting opinions and
dissenting voices that exist in our country.
97
He lives in Boulder, Colorado. And he’s had this amazing involvement for
many, many years. He and I became friends some fifteen years ago. And it
was after the start of the invasion of Iraq when I called Howard Zinn, in
desperation, really, to try to look for some source of wisdom about what was
going on in the world and how music fit into that, or can fit into this world of
destruction and violence that our own government is actively bringing on.
Crawford:
He’s written tellingly about that.
07-00:19:38
Harrington:
Yes. And of all the people that I’d ever read or whose voices I’d ever heard, I
thought Howard was the person I should call. So I called Howard, never
having met him before. And it turns out he knew our music very well.
Within a few weeks, I was in his office interviewing him, much like you and I
are doing right now. [laughs] I’d never interviewed anybody in my life.
Howard Zinn is my first, and so far, only interview. And in the space of an
hour, Howard re-convinced me of the value of music and the value of artists.
Crawford:
Is he musical?
07-00:20:23
Harrington:
I think he’s very musical. But he’s a playwright, he’s an author, he’s a
historian, he’s a dissenter.
Crawford:
And he’s totally ignored by the media. Also Noam Chomsky. I think both of
them are ignored.
07-00:20:33
Harrington:
They are amazingly ignored, considering the astuteness of their thoughts and
the influence—and actually, the renown that they have in other parts of the
world is shocking.
Crawford:
Do they?
07-00:20:48
Harrington:
Oh, yeah. Absolutely. So basically, our concert, which we call Alternative
Radio, is the result of that day in April of 2003, when I was in Howard’s
office.
I wanted to share that experience with our audience, and find a way of making
live radio. And I don’t know if I talked to you several years ago about this, but
we used to have a radio series, which we called Radio Kronos, back in the
eighties. And this was syndicated on many stations around the country.
So our music, at that point, was being played on many, many radio stations.
Well now, as you know, there’s very little music played on most of what they
call classical music stations. There’s certainly very little recent music. A piece
98
like Black Angels has probably not been played on the radio [laughs] for
months. And a lot of the things that I would want to hear, we don’t get to hear
on the radio.
Crawford:
Nowhere.
07-00:22:11
Harrington:
Nowhere. And so I thought, Okay. Here I just had a chance to have this
incredible experience with Howard Zinn. I know David Barsamian. I know
he’s interviewed Howard. Kronos has done radio before. Why not make a
concert where we try to bring music and intelligent thinking about the world
that we’re all apart of, bring it together? And so we premiered that evening in
Carnegie Hall, with Howard Zinn and David Barsamian, in March of 2006.
And since then—
Crawford:
You wrote the music?
07-00:22:58
Harrington:
No. What we did is, we started the concert/live radio, we started with— Well,
it started with David Barsamian and Mai Nozipo. So it started like one of
David’s radio shows. And then right after that, it went into an overlay of four
versions, from four different countries, of the “Call to Prayer.” And from
there, it moved into music of Iraq and India and North Africa. We did part of
the I.F. Stone piece that you mentioned.
But between the music, then, Howard and David were talking about the world,
talking about power structures. And so for me, there’s before Alternative
Radio at Carnegie Hall, and now there’s after. It was like one of the defining
moments of my life, I think, in music. And we’ve done Alternative Radio in
Vienna, with Howard.
Crawford:
Howard travels?
07-00:24:21
Harrington:
Not much these days. He’s in his eighties, and it’s tough to travel. And then
we also did it with Tariq Ali here in San Francisco. I think it was a year ago
October, maybe. I’m not sure when that was. Once again, totally ignored by
the press. Totally.
Crawford:
That’s disgraceful.
07-00:24:50
Harrington:
He’s one of the major commentators on world events.
Then we also did it in London last summer. Once again, pretty much totally
ignored. So the idea that musicians and a concert can actually have some—
what do we want to say?—extra-musical meaning, can bring together
thoughts, can propel thinking beyond the concert, beyond itself, so that it’s not
99
just this little ball of human information that’s just constantly kind of dealing
with itself, but could actually have some importance beyond that—there’s a
huge resistance.
Crawford:
I’m wondering if Europe might be more receptive.
07-00:25:56
Harrington:
The problem is, you do run into language issues. I wish we could speak a lot
more languages. For all those young musicians out there, learn languages.
[laughs] Oh, I wish I knew more languages. I wish I could speak some of the
Asian languages.
Crawford:
But in Germany, you find an audience that spoke enough English.
07-00:26:24
Harrington:
Oh, yeah, absolutely. Well, Alternative Radio has legs. And it will be played,
and it will happen. Actually, we had a live broadcast from Vienna, Austria.
Getting this kind of thing on traditional radio, even though it was carefully
tailored to be a sixty-minute show—two of them. It’s like two sixty-minute
concerts. That’s what our evening of Alternative Radio is. But now we’ll be
doing it in Denver, we’ll be doing it in College Park, Maryland. I think we’ll
do it in Vancouver, British Columbia.
Crawford:
You’ll get young audiences.
Harrington:
We’ll see. We’ll see how it goes. And maybe it will have an Internet presence.
Maybe that’ll be its home, in a kind of a new way. It’s hard to know. But I just
see so many possibilities. And so getting back to the question of our music
and political statements— Basically, I feel that anybody who is trying to
create something that’s a reflection of our inner being, of our societies that we
all share, there’s no way it can not be political. By trying to do something that
basically is hard to define, that seeps into so many aspects of life, and is really
not able to be controlled, it ends up being a huge statement about things.
Crawford:
What are the parameters of going online? You have MySpace, iTunes—
you’re everywhere. Is that attracting huge audiences?
07-00:28:52
Harrington:
Well, it’s interesting about MySpace. It’s almost like our own radio station.
We have four tracks that you can hear on our MySpace site. They get changed
every once in a while. And we have something new coming out. You can
check it out on MySpace. We’ve even included a couple live performances of
things that you can’t get anywhere else.
And so it’s almost like a radio station that you can have on your own
computer. And I’ve used MySpace as a way of learning more about groups
and musicians. And in fact, several of the recent collaborations that we’ve
been a part of, I first made contact through MySpace.
100
Crawford:
The Sigur Rós, is that MySpace?
07-00:29:50
Harrington:
Sigur Rós has been on MySpace, it’s on iTunes; it’s available for sale on
iTunes. And also the Star-Spangled Banner. There was a double release last
September of Sigur Rós and the Star-Spangled Banner.
Crawford:
Are you affected by the recording slump, which everyone talks about?
07-00:30:15
Harrington:
Well, certainly, we are. For quite a few years, there was a substantial income
coming from our recordings. And that has trailed off a bit—quite a bit. At the
same time, I think our audiences are getting larger, the halls we’re playing in
are getting larger. So there’s various ways it works.
Crawford:
I wanted to focus for a moment on your work with composers, generally
speaking, because I know you get involved with them personally. What is the
extent of your personal input on these many, many pieces?
07-00:31:12
Harrington:
Well, it depends on the piece. [laughs] I was mentioning Terry Riley’s The
Cusp of Magic. Terry Riley has been very close to me since 1979, and to all of
the members of Kronos, and has written, I think, twenty-five pieces for us, the
most recent being The Cusp of Magic.
I was thinking that several years ago, Terry was going to celebrate his
seventieth birthday. And I know that what he likes to do the most is write new
pieces and be involved in new projects. And ever since 1995, when he first
heard Ghost Opera and Wu Man, the great Chinese pipa player, he had been
thinking about writing something for Kronos and Wu Man. Initially, I think
his idea was as a companion piece to Ghost Opera.
And so for his seventieth birthday, it just occurred to me, well, why not
commission Terry to write a piece for Kronos and Wu Man? And he thought
that was a great idea. At a certain point, I got a call from him, and he was
saying, “You know, I really want to create magic in this piece.” And this
would’ve been in, oh, probably the fall of 2004, so six months or so after we
last talked.
At that point, the most magical thing I had ever heard in my life was— It was
right in my own home. And it was when I was carrying my granddaughter
around the house, and she and I would be playing these musical toys and
instruments that I’d been collecting on our tours. We sort of had them all over
the house—they’re buzzers, little bells, toys, all kinds of sound makers, music
makers. And just kind of sharing music with her.
I told Terry, I said, “You ought to come over here and just see what you
think.” So he came over and brought his recording equipment. And we ended
101
up recording all of Emily’s toys. And two of the movements of The Cusp of
Magic feature her toys. So in that sense, I had quite a lot to do with that piece.
07-00:34:05
In terms of a piece like Ghost Opera, I remember walking with Tan Dun in
1994. We had dinner in Chinatown somewhere, and we walked back to his
hotel. That was right around when I was beginning to think about the idea of
the Early Music album. I was thinking about the past and the present and the
future. It suddenly occurred to me that Tan Dun would be a good person to
kind of think about that from a totally different perspective, from his
involvement with Chinese music and Chinese culture. And so much of the
story line of that piece is something that we talked about on that walk.
This happens all the time with composers. We’re working on a piece right
now— Well, it’s being completed. We’ve begun a little bit of our work on a
piece by Aleksandra Vrebalov. I might’ve mentioned her. Aleksandra
Vrebalov called me one day when she was a student at the conservatory here,
San Francisco Conservatory. She had, a few months earlier, come from
Yugoslavia. And she just called to say she was a composer, she had a string
quartet. And I said, “Well, why don’t you bring a tape over and we’ll have a
cup of coffee,” and so on. Anyway, since then, we’ve been friends. And she’s
written several pieces for us.
And then last year, I saw this DVD about Serbian culture in the United States.
And I just thought, wow, Aleksandra has to know about this. Because she
moved from her country, but she still has this very close contact with Serbia,
with the culture. A lot of her family still lives there. Anyway, this DVD
details this little society within our society that has maintained its own
traditions. And those traditions slowly are changing as people that had moved
from Serbia, the greater Serbia— as, let’s say, the songs have been handed
down, and now they’re maybe in the third generation of being handed down.
So it’s very interesting that the most traditional elements of Serbian culture
can be found in Chicago, that aren’t even found in Serbia anymore. I thought,
I want to talk to her about this. So we had a meeting in New York a few
weeks ago. She ordered the DVD, we watched it again together. And we just
began talking.
Within an hour or so, it became this piece, this idea for a piece. And part of it
has to do with what’s going on in that part of the world. I don’t get why
everybody’s [fighting]. It’s too complex for my understanding, I think. And so
I was thinking, she knows about this; she could explain it in a musical way to
our audience.
And so right now, she’s writing a piece called Hold Me Neighbor, In this
Storm. And it will be, in a musical way, bringing together the Islamic music,
the traditional Orthodox music, and other forms of music that she’s aware of
from her part of the world, where she’s from.
102
Crawford:
Does she have a bias?
07-00:38:37
Harrington:
I don’t think so. In fact, we’re trying to really avoid that. It’s just more like
okay, here’s a situation, and here are the musical elements of this larger
situation, and let’s find a way of putting them together that can describe
what’s going on. And that’s what she’s doing right now. In fact, even as we
speak, she’s in Serbia doing some field recording of calls to prayer, of monks
in various Orthodox churches, getting some sound material for this piece,
which we will premiere in New York in February.
Crawford:
So it’s a political statement, in a sense.
07-00:39:29
Harrington:
In a sense. And it’s interesting. We’ve played the music of Franghiz AliZadeh, and she’s from Azerbaijan. Probably the most widely known Islamic
female composer in the world that I’m aware of. And there’s no way her
music couldn’t be political.
She started out by bringing kind of Western music to what was then Soviet
Azerbaijan. And so she brought John Cage and George Crumb and Messiaen
and a lot of composers, through her expertise as a pianist. As a composer,
she’s brought elements of Azeri culture into the concert hall. And this is
happening in so many ways, from so many different angles.
Since I saw you last time, we are continuing our work with Wu Man, whom I
mentioned in the context of Terry Riley’s piece. And Kronos played in China
last year, last spring. And earlier, I had visited the Yin Yu Tang, which is—
you might’ve heard of this home, which is now located in the Peabody Essex
Museum in Salem, Massachusetts.
So piece by piece, this entire home—which is like a village, actually—was
brought from Anhui Province to Salem, Massachusetts. I got to visit there last
year. And the first thing that struck me when I went into this home was the
history. You just felt like there were all these people that had been there and
all this life that had happened, music and birth and arguments and death.
Everything in life had happened in this place. It just seemed like you could
feel the vibrations or something. It sounds a little strange, maybe, but as a
musician, I wanted to hear into the wood of that building [laughs] and what
did it sound like? All the amazing sounds.
Anyway, one of our next theatrical pieces is going to be Yin Yu Tang, A
Chinese Home. And right now I’m in the process of exploring the vast
expanse of Chinese music and trying to come up with something that will
make sense as an experience, will take Kronos to a world that we haven’t been
to before.
103
Crawford:
You’re talking just as fervently as you did several years ago about Africa.
Because really, you brought African music to the string quartet. Are you
feeling this way?
07-00:43:12
Harrington:
Oh, definitely. In a lot of ways, Chinese music and African music, there’s a lot
of things that are shared. First of all, I didn’t really know until several years
ago that the very most western part of China is totally Islamic. Given
everything that’s going on in the world right now, it seems to me that in my
listening, it’s very important that I explore things that I’ve never known
anything about, try to cure a little bit of ignorance [laughs] that I have.
Crawford:
How do you, as a quartet, adapt to the different musical tradition?
07-00:44:04
Harrington:
Adapting is something we are trying to do every day. When you came in here
to this room today, you met one of our new collaborators, who’s a member of
Hurdy Gurdy, which is a group, a duo from Sweden, [in which] each of them
play the hurdy gurdy. I heard an album of theirs a couple years ago that just
blew me away. And I just thought, I love this.
In the presentation of that album, the hurdy gurdy is described as a
Renaissance synthesizer. [they laugh] And anyway, we’ve been working this
week with Hurdy Gurdy and kind of imagining the future. And one of the
things that I’m involved in doing right now is I’ll be curating a season of
concerts at Carnegie Hall for 2010. My idea is to have basically twelve
concerts, four a week for three weeks. And each of those concerts will feature
a group or an artist, someone we’re working with or would like to work with
or, in some way, kind of focus some concentration, some attention on some of
the collaborations. Some of them are in various forms of completion already.
I’m really excited about it. Hurdy Gurdy is one of those groups that will be a
part of this showcase.
Crawford:
That’s marvelous. Is Carnegie Hall sponsoring you?
07-00:46:13
Harrington:
Yes, they are.
Crawford:
That’s rather unusual, isn’t it?
07-00:46:16
Harrington:
Yes, it is. We’ve had some really fortunate happenings there in the last few
years. And one of them is, last season we did a week of coaching. The idea of
Kronos mentoring groups, younger groups, was explored in that week.
The approach that we took was, wouldn’t it be interesting if we could just sit
out in the audience and hear a Kronos concert? [laughs] And so I was
thinking, well, how could we do that? And then suddenly it occurred to me,
104
the way to do it is have other groups play our music. And so that’s what we
did. And so in the space of a week, these four amazingly talented groups, each
group learned, I think it was six pieces from our repertoire. Six or seven
pieces.
And then by the end of the week, it was clear which group should play which
piece. And so the concert was twelve different pieces. It included music of
Steve Reich, and Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, and elements of our album that we did
with Ashe Bhosle, You’ve Stolen My Heart, and elements of the Nuevo album,
and elements of Pieces of Africa.
So elements of a lot of various parts of our work. And then in the first Under
30 commission, Alexandra Du Bois, she was there, and her piece was played,
as well. And so this concert just took us through our own history, in a way.
And it was thrilling to hear other people play.
The guy I sat next to is the guy that runs programming at Carnegie Hall. And
basically, between every piece he’d want to know, how’d you get that idea?
And where did this come—? So there was this running conversation between
us.
Crawford:
He’s more or less turned Carnegie Hall over to you. For an artistic director to
do that is rare, I’m sure.
07-00:48:50
Harrington:
Well, for a few weeks we’ll have this opportunity to kind of stretch out a little
bit. And I think that it’s going to be great for the twelve groups and artists that
I have in mind. And in addition to those twelve concerts, I’m thinking of
featuring three or four cameo events of composers that maybe haven’t been
heard about and aren’t known well enough in our country.
Crawford:
Where else can you stretch out? I read your work at Sellars’ festival in
London. And where else? Is Darmstadt still very vital? Aspen?
07-00:40:43
Harrington:
[pause] Music exists in individuals. And every once in a while, there’s a place
that attracts, magnetizes people. And I think for a while, Darmstadt might
have been that way.
I don’t know if I told you that Darmstadt is where Pieces of Africa originated.
Because that’s where I met Kevin Volans. Kevin is the first African composer
to write for Kronos. Well, the people that run that place would be horrified, I
think, to know that something as buoyant and as— well, as our album Pieces
of Africa, and kind of as inclusive, might have originated there.
Crawford:
Why?
105
07-00:50:49
Harrington:
There are a lot of people that take themselves really seriously.
Crawford:
Not academic enough, perhaps?
07-00:50:57
Harrington:
Yes, I would say their thinking is that music should be something that is for
musicians only. And it’s something that is an inside story, and other people
that don’t know all the various strands, intentionally, they will feel as
outsiders. And basically, I’ve rejected that.
Crawford:
I was going to ask you about that, because you haven’t done a lot of UC
Berkeley composers, I think. Or at least the ones I’m thinking of, that studied
with Roger Sessions or Stanford composers. But academic composers, in any
case. Have you avoided that?
Harrington:
Basically, I’m not necessarily avoiding anything, I just respond to what
magnetizes me. I get reams of CDs and recordings and scores, and I do my
best to try to stay up on what’s happening. But I’m one listener. And I can only
follow my ears. The reason we started the Under 30 commission is because we
felt out of touch with the youngest composers. Maybe we should do another
commission called Music in the Universities or something [they laugh].
It’s not necessarily an age thing, but it might have to do with the perspective.
I’m interested in music that we can share with our audience in every part of
the world. I’m not really interested in private languages that are written for—a
composer might be writing for his or her colleagues, or his or her students or
to get the next professorship somewhere, or as a job application. I’m not
interested in job application music.
Crawford:
Do people come to you and say, for instance, “You must hear Ashe Bhosle?”
07-00:53:48
Harrington:
Well, I remember when Taraf de Haidouks was introduced to me. Great
Romanian Gypsy group. Now, hopefully, I would’ve run into them at some
point; but I might have heard them, if a friend of mine hadn’t said, “You’ve
got to hear this.”
I rely on a number of trusted ears in various corners of the world. And on this
last trip, I had two incredible meetings with— three incredible meetings. Two
of them were with ethnomusicologists, and another was with a
composer/instrument maker/performer from Angola and Portugal.
Michael Oppitz is the director of the Zürich Museum of Ethnomusicology.
And he gave me a private tour of an exhibit that he had just mounted, of
shamanistic drums from all over central Asia, northern Scandinavia, Asia, and
North America. And this collection of drums was so inspiring to me. It’s
incredible.
106
The day we left, I had a really early morning meeting with Michael Oppitz.
Since then, we’ve been in touch about other things. And during that meeting,
then, he called the Museum of Ethnomusicology in Budapest, where I was
going. And the next morning, I was able to go and meet with people there.
I’m right now involved in making an album of— It’s very hard to know what
to call it at this point, because it’s an idea. But it will definitely be centered on
music from various Islamic cultures. Put it that way. We’ve already recorded
two tracks for it, one from Iraq and one from Iran. And it was at the Museum
of Ethnomusicology in Budapest that I finally, after three years of thinking
about this album, I finally found the link. And the link is Bela Bartok.
Basically, in a certain way, you could say that he started the field of
ethnomusicology. And he was probably one of, if not the first Europeans to
record Islamic and Arabic music, first in Turkey and then in Northern Africa.
I got to hear some of the recordings. And I remember even getting to hold,
several weeks ago, one of the Edison cylinders that he recorded on his travels
in Africa. And that’s when the light bulb went off, it’s Bartok. Well, I started
hearing Bartók when I was—
Crawford:
Full circle—
07-00:57:27
Harrington:
Yes, yes. So finally it made so much sense to me. It’s so simple. And
sometimes you have to wait a long time to find what you’re looking for.
Crawford:
Your journey is always in music, isn’t it? That didn’t occur to me before.
07-00:57:45
Harrington:
Yes. Anyway, I’m onto something now that is very exciting for me. I think
it’s going to be something that will bring our music into focus for our listener.
It will give coherence to things that we’ve been pursuing for many, many
years. I think I know how to do what I’ve been trying to think about doing for
quite a while now. And that ties in with the Awakening concert that we
mentioned, the 9/11 concert; it ties in with a lot of— Right now we’ll be
working with Homayoun Sakhi. Homayoun lives in Fremont. He’s one of
Afghanistan’s greatest musicians. I can spell his name for you if you’d like.
Crawford:
That would help.
07-00:58:45
Harrington:
Yes. It’s H-O-M-A-Y-O-U-N, S-A-K-H-I. Fremont has the largest Afghani
population outside of Kabul, in the world.
Crawford:
Mm-hm, I knew that. But this is something we’re so fearful of, this culture.
107
07-00:59:11
Harrington:
Right. And the music is unbelievable. It’s like having Ravi Shankar living
over in Fremont. And so we’ll be working with Homayoun. I just, in this very
room, had a wonderful meeting with a group from Iran the other night. And
there’s a Kurdish ensemble called the Kamkars Ensemble, that we’ll be
working with in the future. And so it’s like you put out feelers, and the world
begins to kind of provide you with some information. I feel like that’s what’s
happening right now. It’s kind of like after thirty-four years, I’m getting some
information.
And like I was trying to say about the Chinese Home, Yin Yu Tang, I would
like that even to seem as though that home, and however we project it onto the
stage, would almost be like an antenna. It’s collecting information, musical
information from all over China, and it’s focusing it through this home. And
the home almost becomes like an instrument. So there are a lot of projects
right now.
Crawford:
I should say. We’ll break here.
[End Audio File 7]
Begin Audio File 08 11-28-2007.mp3
08-00:00:00
Harrington:
Several weeks ago, we were very fortunate to play in Henryk Gorecki’s
hometown of Katowice, Poland. And for the first time ever, all three of his
quartets were performed in one concert. We’ve rarely done that kind of
concert— we’ve done it with the music of Alfred Schnittke, for example, and
once we did it with Bartók at Great American Music Hall here in San
Francisco, where we played all six Bartók quartets. We’ve done it with Terry
Riley a couple of times, when we’ve played exclusively his quartet music.
But here with Gorecki, you felt that you were right in the center of his musical
imagination. The Third Quartet, which was actually going to be on the
program, was supposed to be on the program of our Carnegie Hall debut in
1994—this is several years after it was first commissioned.
Henryk Gorecki missed the first deadline, which was for Cleveland, I think it
was. And then he missed another one. And the third time he missed it was
Carnegie Hall. And after that, almost everybody gave up on a third quartet
ever being written.
But I had a meeting with Henryk in the late spring of 1995, and he told me the
whole story of the piece. And then a few years later, I talked to his son when I
was in Mexico. And his son had told me, “Oh, I heard my father play the
Third Quartet on the piano.” So I knew the piece existed.
108
But it wasn’t until I got this kind of cryptic phone call from Henryk saying
that the music would be arriving in a couple of weeks—and this would’ve
been in the spring of 2005—that I was absolutely confident that it’s really
going to happen. So we were waiting something like thirteen years for this
piece, and one of the first things that we did when Jeff Zeigler had just joined
Kronos—it was one of the very first hotel rehearsals we ever had—was read
through the score of Gorecki’s Third Quartet. We only had one copy, and so
we were all gathered around this music stand. And it was very clear to me
why it had taken so long for Henryk to release the piece. And that’s because
this music is so personal that it’s almost like you need to be all by yourself
when you listen to it.
Crawford:
He didn’t want to give it up?
08-00:03:19
Harrington:
I don’t think he could. First of all, it’s over fifty minutes long, and it’s almost
all slow. And it’s not a piece that kind of belongs in the world we inhabit
these days. It needs a special place. For me, it achieved that special place in
that hotel room in Chicago. I felt so close to this music. It spoke so much
about what I know of death and what I know of sadness, and also what I know
of the effects of those feelings over many, many years.
When we finally gave the premiere of that piece, in Poland in the fall of 2005,
that’s when I really knew the extent of the piece that we had here. I don’t
usually advise anybody on anything, especially listeners on music; but I could
say one thing about Gorecki’s Third Quartet. It’s a great piece to hear by
candlelight. It’s a great piece to hear when you’re all by yourself, or with
someone that you absolutely trust totally. Because you don’t know what might
happen when you’re listening to this music. I can tell you that for sure. It’s
very personal music. And it’s a good piece. You could enjoy a whole bottle of
wine during that piece.
Crawford:
Is that why the critics missed it in London?
08-00:05:14
Harrington:
I would say that they totally missed this piece. That was one of our best
performances we’ve ever given, of that piece or anything, I think. It was in
London, and the way I wanted to present Gorecki’s Third was to start the
concert with its total opposite. And for me, the total opposite of Gorecki’s
Third is The Cusp of Magic by Terry Riley. It’s buoyant, it’s shamanistic. It
has dark elements, but the darkness is seen through the light of very bright and
vivid colors. And it’s an astonishingly colorful piece of music. Well, I find
that Gorecki’s Third is not buoyant in that way, it’s not colorful in that way.
But it’s— [pause] If Riley is yin, Gorecki’s Third is yang.
Crawford:
Great. Were you close to him during the writing process?
109
Harrington:
Well, he does not speak very much English at all. I speak very little German,
and no Polish. And every time we’ve met, we’ve had to have translators with
us. I feel very close to him. I hope he feels close to me. I think he does. I think
he feels close to Kronos. He gave us the Third Quartet, and I’m immensely
proud of that, because he trusted us with some of the most intimate emotions
that human beings are capable of, I think. The New York Times hated the
piece, too.
Crawford:
Really?
08-00:07:30
Harrington:
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I can’t even remember. It was such an awful way of
describing this music that I’ve forgotten it.
Crawford:
Any reviewers like it?
08-00:07:42
Harrington:
Some of the reviews for the record were unbelievable. It’s almost like this
piece challenges the idea of what a listening experience is. And that’s why I
advise a person to be alone or with a trusted person—the lighting, and having
some wine, and just allowing an hour of really thoughtful time.
Crawford:
So the venue would have a lot to do with one’s appreciation of it.
08-00:08:25
Harrington:
Yeah. We’ve played the piece always in very large places. And our lighting
designer, Larry Neff, has created an intimacy, as much as you can in a
thousand or 2,000 seat place. But even so, I think this music is very private.
Anyway.
Crawford:
I’d like to talk more about quartet members. You’ve had very rare personnel
changes in Kronos, and once before when we talked, you said that you liked to
have a woman in the quartet, because four men produced a lot of testosterone.
08-00:09:09
Harrington:
[laughs] Yes. When we first played with Jeff in the late spring of 2005, he
brought this energy to Kronos that was really palpable. It was something all of
us felt. And as we got to know him a little more, we began to find out some
details. He was born the month that Kronos had its first rehearsal.
Crawford:
[laughs] Oh, no kidding.
08-00:09:49
Harrington:
And the first recording that he ever had of ours was Black Angels, that he got
when he was in high school. He grew up hearing us. He lived in the Bay Area
when he was growing up. So there was kind of this involvement with our
music that was something that—he almost understood something about it that
the rest of us didn’t, I think. And he’s an incredibly quick learner. And the
110
kind of concerts that we can play now, today, we have never been able to play
before, in all of these years.
Crawford:
What do you mean by that?
08-00:10:27
Harrington:
Well, for example, we did a show in Budapest a few weeks ago. We played
music from eighteen different countries in one concert. And it was so thrilling
to be able to be there and to do this. I think Jeff has given Hank and John and
me this kind of energy and confidence in ourselves and our work that is really
important for us right now. He has fit into the relationships, the many very
longstanding relationships—I’m thinking of those with Henryk Gorecki and
Terry Riley and Steve Reich and Philip Glass and many, many musicians that
we’ve worked with for a long, long time. It’s a very natural kind of
relationship, and the whole testosterone issue isn’t something I even notice,
so— [they laugh]
Crawford:
I think you were joking.
08-00:11:37
Harrington:
I might’ve been joking.
Crawford:
You still tour a great deal—is that something that’s a hardship for any one of
you?
08-00:11:48
Harrington:
I think it is. It’s a hardship for all of us.
Crawford:
Do you say no sometimes?
08-00:11:54
Harrington:
Oh, we say no a lot. As a musician, I feel like I’m only as good as the last note
I played. I’ve always felt that way. I keep thinking, oh, if I get one more
chance, I’ll get better. [laughs] And I think it’s partly that challenge that fuels
me. I can’t speak for anybody else in the group. But it’s also the music that we
have these days.
For example, we just played a surprise birthday party for Peter Sellars, the
great director. I thought a nice present for him would be if the three
composers that he’s worked with most closely—John Adams, Kaija Saariaho,
and Osvaldo Golijov—would all write pieces for him. Well, they did. Believe
it or not, they did. And John Adams’ piece is, without any question, the best
quartet he’s written. We premiered it in a little barn up in Marin County, and
it was this incredible experience.
So we’ve got this amazing John Adams piece. It’s just incredible. And I can
say that on so many fronts, what’s going on right now in music, it’s definitely
more and more vital.
111
I mentioned that we saw Henryk Gorecki a few weeks ago. He’s almost done
with a fourth quartet.
Crawford:
We didn’t talk about Jennifer Culp—she wasn’t with the quartet then. What
happened with her?
08-00:14:05
Harrington:
There was a parting of the ways. It was kind of a natural sort of parting.
Crawford:
Just not right—not good chemistry?
08-00:14:13
Harrington:
We did a lot of incredible things when Jennifer was in the group. And she
brought a lot of things to Hank and John and me that were really important for
us. I think as the intensity of our concertizing increased, and I think as my
imagination has gone more and more wild in the last few years—since I saw
you last, actually—in the last few years, I’m seeing our work in a more—
well, the canvas is bigger. I need more paint. [they laugh] Lots more paint.
Crawford:
How many more years for the bigger canvas?
08-00:15:04
Harrington:
How many more years? What do they say on the political campaigns, four
more years? I need fifty more years [they laugh] even to get started with some
of the stuff I want to do.
Crawford:
You’ve talked about filling in the blanks, about Native American music, for
instance. What is left that you need to do?
08-00:15:38
Harrington:
Well, trying to fill a single note with everything that one feels, one thinks, is a
part of knowledge and experience, that’s always left. I mean notes are notes,
and music dissolves. It’s gone. The moment the note is gone, the music’s
gone. Until or unless there’s been a memorable experience created and
somebody recalls something in their mind. So attempting to make a
memorable experience is always what’s left. And you never feel like you’ve
done it, ever. To me, it’s always like starting over every time.
Crawford:
I’m sure that’s right. What about benefits and working for charities. I heard on
iTunes God’s Away on Business—with Tom Waits. Do you do a lot of work
like that?
08-00:16:54
Harrington:
Yes, we just played Neil Young’s Bridge School benefit down at the
Shoreline Amphitheater; we did two shows with Tom. That was something we
wanted to do for the Bridge School. And the one you were thinking about was
done for the Dali Lama and Tibet—we can get that exact title. It’s on the
album, I just can’t remember.
112
But to me, Tom Waits is one of our great songwriters, an amazing performer.
We’re talking to him about an album idea.
Crawford:
Well, I hope you do that. Black Rider was one of the best things I’ve seen.
One of your stated goals was to encourage composers to write the next Lyric
Suite. Who comes closest? If you’re able to say. which of all of these many,
many hundreds of pieces will live on?
Harrington:
I can’t forecast anything about music. I don’t know anything more about it
than the next person. All I try to do is listen to my own inner self, follow my
own ears, and try to learn a little bit more about the world every day, through
music. And if that means something to someone else, that’s great. It’s a plus.
I find that the world of music is such a private and personal world that to have
any idea that I would know what might be useful for someone else, what
might be important, what might be the Lyric Suite for somebody else— I don’t
know if I mentioned this, but that’s the first piece of what I call “my music”
that I ever played for my wife.
Crawford:
Oh yes, you did. [laughs]
08-00:19:43
Harrington:
And she wasn’t my wife at that time—
Crawford:
She stayed with you all these years.
08-00:19:45
Harrington:
Yes, she has. I mean, through all the touring and just everything that’s
involved in the career that I have, the time away. But having said that, it also
creates a certain beauty in the family life. Even last night, we were celebrating
her birthday and having our daughter and our son-in-law and our
granddaughter there, it was just amazingly beautiful. And we realize that I am
gone a lot, but I’m also—one of the things she was saying was, “That’s true,
but in all the tours, we’ve talked every day.”
Crawford:
Really?
08-00:20:59
Harrington:
Yes. It’s almost like a medical expense. [laughs] You might as well just chalk
it up to therapy. It’s kind of like whatever groundedness that I enjoy comes
from my family. There are a lot of young musicians out there that are so afraid
of starting a family, so afraid of making commitments to other people. And
while I’m not going to advise anybody, what I can say is how important it’s
been for me, every aspect of family. And trying to bring the world of music
into the family.
113
We get to play a concert in January, this coming January, a family concert
here at Herbst Theater. I mentioned Herbst earlier because that’s where we did
the Awakening concert. You probably know that that’s where the United
Nations charter was signed in the 1940s.
Crawford:
That’s right.
08-00:22:12
Harrington:
We’re going to do a concert, and my granddaughter gets to come to this
concert. We were just planning, thinking about the music we’re going to play
in that concert, this morning. There are so many wonderful things that you can
share with your family as a musician. My daughter’s a first-grade teacher, and
she teaches down in the Sunset. We played at her school last year, Francis
Scott Key Elementary School, and it was such a thrilling experience to be able
to play for her students.
Harrington:
There’s always elements in life that are pulling at you in one way or another,
and it’s very easy to become unfocused, very easy to get involved in all kinds
of things that are [not important]—
Crawford:
I wondered about that. Also something said before—you told me that when
you first heard the Crumb piece, you wrote Peters—I think Peters is the
publisher—and you said, “Knowing me, it was the next day.”
08-00:23:36
Harrington:
It was the next day. I called him, I think, first, [laughs] and then I wrote him.
Crawford:
Are you at peace—or are you torn by having all the options?
08-00:23:59
Harrington:
Well, the feeling of being constantly ignorant is humiliating. [laughs] But
another thing that’s humiliating is a violin. Anybody that’s tried to play a
violin would probably tell you the same thing. It’s a humiliating experience. It
always wins. The violin always wins. It’s very revealing. It tells you if you’ve
practiced enough [laughs] that day. And it’s mysterious. I love it.
You get two of them together with a viola and a cello, and man, there’s all
kinds of things that can happen. [laughs] And as a way of expressing life and
society and personality, I’ve never found anything that’s better. And I
wouldn’t trade it for anything. And fortunately, my family’s never asked me
to. And in that way, I’m really lucky.
Crawford:
[End of Interview]
Well, that’s a great place to end. Wonderful story. Thank you so much.