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TIME WAITS FOR NO ONE
“In August of 1973, my wife and I were listening to the radio and all of a sudden came on this very amazing, bizarre, weird, fabulous music. When it was over, the announcer said it was ‘Black Angels’ by George Crumb.” David Harrington, founding member and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet is on Zoom from his home in San Francisco and is recalling the genesis of the ensemble. Harrington was born in Portland, Oregon and studied music at the University of Washington in Seattle. “I, for one, had never heard of George Crumb,” he continues. “I’d never heard any music like that. In one experience, he was able to bring in Jimi Hendrix’s experimental sounds, Schubert, Renaissance music, Bode Crystal Glasses, and it was an amplified quartet, which I’d never heard before, a string Quartet. Plus, it felt like a response to the American War in Vietnam. “So, basically, I heard my song in August of 1973. A week later I got a score to the piece and realised I was going have to get a group together that rehearsed every day in order to play this music. So, on September 1st, 1973, we had our first rehearsal.” While hearing that George Crumb piece inspired Harrington to form the quartet, it took them more than a decade to finally record ‘Black Angels’. “There was a lot of things that we needed to learn in order to record that piece properly,” laughs Harrington, “you know, about how to use the studio as a musical instrument. Just a lot, a lot of things. Also, I always wanted ‘Black Angels’ to be the first piece on the album that we would make and it took me about 13 years to figure out what should be the second piece! So, you know, I’m in this for life and waiting 13 years to find the second piece that would follow ‘Black Angels’, that’s not too long. Our work takes a long time. It took eight years to make Pieces of Africa and a lot of the things we’ve done start years before they eventually appear.”
‘Kronos’ is certainly an apt word to tag the quartet. Now celebrating its fiftieth anniversary, the ensemble – with a slowly shifting array of other members around Harrington – has recorded more than sixty studio albums covering an incredible variety of music – from Thelonious Monk, John Adams, Harry Partch, Terry Riley and Steve Reich to Laurie Anderson, Astor Piazzolla, Henryck Gorecki, Bartók, Shostakovich, Prokofiev, Copland and, of course, George Crumb (just to name a few. They have also collaborated with Tom Waits in recording and live performance and have performed with Paul McCartney, Allen Ginsberg, Rokia Traoré, David Bowie, Rhiannon Giddens, Caetano Veloso, amongst others. Kronos has also commissioned more than 1,000 works. It has also received more than 40 awards, When Harrington is asked to describe his music he says, “Some guy came up to us the other night and said, ‘Wow, I really like that classical music’. Okay, if that’s what it is for you, that’s fine with me. I don’t know what to call it and so I don’t call it anything.” “Kronos began in Seattle. That’s just, that’s where I’m from,” responds Harrington when I suggest that the Quartet would have been quite daring at the time of its inception. “So, the first several years, we were there, then we moved to upstate New York and for two years and then San Francisco in 1977. “During the American war in Vietnam, Seattle was a centre of resistance. I’m certain that that energy fueled me. Also, don’t forget, Jimi Hendrix is from Seattle.” The KRONOS Five Decades Tour in 2023 will be the eighth Australian tour for the acclaimed quartet and Kronos will perform a carefully curated selection of its work, spanning brand new works and signature pieces from composers around the world. The 50th anniversary tour marks the debut of Kronos Quartet’s recently appointed cellist Paul
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TIME WAITS FOR NO-ONE
The remarkable Kronos Quartet is celebrating its 5oth anniversary as it embarks on its eighth Australian tour, culminating with WOMadelaide.
By Brian Wise
Wiancko, who joins violinist Harrington and longtime members John Sherba (violin) and Hank Dutt (viola). Kronos’ most recent recording is Mỹ Lai (2022), an opera by Jonathan Berger and Harriet Scott Chessman. Kronos’ work has also featured prominently in many films, including the ‘live documentary’ A Thousand Thoughts, written and directed by Sam Green and Joe Bini, which premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in 2018. Mỹ Lai was written specifically for the Quartet and is a challenging work dealing with one of the central issues of the Vietnam War. On March 16, 1968, the United States Army killed over 500 unarmed civilians in the hamlet of Mỹ Lai, Vietnam. Helicopter pilot Hugh Thompson, against orders, intervened to save Vietnamese lives and his story is the basis of the opera which also features Vietnamese multi-instrumentalist VânÁnh, Vanessa Võ, and vocalist Rinde Eckert. “I remember when Jonathan Berger, the composer of the My Lai opera met with me and introduced me to the story of Hugh Thompson: how this young pilot and his crew basically challenged the entire American military. They could see from their vantage point that innocent people were being massacred. The American forces were indiscriminately killing innocent people and that’s something you could see being in a helicopter. “One of the gunners from that helicopter came to the world premiere. It was the first opera he had ever been to in his life. I had a conversation with him after the performance and he said that he was about 19 years old and he could see the carnage, the injustice, the terror that was wrought. He said that if he would’ve been a soldier on the ground he might have had a totally different response. I just appreciated the modesty and the honesty of what he said.
Kronos Quartet. L to R: Paul Wiancko (cello), David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola). Photo courtesy of the Musical Instrument Museum.
“This experience of performing and recording and being involved in this My Lai [project] has been a really central experience for all of us in Kronos. For me, it brings back those first days of Kronos. It kind of creates this large circle and we’re onto other circles as well. The fact that, Vân-Ánh Võ, our collaborator, who is such a master of Vietnamese music and Vietnamese instruments, joined us is wonderful; and, I think, central to the whole idea of this opera.” Harrington says that he is also excited about the new project the Quartet have been working on and that they had just come out of the studio a few days prior to our conversation. “I was watching a TV show and the lawyer, speech writer, writer and friend of Martin Luther King Jr was describing how the ‘I Have a Dream’ speech came about,” he explains, “and it was so inspiring to me. I thought, ‘There has to be a piece of music that brings this story into the concert hall’. Well, it turns out Clarence Jones lives in Palo Alto. He’s going to be 92 in January. A few years ago, we, encouraged him to go into a recording studio and tell the story. Then he also read from Martin Luther King’s letter from the Birmingham gaol, and we came to find out that Clarence Jones, his lawyer, is the one that got the letter out of jail by putting it in his pocket and secretly getting it out, which was a very dangerous thing to do.” “Anyway, I’ll tell you very quickly,” says Harrington before outlining the story that they have recorded of King writing his famous speech. “Martin Luther King starts the speech. The first several paragraphs are pretty much what Clarence wrote the night before. Then he moves into other topics. Mahalia Jackson was his close friend. When he was depressed, he’d call up Mahalia and she’d sing for him on the telephone. That was, that was the nature of their friendship and relationship. She had just sung, she was still on the stage and she’s not quite hearing what she needs to hear from her friend, Martin Luther King. She calls out to him, ‘Martin, tell him about your dream. Tell him about your dream Martin’. And that’s when he closed the book, and he looks out and the speech became the speech. And for me, as a musician, we train ourselves to use our ears and Mahalia Jackson was using her ears as a musician, as a friend. That changed our history. Anyway, that piece is going be on our next record. We just recorded it last week.” So, after so many albums and such an exciting new project how are they going to select the repertoire for the forthcoming tour? “Every concert is different, right?” says Harrington. “Every concert. I like it that way. There’s lots of music to play. We like to mix it up, experiment with our work. Let’s say, ‘Black Angels’ next to ‘Different Trains’ or next to any number of things that we might be playing.”
