Regional Oral History Office University of California The Bancroft Library 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 Ali- Zadeh 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.