David Harrington of Kronos Quartet: The Musician Listens
David Harrington reveals the philosophy behind Kronos Quartet's genre-defying repertoire and explains why the ensemble has "barely scratched the surface" after half a century.
Today, the Spotlight shines on violinist and visionary David Harrington, founder of Kronos Quartet.
For fifty years, David has led one of the most adventurous musical ensembles on the planet. Kronos has commissioned over 1,100 works, collaborated with everyone from Philip Glass to Nine Inch Nails, and earned three Grammys along the way. Their recent “Hard Rain” project brought together nearly fifty artists worldwide to reimagine Bob Dylan’s nuclear-age anthem, while the Library of Congress has just acquired David’s archive.
David shares stories from five decades of musical exploration and why he believes musicians must listen to the world and respond with purpose.
If you enjoyed this episode, check out my discussions with Dorothy Lawson, Philip Golub, and Lisa Pegher. All three are available on spotlightonpodcast.com.
(The musical excerpts heard in the interview are from Kronos Quartet + The Hard Rain Collective’s Hard Rain EP)
Dig Deeper
• Visit Kronos Quartet at kronosquartet.org and follow them on Instagram, Facebook, and YouTube
• Purchase Kronos Quartet + The Hard Rain Collective’s Hard Rain EP from Bandcamp or Qobuz and listen on your streaming platform of choice
Key Albums and Recordings Mentioned:
• Pieces of Africa - Grammy-nominated, National Recording Registry selection
• Sun Rings by Terry Riley - Grammy-winning collaboration with NASA Voyager recordings
• Long Time Passing: Kronos & Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger
• Songs and Symphoniques: The Music of Moondog
Collaborators and Composers Mentioned:
• Terry Riley - Long-time Kronos collaborator and minimalist pioneer
• Nicole Lizée - Contemporary composer integrating technology with chamber music
• Laurie Anderson - Multimedia artist and Kronos collaborator
• Rhiannon Giddens - Currently working on new piece for Kronos
• inti figgis-vizueta - Contemporary composer mentioned for new political response piece
(This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.)
Lawrence Peryer: Before we get into what's going on right now and what's coming up, I wanted to ask you a little bit about what I think of as your trifecta with the Library of Congress. There's the archive acquisition, the inclusion of Pieces of Africa in the National Recording Registry, and most interestingly, your appointment to the Kluge Chair in Modern Culture. First, what does it feel like and what does it mean to have your work included with some of the country's most significant cultural artifacts?
David Harrington: We're very proud that our archive up to the point of last year is now at the Library of Congress. I told them at the library that as far as I'm concerned, we're going to need you to send another truck out to San Francisco in fifty more years. There's so much to do and so much that we want to do, building on what has happened over all these years.
What I like is that once everything's organized, people interested in researching and learning more about the details of our work can have that public access. One thing I learned as a scholar in modern culture at the Kluge Institute was what an incredible resource the Library of Congress is for our country, and how few people actually know what you can learn there and what you can experience there. It seems like it's just not very well known that you can get a librarian from so many of the different departments on the phone, and you can talk to that person, ask your questions, and have access to so much information that might be helpful in whatever you might be trying to do. So that's a long way of saying I'm really happy that a lot of our work is there.
In terms of the Recording Registry, I am incredibly proud that Pieces of Africa is included. I showed my grandson the complete list of recordings on that registry. He was blown away. He's sixteen years old and a big music fan, and of course there are a lot of names that he hasn't encountered, but there are a lot that he has, and it's impressive that, you know, basically you're lucky if you get one recording there.
I have to say, when I saw that the recording I heard of George Crumb's Black Angels—there are only several recordings by string quartets on the Recording Registry, and one of them is the recording I heard in August of nineteen seventy-three, the New York String Quartet playing Black Angels—it made me so happy. I would have liked our recording to be there, but I understand why the first recording of that piece belongs there. That's why I started Kronos after I heard that recording. And then to see it on the list when Pieces of Africa was there was really cool. It was a great moment.
The work I was able to do at the Kluge Institute and working with librarians from the American Folklife Center influenced the work of Kronos and will influence it many years into the future. For example, one of the pieces we're putting together we're calling Three Bones, and Three Bones is a triptych. The center of the triptych is some of our work with Gullah musicians and the Sea Islands music. One of the things I was able to do while I was there was to get a recording that was made by Lorenzo Dow Turner in nineteen thirty-two. Lorenzo Dow Turner was the linguist who established that Gullah is a language.
Part of his research involved doing a lot of field recordings of people speaking and singing. There was a recording he made in nineteen thirty-two of an elder woman singing. She did not know the language she was singing. She knew the melody and she knew the words, but she didn't know what the words meant or what language they were in. She had learned this from her mother, who had learned it from her mother.
A few years later, in the nineteen-forties, a linguist from Sierra Leone—Lorenzo Dow Turner played the recording, and the linguist from Sierra Leone said, "Well, that's Mende, one of the languages spoken at Sierra Leone." But he didn't know the context of the song, and I don't think he knew all the words either. A few years later, into the late nineteen-sixties, an anthropologist and a musicologist took the recordings to Sierra Leone and eventually found somebody who knew the song and could sing along. It turns out that this song in the Mende language is a song sung by women at funerals. As far as we know, it's the only song in American music that exists in the original African language. In other words, it survived the Atlantic passage and was passed from mother to daughter, grandmother to granddaughter—we don't know how many generations. We have that recording, and it's now in the most pristine audio condition it's ever been in.
We premiered part of our triptych at Spoleto in June. Charlton Singleton wrote the surrounding music, and Quentin Baxter, a Gullah percussionist and drummer, joined us. That was one of the wonderful things I was able to do while I was there.
Lawrence: You know, so much comes out of that story.
David: I know.
Lawrence: That's just one song. It really is a great representation of what it's like to be someone who loves music. How you can open one door and go down all these different hallways and end up in all these different places.
Something else strikes me as I was watching you tell the story, and our listeners won't catch this, but you were smiling the whole time. That leads into the second question I wanted to ask you. By the way, thank you for not correcting me on my horrible pronunciation. I will now say it correctly: the Kluge Chair. My sense is that it basically gave you the keys to the candy shop. I wonder—you spoke about being able to phone all these librarians and they help you navigate that universe. When you first picked up the phone, what was the first thing? Did you have an agenda when you went in? Like, how does one start in that context?
David: I'm going to show you a photograph, and I know the listeners aren't going to be able to see this. My first day was June twenty-fifth, twenty twenty-four. I invited my daughter to come with me. She is a middle school librarian in San Francisco public schools. I thought, what better place to go? We were escorted down a big hallway, had lunch, and the first person we met—I don't know if you know who that is—was Dr. Carla Hayden, the Librarian of Congress, the head of the largest library in the world. My daughter Bonnie got to meet her. I was introduced by the guy escorting us as "David Harrington, Kronos and Kluge Scholar in Modern Culture," and all this. Then I said, "And here's my daughter," and Dr. Hayden said, "Well, she's the one I want to talk to." It was a very proud dad moment.
They talked for about ten minutes about children's books, the importance of libraries and librarians, and making books available to kids. That's what Bonnie's been doing her whole life. Even though she was teaching third grade for twenty-three years, she's always been a librarian at heart. The commitment she showed and the respect for other librarians was so wonderful. When she got fired, I have to tell you, it really angered me because I was aware of how excellent she is as a public person, as a representative of books for our entire society.
Lawrence: I felt that coming. (laughter)
David: Yes. Firsthand. There was nothing in it for her career-wise. That's just who she is. That was one of the first things that happened at the Library of Congress that I can recall for me. Learning to navigate even a little of this incredible resource was thrilling. I can't say that I know how to navigate the Library of Congress, but being around the scholars, the librarians, and the collections was thrilling and gave me a larger appreciation for what we have as citizens of our country.
Lawrence: I think the word commitment is a great through line for a lot of what I want to ask you about. And one manifestation of commitment is social commitment and engagement—music and art, not as something that simply exists in a conservatory or in a closed-off way. If I had to characterize some of the things that Kronos means to me, I think about art in the world, art in maybe popular spaces, democracy—you know, if these aren't too lofty things to say to you. The Hard Rain project, which is what came across my desk and caused us to reach out to you, features all of these incredible voices. I didn't want to name some at the risk of not naming all, but there's just some wonderful voices. It's such a joy to hear the way they're collaged and pop up. I'm curious: how do you decide when a project needs to be at this kind of collaborative scale versus just the intimacy of the quartet?
David: The way this began was that I got a call from Owen Gaffney in Stockholm, and he works with the Nobel people, and he asked me if Kronos would be interested in reimagining Bob Dylan's "A Hard Rain's A-Gonna Fall." The initial idea was that we would play this in Stockholm at a concert we were doing in a decommissioned nuclear bunker in Stockholm. We did that. You can hear the singer—she's part of the recording—Sarah Parkman is her name. We premiered the song with Sarah, but as we were putting it together, it began to seem like it would be great to involve the world of singers if we could and the world of musicians. It started out as a performance with Sarah Parkman. Then we were thinking, "Well, let's see who else might be able to join us."
There's a lot of chance that happens. I got an email from Asha Bhosle's son: "Mom and I are in San Francisco. Would you like to meet?" You probably know we did an album with Asha Bhosle, oh, twenty years ago, I think. I thought, "Great. I can't wait to see Asha. I haven't seen her for a long time. She's ninety-two years old." I went down to the hotel, and we met. I asked her personally right then if she would like to be a part of this. She said she would love to. Her granddaughter was with her, and the idea came up: "Wouldn't it be great to have the generations singing together?"
One thing that happened was that Elia Einhorn, the co-producer who's a real genius, I think, reached out to a number of musicians and singers. We agreed that Allison Russell would be fabulous, and Elia was able to reach out to her directly. In each case, it came from a personal connection, actually each request. I don't know how much you know about the work we've done over the years, but I was invited to curate the Carnegie Hall premiere of Terry Riley's "In C" some years ago. I basically put the orchestra together instrument by instrument. It took a long time to do this. It didn't happen quickly. The same kind of thing happened with Hard Rain. We've worked with Laurie Anderson. I called Laurie about this, and she said absolutely, she's doing it. It's happening. The enthusiasm from so many members of the musical community was just inspiring. It was thrilling to be a part of this.
And then to hear someone like Ocean Vuong—his voice is so beautiful. It's incredible. In fact, I just got off a call a few minutes ago, and we're hoping that Ocean will join us in concert sometime. And Charlotte Gainsbourg—I mean, those are two of my favorite voices on the drone. Of course, I love hearing Iggy Pop.
Lawrence: He brought the full Iggy to it. He really did.
David: So beautiful. His voice is so beautiful. We've worked with Tanya Tagaq, the amazing throat singer from Northern Canada. We recently recorded an album with Peni Candra Rini from Java. These singers had to be a part of it, you know. They just had to.
Lawrence: I often ask the artists I talk with about the role of place in their work and how place interfaces or interacts with their work. I wanted to ask something similar of you because of your history with places like Seattle and San Francisco and other locations around the world. But more specifically, could you talk to me a little bit about the power of recording your part for this piece in Japan?
David: It came down to timing, in a certain way. It seems at this point like, well, of course they planned that they would record their part in Japan for the resonance, the meaning, the poetry. That's not really how it happened. It happened schedule-wise. This recording got put together really quickly, by the way. A lot of my co-producing work was done on tour, late at night and early in the morning. I didn't really have the time to do it. But I felt like the occasion of the eightieth year since the detonation of a nuclear device, the bombing of Hiroshima on August sixth, nineteen forty-five, and then August ninth was Nagasaki, and July sixteenth was the Trinity test. There was going to be an assembly of Nobel laureates for the prevention of nuclear war in Chicago. Chicago is where the Fermi Lab was instrumental in the development in the nineteen-forties.
Yeah, and it's where the Doomsday Clock is, and Kronos was invited to play there. The only way we could get the recording done so that it could come out on the sixteenth of July was to extend our tour in Japan, where we were celebrating Terry Riley's ninetieth birthday. We extended it one day and recorded that final day in Japan. When I look back, I think, "Well, there's something really perfect about that." And it was not lost on us, by the way. Not at all. But it wasn't planned that way. It just had to be that way in order to finish it in time.
Lawrence: Wow, I mean, that's pretty astounding. Especially for a group of people that work so much and are in so many places over any interval of a year, a few months, and to have it work out that way.
David: When we actually did the concert in Chicago as the conclusion of the assembly of Nobel laureates and nuclear scientists, we had four speakers join us. Several of them will be included on the vinyl release. There will be two live performances from that concert. It'll come out on vinyl. We're working on that right now. One of them is a Japanese man who is reading a diary entry of a father and a husband who lost his wife and child at Hiroshima, and this man was reading over Laurie Anderson's piece Flow. It's as emotional as it gets, let's just say that. That was part of the concert.
You mentioned place, and so our Hard Rain started in a decommissioned nuclear bunker in Stockholm, and then it came to the United States and was played in Chicago on July sixteenth, the eightieth year since the first detonation. These timings and occurrences are important. I could think of other moments in our work over all these years where the timing seems really almost like it's part of the work itself.
For example, we played in Yerevan, Armenia, and we did a concert marking the hundredth year since the beginning of the genocide. I don't know if you've heard that recording that came out this past year. I invite you to check it out. It's music by Mary Kouyoumdjian, and the album is called Witness. The closing track is called "Silent Cranes." You hear voices of survivors of the genocide.
Lawrence: I will when we're done here. Believe me.
David: I'll never forget being there, performing for that audience on that day and playing that piece by an American whose family immigrated from Armenia, survived the genocide, immigrated to Lebanon, and from Lebanon's civil war, came to the United States. It's amazing how the generations and how certain people—these events resonate with them and create music. Mary is—well, you'll hear it.
Lawrence: I can't wait. Yeah, it's amazing, David, because hearing you say that, the thought that came to my head was those moments, those synchronicities—those, whatever you want to call them—have this ability to collapse the world and to cause you to realize just how small and intimate your experience on this planet can be, despite the vastness of it and despite the number of souls that have lived and will live. I was struggling to come up with the articulation of how to ask you this question, and I may stumble through it, but it's not what causes you to build works around these moments. It's more philosophically or artistically: what do you think and feel that the art is doing in those moments? What is the art doing for this commemoration of the atomic detonation and devastation? What is it doing when you go to places like Armenia? I'm sure there are many other examples from your career. What is going on? What is the art doing?
David: You know, I'm not sure we can always know. In Chicago, what happened was this: not only were there twenty Nobel Laureates in the audience, but there were nuclear scientists, members of the public, and interested Kronos fans. What happened there was, for me and for Kronos and our future, incredibly significant because it felt like what we were able to accomplish is something I'd wanted to accomplish for the fifty-one point nine years of Kronos up to that point. That is: scientists and musicians would be in the same room doing the same thing. These scientists had just spent three days fashioning a statement that was published in the New York Times. The idea was that heads of states all over the world would receive this statement delivered by people who know the effects of nuclear war on life and civilization.
We were there as musicians, not necessarily only Kronos. It felt like we were representing all musicians. It was an incredible experience for me. It felt like we connected. When you think of music and then you think of science, they can seem very far apart, but they didn't seem far apart at all that night. So many conversations happened way into the night after that concert: "We've got to do this more. This is so great. Music amplified us. It inspired us." I can say that the conversations I had, for example, with Saul Perlmutter, who is a Nobel Laureate and a violinist by the way—one of the people who established that the universe is expanding. Just to be able to have conversations like that.
And then Daniel Holz, who organized the assembly, he and I were getting ready for an interview on Democracy Now, and the person preparing us was asking us questions. They probably wanted to see what kind of things we might say.
Lawrence: Make sure you behave?
David: Yeah. I kind of got the feeling like we were being checked up on just a little bit. But right during that conversation, Daniel looks down at his phone, and he's the guy who is in charge of the Doomsday Clock committee and one of the world's authorities on black holes. He looks down at his phone, and I saw it for myself: "We just discovered two new black holes." And what other violinist of any quartet in the universe could say they were with the authority on black holes?
Lawrence: That's amazing.
David: The authority on black holes. And they just discovered two new ones. (laughter) Of course, later he said, "They're at least a billion years old, but still."
Lawrence: Well, they're new to us. (laughter)
David: New to us.
Lawrence: Yeah. It really is amazing to contemplate the places that music has taken you and the world it's revealed.
David: The reason I can't tell you much about this is I'm not sure because it's something that's evolving. I'm spending a day with Daniel Holz next week. We're going to Golden Gate Park. I have a place there where I've had thousands of meetings. It's called the Fragrance Garden at the Strybing Arboretum. That's where I like to have my meetings outdoors in the arboretum. Daniel and I are—who knows what might happen. Daniel is the kind of person who makes things happen. He's the one who made that assembly happen. Who knows? The next time I see you or talk to you, Kronos may be musicians in residence at the Doomsday Clock. I don't know, but something like that is going to happen. I can tell you that for sure.
Lawrence: Speaking of making things happen, something that's easy to roll off the tongue but kind of staggering to contemplate is the number of works that Kronos has commissioned. It's almost like there's a whole other parallel universe within the music business that you all run. I'm curious about a couple of questions around commissioning, but has your process—how has your process for identifying and working with composers changed as the Kronos project has grown over the years and evolved? Like, is there a methodology?
David: Let's talk about the very first commission. It doesn't start with it, it starts earlier than it started. (laughter) Things always do, right.
Lawrence: It's the story behind the story?
David: Yeah. When I was sixteen in high school, I was in a string quartet, and we found ourselves playing a new piece, actually going to the home of the composer of a new piece as it was being written. That composer was Ken Benshoof from Seattle. He's now in his nineties, I think he's ninety-two at this point. When I was sixteen, that's what I was doing. At a certain point we played the world premiere of Ken's piano quintet, and that concert hooked me on the process of assembling new pieces that nobody had ever heard.
By the time we'd had several months of rehearsal and the piece was completed, I realized nobody else in the world except the five of us knew what this was about, and we got to share it with an audience. It's like this secret language that we got to reveal, and I just loved that. Ken became my composition teacher in high school.
Then, fast forward a few years. My wife and I had come back from a year in Canada. I had accepted a job in the Victoria Symphony when I thought I might get drafted by the US Army. When I had my physical, they didn't want me any more than I didn't want them.
Lawrence: The feeling was mutual? (laughter)
David: The feeling was very mutual. But by then I'd signed the contract, so we went to Victoria. We were there for a year, and then we came back in July and August, and I started playing quartets with various musicians around Seattle. We had the radio on, and that recording of Paul Zukofsky and the New York String Quartet playing George Crumb's Black Angels was on and on and on the radio.
I had never heard any music like that, and I had been trying to find my song, and there it was. The next morning, I found out who Crumb's publisher was. I called the publisher in New York City and convinced them they had to send me the music because I had to have it. I didn't even have it. Well, I don't think there were credit cards in nineteen seventy-three. If there were, I didn't have one. I convinced the guy to send it, and I said, "I will send you the money. Don't worry. I will." He trusted me. Peter's Edition arrived with Black Angels. A week later, I looked at the score and realized I've got to play this piece. That's all there is to it. I have to. I realized I'm going to have to get a group together that will be committed to all the things involved in playing that piece.
I talked to my friend Ken Benshoof, and he said, "Well, I'm going to write a new piece for your group." This was before we even had a group. Ken started writing what became Traveling Music, and you can hear that on Spotify if you want. It was recorded for the twenty-fifth anniversary box set of Kronos. The reason I'm talking to you today is because that piece was so beautiful, number one, and so much fun to put together as a group. The fact that Ken believed in me and the group even before we started rehearsing, and he made this piece—it was just such a thrill to play.
That was in the spring of nineteen seventy-four when we did the first commission piece. There was no money involved. I didn't have any money. He wanted to do it, I wanted him to do it, and I think I bought him a coffee and some donuts or something. That was it.
Lawrence: Earlier you mentioned some of the things I think of when I think of Kronos, and another thing I think of is relationships with some of you—you know, even you mentioned Asha Bhosle, and I think of Terry Riley, and there's a list of people you've had affiliations with for so long. I'm really curious about—again, it's a balance question—how do you maintain all of those relationships while still staying open and making space for completely new ones? There must be so much intention that has to go into that.
David: I didn't really answer your other question about how it happens. For me, it's a matter of a magnetic force. I got magnetized to Ken Benshoof's music at age sixteen, and then I became his page turner when he did piano concerts. We became very good friends, and he would always be playing new pieces for me on the piano, so I saw his process.
That's how the relationship started with Terry Riley, and it was kind of similar and related to Ken Benshoof because Kronos was at Mills College. We had just been appointed Quartet in Residence there, and what should we be rehearsing but Traveling Music by Ken Benshoof. When Terry Riley came into the concert hall, I recognized Terry from his recording Rainbow in Curved Air—his photograph is on the recording. I looked over and thought, "Hey, that's Terry Riley." He said, "Oh, this is really great. What were you playing?" I said, "Well, the music of Ken Benshoof." Terry said, "Ken Benshoof! I went to college with him in the fifties." That was in the spring of nineteen seventy-seven, I think, when I first met Terry.
It took a couple of years for him to feel comfortable notating his music again. Basically, in every case with composers, it's a matter of finding the kind of moment or the conversation that can lead that person to feel comfortable. It took me twenty years to get Laurie Anderson to feel comfortable writing a piece for Kronos, but once I think something is important to do, I will not give up.
In terms of new work with composers, if something magnetizes me or anybody in the group where we just want to hear more of that person's music, then it seems like that person ought to work with us, ought to write for us. I think that's one thing that is very consistent through all the years and all the people we have worked with. I feel so lucky to have had Terry Riley as a close friend for forty-five years. I couldn't imagine him being in Japan and having a ninetieth birthday without us being there with him. Ayane Kozasa, our violist, figured out a way for us to be there, and it was great.
Lawrence: I want to be respectful of your time and our remaining time together. What I'd like to ask you in closing is that I have this paraphrase or fragment of a quote of yours, and it has to do with you talking about wanting the quartet to quote "tell the whole story if possible" end quote. I wonder, these last couple of years have been a lot about looking backwards, yet you're always looking forward. I'm curious what part of the story remains to be told.
David: Oh, we barely scratched the surface. (laughter)
Lawrence: Beautiful.
David: That's the thing about music—it's none of us own it. We get to share it. Just this morning I got a message from a composer living in Washington, D.C., a transgender composer who is so upset about what's happening to our country. She wants to make a special piece for us as a response. She wants to do it right away. First of all, we're definitely going to do it. Secondly, it's going to involve some prerecorded cello lines that her close friend Andrew Yee from the Attacca Quartet is going to record. There'll be multi-track Andrew Yee. The composer is inti figgis-vizueta. Kronos will have this response, and I'm feeling, especially after July sixteenth, that we need to step up to the plate in a new way. It's interesting that this request came this morning at three o'clock in the morning, by the way. I just happened to be awake, and I wrote right back.
Inti has written three other pieces for Kronos, and she has an entire sound world that's very beautiful. I feel that one advantage you get from fifty-plus years is that you get access in a new way. Inti thought of us right away, and she thought of us because of the work she's heard that we've done. Not only Black Angels, but all kinds of anti-war pieces. We've been telling the story of how Martin Luther King arrived at the "I Have a Dream" speech, involving his close friend Mahalia Jackson, who was on the rostrum with him that day, and his lawyer and speechwriter Clarence Jones. I happened to hear Clarence tell the story on C-Span, about how Mahalia Jackson called out to Martin Luther King after the beginning of the speech. She called out and said, "Tell 'em about your dream. Tell 'em about your dream, Martin."
When I heard that, I realized that Mahalia Jackson, in that sense, represented all musicians in such a perfect way because Martin Luther King Jr. was her close friend and confidante. When he was down, he would call her up, and she would sing to him. That's what Clarence Jones told us. The night before the speech, King called Clarence and said, "Clarence, can you write some thoughts out for me for tomorrow?" Clarence wrote out his thoughts. The time of the speech arrived, and the first five or six paragraphs were what Clarence wrote.
But Clarence Jones doesn't say that he wrote the words of Martin Luther King. He says he heard them. So Martin Luther King Jr. surrounded himself with musical people, and Clarence heard Martin Luther King Jr.'s voice. At a certain point, the speech veered away from what Clarence had written. Right after that is when Mahalia called out to him, and that's when he closed the book and looked out, and the speech went cosmic.
What I got from that is a musician's responsibility is to listen. That's what we can offer our families, our friends, our society, our world—we listen to what's going on, and we try to find responses. We try to find music wherever we can find it, and we try to create a community around us. That's what Mahalia Jackson did. One of our future albums is called Glorious Mahalia, and it's all recorded. We're waiting for it to come out in the spring of twenty twenty-six.
