David Harrington KRONOS QUARTET: MUSICIANS WITHOUT BORDERS. Interviews conducted by Caroline Crawford in 2004 and 2007

Transcription

1 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

2 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, 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, , 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,

3 L-R: Jeffrey Zeigler, John Sherba, Hank Dutt, David Harrington Photograph by Jay Blakesburg

4 Kronos at Mills College, L-R: Hank Dutt, Joan Jeanreneaud, John Sherba, David Harrington. Photo courtesy of Kronos Quartet.

5 v Discursive Table of Contents David Harrington Interview 1: March 1, 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, 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, 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, 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.

6 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

7 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

8 3 Interview 1: March, 1,2004 Audio File 1 00:00:21 00:01:12 00:01:13 00:01:35 00:01:36 00:02:38 00:02:38 00:03:33 The date is March 1st, 2004, and I am with David Harrington in Kronos s studio on 9 th 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. 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. I can check that. [1917, ed.] 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. Was she with you in Seattle? 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 very vividly. 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. What was it about him?

9 4 00:03:35 00:04:04 00:04:09 00:04:52 00:04:57 00:05:12 00:05:13 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. So you were playing from an early age. 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. You were in that club for life, as I remember. They followed you to university 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. I read that was very important to you. 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 How did you do?

10 5 00:07:02 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 It has got to be. So that was really signal to you, hearing Opus :07:21 00:07:54 00:08:03 00:08:54 00:09:00 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. 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? 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. Who was important to you musically in those years? 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]. Well, how about your family your siblings and your parents, were they musical and did they encourage you? 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

11 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 00:11:38 00:12:18 00:12:21 00:13:07 00:13:05 00:13:41 00:13:41 00:13:57 I thought they were bulbs. 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. She is the first person you mentioned, so a big influence. 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. Could you say their names? Yes. My father s mother s name was Lillian Zenger. My mother s mother s name was Alice Bettington. Last year Musical America named Kronos Quartet musicians of the year. That s right. 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. [laughter] But that Harrington was also caught up in the energy of sixties popular music.

12 7 00:14:06 00:14:24 00:14:24 00:15:30 00:15:35 00:16:20 00:16:21 00:16:25 00:16:28 Well I don t recall hearing that before, but yes, I remember from the age of twelve getting hooked on quartet music. You weren t thinking of a solo career ever? 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 What about the string quartet you started when you were twelve years old? How long did that last? 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. Professional gigs? No, not at that point. You studied composition in high school? 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

13 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 00:18:10 00:18:38 00:18:47 00:19:27 00:19:31 Just for you. 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. 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. 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. That is an exception in school though, isn t it? 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.

14 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 00:22:09 00:22:51 00:22:55 And without this Mr. Taylor, would your interest have been so eclectic, do you think? Would you have had the exposure to African music? 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 I have it. It sounds like Benshoof. 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 00:24:26 Are you still in touch with these people? 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.

15 10 00:24:43 00:24:48 Well, after high school, you went where? 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 00:26:47 00:27:07 In Seattle? 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] Music faculty? 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 28:43 00:28:46 Did he agree? I think he never forgave me. It is sometimes hard.

16 11 00:28:46 00:30:05 00:30:51 00:30:53 00:30:55 00:30:56 00:31:05 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. Very restrictive for you. 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. That is true of most universities, isn t it? I guess it is Did you consider going to a conservatory? Yes, after high school I did have the opportunity to go to Eastman and to other places. You did. 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

17 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 00:34:33 00:34:45 00:35:07 00:35:11 00:35:14 She was working there? 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. Is she musical? 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.. Wow! She thought I was nuts! [laughter] She stayed around 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.

18 13 00:35:29 00:35:29 00:35:50 00:35:50 00:36:04 00:36:07 Why did you choose the Lyric Suite? 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. She said okay. 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] That s great. 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 00:37:35 00:37:36 00:37:39 Unusual. You would find me in the front row. Unusual for the West Coast, wasn t it? I don t think that we had a series like that. 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

19 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 00:38:49 00:39:30 00:39:33 You said she was first violinist. 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. So you were political as a very young man. 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 A- T-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

20 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 00:42:16 00:42:35 00:42:37 00:42:39 00:42:39 00:43:34 00:43:45 00:44:28 00:44:32 Lots of concerts? 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. Was there support for contemporary music? Yes. Fiscal? 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. Because Black Angels is focused on the war, and you felt other music was irrelevant? 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 With the Crumb piece? 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

21 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 00:45:09? Do you still perform it? We haven t played it for a while now, but we recorded it for the 25 th 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 00:47:19 00:47:26 00:47:29 00:47:40 00:47:42 That was recorded? No, I don t have a recording of that first performance. There might have been, but I don t have it. Was that your first quartet performance? No, the first quartet performance as Kronos would have been in November of 1973 in the North Seattle Community College. What was programmed there? 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

22 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 00:48:47 00:49:16 00:49:19 00:49:24 00:49:30 00:49:33 So you pretty well knew where you wanted to start. 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. Did you all speak up? Oh yes, yes, yes. What was the SUNY connection? Well, that was a couple of years later. I don t know how detailed you want to get on all of this. We want details. 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

23 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 00:51:36 00:51:40 00:51:41 Were you Kronos by then? We were Kronos after a couple of weeks. How did you come up with the name? 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. 00:53:12 I was going to ask you why you spelled it that way. [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 00:54:32 Cannibalism, is it? [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

24 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 00:55:09 00:55:31 00:55:37 00:56:04 Who knew? [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! 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. Well, I will show it to you if you like. [score is shown on video]. We should change the tape here [audio file ends]. 00:00:20 00:00:31 00:01:31 00:01:31 00:02:30 Let s talk about personnel. Who was there and when did the quartet become a more or less permanent foursome? 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. Were you making a living? 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 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. As residents?

25 20 00:02:31 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. 00:04:34 Then it was offered to you for one year. 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 00:05:30 00:05:59 Did you like the teaching? 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. You would need that in a sense too, as much as your students.

26 21 00:06:02 00:06:05 00:06:07 Yes. Yes. Well let s talk about the others in the quartet. 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 :10:09 00:10:12 Is there a way you get the word out that you are looking? 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.

27 22 As it turned out, Walter s parents lived in San Francisco and as a matter of fact they lived on 18 th 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 20 th 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 00:12:54 00:12:54 00:12:57 00:13:06 00:13:14 00:13:17 So you came here before you had a Mills College connection, really. Oh yes. Because this was somehow the center of what you thought might be suitable? It felt I had been to San Francisco once before. It felt like a place where we could thrive. It just felt like home. What in particular? I don t know whether it was the light, or whether it was the culture as I had known it at the time. The Tape Center was here. Did you know much about that? 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