Covering Their Bases Kronos Quartet's David Harrington

Since 1973, David Harrington and the Kronos Quartet have challenged people’s perceptions of what falls within a string quartet’s repertoire. That sense of exploration ties its sizable output together, from film scores both terrifying (Darren Aronofsky’s Requiem For A Dream) and winsome (Paul Schrader’s Mishima: A Life In Four Chapters), to surprisingly bold covers of artists as far-ranging as Nine Inch Nails, Sigur Rós, Thelonious Monk, and Blind Willie Johnson. Rather than touch on all the songs by artists the group has paid tribute to over the decades, The A.V. Club talked to founder/violinist David Harrington about what they have in common with Lynyrd Skynyrd cover bands, his fear of heights, and what he thinks about all those cheesy string-quartet tribute albums to bands like Third Eye Blind. The Kronos Quartet plays the McAninch Arts Center on Friday.

The A.V. Club: Do you feel a kinship with cover bands, or do you think you’re doing something totally different?

David Harrington: In preparation for talking with you, I made a little list of a few pieces of music that we play. So as long as you’re on record, the thing I wanted to ask you is, what is a cover?

AVC: That was my next question.

DH: You know, I’ve been thinking about this ever since the topic came up. I think back to the very first time I heard string-quartet music. I was 12 years old, and the first piece I heard was Beethoven’s Opus 127 E-flat major quartet. And those opening chords, played by the Budapest Quartet, and this would have been 1961, the sound just blew me away, and I had to try to make that sound. So I went to the public library in Seattle and checked music out and I got some friends from the Seattle Youth Symphony—another violinist, a violist, and a cellist—and we tried to play those chords. And, basically, I feel like I’ve been doing the same thing ever since.

In the late '70s, there was this fear permeating the cultural environment that all the orchestras in the country were going to go belly-up. And the one thing that touched me in all this was, “Oh God, does that mean I’ll never be able to play ‘The Rite Of Spring’?” ‘Cause I hadn’t played it. And also, by that point, it was clear I wasn’t going to be an orchestra player. But anyway, I decided that Kronos had to play “The Rite Of Spring.” And so we got a friend to make a new version of “The Rite Of Spring” for us and piano. While we were putting that together, we started thinking about the kind of experience we were going to have for our audience. I thought, “What if we need to do an encore? What can we possibly play after ‘The Rite Of Spring’?” The only thing that came to mind was Jimi Hendrix. And that’s why we got started playing “Purple Haze.” It was an encore to “The Rite Of Spring.” Then what happened is, the group got more and more amplified as time went on, and our version began to change and the version you’ve probably heard is the result.

AVC: Why did that song occur to you as encore material?

DH: I grew up in Seattle, and Hendrix was from Seattle. When I was starting in high school and college, his music just completely galvanized me. The sound—there was something about his virtuosity and the sound and the naturalness of the way he played that just seemed really fantastic. I really can’t explain it. I was just drawn to his sound and his music.

Here’s another piece I bet you don’t know about. Kronos worked with Conlon Nancarrow. In fact, we played the world premiere of his string quartet No. 1. He came from Mexico. He moved there in the late ‘40s or early ‘50s, during the McCarthy time. And he started making these amazing pieces for player piano, mainly because nobody could play his music or would play it. So he just basically said, “Fuck it, I’m going to figure out a way to do what I want the way I want.” So he started writing player-piano music. One of the coolest of his studies is Study No. 3a, “Boogie Woogie.”

Ever since I first heard that, I wanted to play as fast as that. It’s super-humanly fast. No living human being at the moment can actually play that fast. It gets faster because the roll gets tighter as it goes along. Anyways, I was talking with Trimpin. Trimpin is the guy who digitized all of Nancarrow’s player piano rolls. It occurred to me, “Wouldn’t it be possible, if Kronos sampled every one of our pitches in a variety of ways to actually replace Nancarrow’s piano sound with Kronos’ sound?” Trimpin said, “Oh yeah, no problem.”

AVC: So when you hear something like “Boogie Woogie” or listen to music in general, are you always thinking about how you can deconstruct or build upon it? Or are you ever able to just hear a recording as an end product?

DH: When I listen to music, which is quite frequently, I’m always hoping to find something that I can’t live without. And if I find that, I try to bring whatever that might be into the realm of Kronos. I decided at a very young age that basically my instrument was the quartet, was Kronos. So, in a lot of ways, I don’t feel like a violinist. I feel like a member of this group and for me, my instrument is all four of us. Occasionally there will be a composer whose music just pulls me, and I just trust myself to be pulled. It might be Blind Willie Johnson. “Dark Was The Night,” to me, was one of the great American pieces—not only American, it’s one of the great pieces that I’ve ever heard.

A couple of other things that you might not have heard yet, because they’re not available: There’s a fantastic compilation of music that was recorded and released originally on 78s, and it’s called Black Mirror: Reflections In Global Musics. I would recommend it to anybody. But anyway, on that album there’s a song, and when I first heard that song, it just completely blew me away, because all the sudden I had heard the greatest note that I’d ever heard anybody make up to that point. The song is called “Smyrneiko Minore,” and it was sung by Marika Papagika, a young woman who emigrated from Greece to the United States, and she recorded it in 1919 in New York. When you listen to that song, you’re totally unprepared. At least I was. I was totally unprepared for her entrance. When she comes in, that first note, it’s unbelievable, the sense of human sorrow and the feeling of that note.

AVC: When you hear a quality like that in a song, and then you recreate it, how often do you hit your mark? Do you get the same feeling from your recordings as you do the originals that inspired them?

DH: There’s no way I could recreate her version. What she did for me, though, is she raised the bar on what a person can put into a note as a performer or as a musician—just the experience that can go into that note to shape it and to give it its color and its life and its future. What I want to do is add the effect of that note that she made into my own life, into my own collection. I want to find a way of sharing that with other people. When I go out on the stage, every time I ever play that note, in the arrangement, it’s my challenge, actually, to play—my part is the vocal part—and I wanted that challenge. Every time before I play that note, I can hear her voice in my head. As a matter of fact, that recording is a present that I give to a lot of people, and just recalling Howard Zinn, I remember I sent that album to Howard after his wife died. I said, “There’s a note on this album, Howard, and I’ll leave it up to you to find it. You’ll hear it.” [Laughs.] And he wrote back to me and said he heard it. It just says so much. For me, that’s the kind of thing I’m looking for in music, and it’s what I want to try to provide when we make a concert or we make a recording. It’s almost like making connections to music. So if you come to a Kronos concert, and you hear that song, you might go back and listen to Marika Papagika, and then it might take you into a world of Rembetika music. That’s the way music works: You hear something, and then you get pulled, and you start to explore. So a lot of times, the things that we do are, hopefully, the beginnings of explorations for other people.

AVC: It’s certainly a different port of entry than string or bluegrass albums like The Vitamin String Quartet Tribute To Third Eye Blind or String Quartet Tribute To Nirvana. Certainly you can make the same case for connections being made, but those seem largely intended for people already familiar with the source material.

DH: Yeah. Well, the guy that started those, that whole approach, I can’t remember his name, but he introduced himself to me one time, and he kind of thanked me for giving him the idea. [Laughs.] I’ve only heard a couple of them, but the ones I did hear—maybe the original music didn’t actually touch the people involved. It was just an exercise in something rather than an actual experience or feeling or transformation that had occurred because of hearing the music of Third Eye Blind. I think the one I heard was Nirvana? It might have been Nirvana or something like that. For me, emotionally, it just didn’t register. At all. When music does that for me, it just goes in one ear and out the other. I have no memory of it at all. I’m really not interested in that kind of thing for my group or my audience or my family or anybody.

AVC: Kronos is very adventurous. What’s something you’d never do?

DH: I don’t know if you’ve seen Trimpin: The Sound Of Invention, but it was a film made about him and his work, and the collaboration that we did with Trimpin is a part of that film. In the early making of the piece that we did together, there’s this moment where Trimpin was suggesting we take these cheap violins and destroy them. And I said, “Trimpin, I can’t do that. I can’t do that. My daughter is a first-grade teacher. There’s no music in her school for any of the children. I can’t go out on a stage and break an instrument. I’m not going to do it.” So we reached a point.

Another time, [Karlheinz] Stockhausen, the German composer, sent me the score to Helicopter String Quartet, and he was hoping that Kronos would premiere it. I looked at the score and it looked really interesting and wild and everything, but the idea was that we would actually get up and be in a helicopter and play the piece. I wrote back to him and said that I am incredibly afraid of heights, and there’s no way I could possibly play a violin and be in a helicopter at the same time. I just couldn’t do it.

AVC: Would that even be audible?

DH: Yeah, there’s ways. It’s been done. He found other people that wanted to [laughs] strap themselves into a helicopter and do it, but I couldn’t do it. So you find your limits as you go along.

AVC: So, we’ve been talking about covers. What comes to mind when you hear the phrase “cover band”? Does Kronos fit into that same family?

DH: I’ve never thought of it before. That’s why I was really interested in talking to you. I have never thought of it.

AVC: Well, certainly you guys are very different from a bar band that plays Lynyrd Skynyrd.

DH: I was thinking about it. The hotel I’m staying in is right next to the hall, and I was out looking for a place to eat breakfast, and I went by the hall, and it’s where the Oregon Symphony plays. I realized I was going to be talking to you today, and I thought, “Hmm. Does that mean every symphony orchestra in the country is a cover band? Is every opera company a cover band because what they’re doing is music that’s been done before by other people? The same music?” In a way, every musician is a cover musician. In a way. Whoever said, “There’s nothing new under the sun,” I think, is right. There are variations. There are infinite variations. The limits have to do with time and imagination and circumstances and personal experiences. To me, those are the limitations. But anybody that attempts to make a musical note is faced with the same issues. No matter what instrument they play or what part of the world they’re from or anything like that. To me, the limitations are the same. So whether you’re hearing some group on record playing the music of Lawrence Welk or whatever, it’s the same. That’s not to say that everybody thinks of it the same way, but the way I perceive it, we’re all in the same situation. I think we define ourselves by the way we express that sense of limitation and imagination and those things.

AVC: But certainly everyone senses the limitations you were talking about, and probably wants to rebel against them. 

DH: There are infinite distances between pitches. So basically musicians that are involved with instruments that play pitches or rhythms or whatever, they kind of share that body of possibilities. I guess for me, the wonderful thing about being able to say that I’m a musician is that I get to spend 24 hours a day listening and exploring. For me, there’s a certain responsibility in that. It’s not just something that, for me, it’s not casual at all. Since I get to spend that time, I think of myself as a filter, if for no other person than myself. I get to filter out what doesn’t permeate through and become an essential part of my own experience. I think of that as what I do. Sometimes that involves, like in the case of “Dark Was The Night,” for example, taking a piece and wanting to find another way to do it, wanting to bring that music to our audience and hoping that the version that we do will lead to other places. It might lead back to the original for some listeners. It’s interesting that some of the composers that have heard that, where I restrung the violin, are now thinking about restringing instruments in different ways for new pieces for us. So that one piece and that one way of dealing with the instrument is leading to other possibilities.

AVC: Limitless possibilities.

DH: I know! That’s exactly what I mean. In that way, a bar band that plays covers in the way you were talking about, there’s something really wonderful about playing music that you find valuable and beautiful and fantastic. Basically, I appreciate any music when performers are getting out there and saying, "This is what I love best, and here it is." To me, that’s valuable. There’s a certain transaction in that, a cultural transaction. I just love it.