'West Coast Left Coast' Tonight: Interviews with Kronos Quartet's David Harrington and Incubus' Mike Einziger

[Tonight is the opening of the L.A. Philharmonic's West Coast, Left Coast events that run through December 8. Rounding up our series of exclusive interviews with musicians who will be playing at WCLC (see also our chats with Terry Riley and Matmos), here's the LA Weekly's John Payne talking to David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet and Mike Einziger from Incubus.]

David Harrington

Mike Einziger

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A conversation with David Harrington of the Kronos Quartet

LA WEEKLY: Well, how about it, David, what does it mean to be an artist from the West?

David Harrington: Well, it's interesting, I was talking to somebody about being an American musician the other day. The easiest way for one to notice one's nationality is to go abroad. I feel most American when I'm in Europe or Asia or South America. I don't really think about it that often, until I'm somewhere else. We just played in New York the other day, and I really do feel somehow connected to the West Coast. It's hard to describe in a way that resonates correctly for me, but it's sort of like a desire to be available for possibilities.

I think that does fit with Kronos; it's part of living in San Francisco, I think it's probably what attracted me to move back to the West Coast from New York, where we'd moved for a few years. It just didn't feel right to me being out there as a place for us to be centered. And it just seemed like San Francisco was pulling us.

I've always enjoyed the light there, I feel inspired by it, I feel that the resonance that people like Alan Ginsberg and John Cage, Terry Riley, Pandit Pran Nath...It's interesting that Ravi Shankar lives out here. And we were performing with Wu Man, who lives in San Diego, most recently at Carnegie hall the other night, and of course John Adams, Charles Mingus are from there, Jimi Hendrix, Nirvana. There is something - maybe it's in the water, I don't know! [laughs]

How much did the topography, the ambience, of the Western environment affect your, well, openness to music?

Well, I'm from Seattle, and there's a quality to the green of the Douglas fir trees that is unlike any green I've ever seen anywhere, and I've always just found it so expressive, so beautiful. And I started playing quartet music when I lived in Seattle, and who knows? I mean, those things are so deeply a part of us.

Can you describe the socio-political tenor at the time of your founding of Kronos. What was going on that might've started swayed your artistic path?

The Vietnam war was still going on in 1973, it wasn't over yet. And for me, I heard music by George Crumb, Black Angels, heard it on the radio one night. And that experience, I mean, I think I'd been looking for that music or something like it for a long time, and finally there it was. And basically, it was really simple: I had to play that piece. And in order to play that piece, I had to get a group going that would work hard enough to be able to do something like that.

And so, a few days after hearing Black Angels, Kronos started rehearsing, and a few months later we were playing it. Basically, I think I've been doing the same thing ever since, which is attempting to find the music that feels right to play given everything that I know is going on. And social events, societal issues, those kinds of things that I'm aware of, do influence our work a lot. Certainly our most recent album, Flood Plain, the album began as soon as I was aware that Bush and Cheney and Condoleeza Rice and all those people were going to drag the country into another war in Iraq. And it took about six years for the album to get put together. These things do take a lot of time.

What is the process in putting an album together? Is there a lot of research and development involved?

Harrington: A lot of times, I'm really interested in creating bodies of work, for example in Pieces of Africa, it started with one piece, and a few months later there might have been another, and then do another. And I began to notice that there was this kind of sound, feeling, in this music that was unlike any quartet music I knew about. And so, rarely do our albums start out as albums, they begin as individ. Pieces. There might be a piece that somehow relates. It's not unusual for me to be working on 10 different kinds of projects all at the same time, and each one of them might be in a different state of completion.

Before Kronos, you'd studied and played the music of the European serialists, and had drawn inspiration from Stockhausen, like many others. You were also touched by the non-traditions of California artists such as Cage, Partch, Harrison and Beefheart. In charting a course for Kronos, however, was there by chance a feeling that new music had become dried up and, oh, unsexy?

Actually, I've never felt that, and part of the reason I've never felt that is because when Black Angels became part of my life in August of '73, to me that piece was such a challenge and such a bold sonic and cultural revelation, and to me the string quartet as a medium was absolutely central to culture. I mean, I think that one piece basically revived the entire medium. If you compare that to any other string quartet ever written, it's very unique - sonically, everything it demands of anyone who plays it. I mean it's a very special aspect of American music.

Your ensemble has performed an incredibly broad range of musics. What draws you toward them?

I'm very selective. It might seem like the Kronos does everything, but actually we don't. I'm drawn to things that magnetize me, and I really trust my ears, and I follow them. And when I encountered Harry Partch's music, I remember hearing U.S. Highball, and I couldn't believe I'd never heard that piece before, and it just seemed kind of shocking that that piece wasn't more well known. So at a certain point it just seemed like, okay, I want to hear U.S. Highball, how are we going to do that? So I talked to Ben Johnston, who worked with Partch in the early '50s and who has written for Kronos and is a friend of ours -- we recorded his Amazing Grace quartet for our second album on Nonesuch -- and asked him if he would be interested in making a new version for Kronos.

In a certain way it was kind of selfish, because I just wanted to hear that piece and I wanted to share it with our audience, because I figured that if I hadn't heard it, most of our audience hadn't heard it live, so...

To take something like that and translate it into something that would work for string quartet must've been very difficult.

Our version is not going to sound like Harry Partch's version, that's all there is to it. But I feel that in any translation, whether it's a really fine translation of Rilke's poetry or the letters of Van Gogh, anything that you can think of that is a major artistic statement, a really fine translation can get you pretty close. It can get you a lot closer to the experience than if you didn't have it. I mean, if you didn't speak Dutch and all you could do was look at the letters of Van Gogh, in Dutch, and not really understand much of anything, it would be much better to have a translation of whatever language you speak.

Any time you translate something for your instrument, you're creating something new.

And some people are going to talk about what's lost and other people are going to talk about what's gained. [laughs]

Your focus onstage is rather awesome. I've always wondered how susceptible are you and your group are to the energy in the room when you perform?

To me, the audience is almost like an instrument. And however many sets of ears there are in that instrument, and they're kind of willing the musical experience out of all the other instruments in the room, including ours, to me really affects the outcome. And it's a musical outcome is something that is so clearly felt and so hard to describe, but it has something to do with creating another inward sense of knowledge.

I guess that might be something about many of the musicians on the West Coast that I find most attractive, that I think they have in common, this kind of searching for musical information from a wide variety of sources. It's almost like if you gaze out at the Pacific Ocean and watch the sun going down, you kind of wonder where it's going.

[Next, John Payne talks to Mike Einziger]