When David Harrington was a 14-year-old boy interested in
classical music, an oft-repeated story goes, he had a realization that the
composers he was listening to - Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert – all had
been based in one small part of Europe, Vienna, with the same cultural and
religious background, leaving the vast majority of the world unrepresented in
the genre.
Since founding the Kronos Quartet in 1973, Harrington has
consciously broadened the repertoire of the classical string quartet to works
from musicians from around the world. Over the decades they’ve played the music
of avante-garde American composer Phillip Glass, Indian singer Asha Bhosle, American rock legend Jimi Hendrix, Mexican
rock band Café Tacuba, Argentine tango composer Astor Piazzolla, jazz pianist Thelonius
Monk, and Moroccan sinter player Hassan Hakmoun. They also collaborated with
the likes of both the Dave Matthews Band and Patti Smith.
On Saturday night March 2 at 8 p.m. Washington Performing Arts is bringing to 6th & I Synagogue, the San Francisco-based
Kronos to perform with
guest vocalist Mahsa Vahdat from Iran, in a show billed as “Music for Change: The Banned Countries.” Kronos will be offering the string quartet blend of two violins, viola, and cello.
As the program title indicates, Kronos will be presenting a
program of compositions from many of the countries whose citizens are banned
from visiting the United States by the Trump administration. Some non-banned
locations are on the list as well. While
some of the compositions on the bill have long been in the Kronos repertoire,
others are newer. There will be music
from Azerbaijan, Egypt, Lebanon, Yemen, Palestine, Syria, Mali, Somalia, Afghanistan,
and Nubia (located on the border region of Egypt and Sudan). The group will also be performing a set of
songs that are part of their just released album Placeless, with Mahsa Vahdat
and her sister, singer Marjan Vahdat. I
spoke with Harrington on the phone regarding the show and his band.
The idea for a concert of banned countries music came after
a show they performed with Vahdat shortly after the travel ban was first
initiated in 2017. “That night, by
coincidence, we were playing music from Sudan, Syria and Iran. Then we did an
encore from another Muslim majority country.” The crowd he says was very
appreciative but seemed concerned, after Harrington mentioned the ban, how
unjust it was that those countries would be targeted. After the show Harrington was approached by the
director of Stanford’s Iranian Studies program, Abbas Milani, who had attended
the concert and expressed his wish that the group continue to play music from
such countries. That show and discussion planted the idea for the tour.
Harrington is always trying to make connections between the
various compositions the group is performing. He says,”There was a point in the
early 1990s where we happened to be
playing the music of Foday Musa
Suso, Hamza Al Din, and Dumisani Maraire
on the same concert and I listened to a recording of that, and I thought wow,
there’s something here. We also had
music of Kevin Volans on that. Eventually that became the album Pieces of
Africa released in 1992. That’s kind of
the way our work is. Generally we are
playing music from many places and we find ways of organizing this information,
these musical impulses into experiences that feel that they add up to something
larger than a sequence of pieces. That
became the guiding idea for the Music from the Banned Countries.”
The composition listed at the top of Saturday’s program will
be “Mugam Sayagi“ by Azerbaijani female musician Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, who was
the first Islamic composer with whom Kronos had ever worked. However
Ali-Zadeh’s music won’t be the initial sounds heard by the audience. Fifteen
minutes before Kronos starts, a recording will be played –“a sonic tapestry of
calls to prayer, readings from the Koran, and sounds of cities and instruments
and voices and radio stations from all of the banned countries,” enthuses
Harrington. He adds that with the whole program “we’re trying to tell a
story through sounds, through instrumental musical colors and from the various
pieces we have assembled that will perhaps give our audience a sense, of
perhaps things they haven’t heard before, and perhaps feelings that we don’t
normally encounter in our country here, but that in so many ways are so vibrant
and beautiful and help to appreciate and enlarge our understanding of what
music can be.”
Harrington’s friend, arranger Sahba Aminikia introduced them
to singer Mahsa Vahdat. Vahdat now lives in the US, and performed a captivating
duet performance with the now late Mighty Sam McClain at DC’s Atlas Center for
the Arts in 2012. Vahdat has a powerful,
melancholic voice. At Kronos’ annual festival in San Francisco, Mahsa’s sister
Marjan joined her onstage, and the impressed Harrington realized he wanted
Kronos to record with them both together.
Erik Hillstad of Norway’s kkV Records came to the San Francisco festival
performances as he had been releasing Mahsa Vahdat albums. He invited them all to come to Oslo to record.
They worked with arrangers Aminikia,
Atabak Elyasi (Mahsa’s husband), and Jacob Garchik. The Placeless album was done in November 2018
in a large church in Oslo. On it, the Vahdats
lend their striking, nearly operatic voices, to both classic poetry from Rumi
and Hafez, as well as newer poetry from the likes of Forough Farrokhzad. The feel of the tunes resonate even if one
doesn’t understand the language being sung.
Kronos will be doing a traditional song, “Wa Habibi,” that
is more associated with Lebanese Christians than Muslims, and preceding it with
a Lebanese bell sound Harrington discovered on the internet by one of the last
handmade bell makers in Lebanon. “I heard this recording of one of his most
recent bells that he had removed from the cast or the form and he took the mud
or sand off and dusted it off and you hear him play the bell for the very first
time. You hear it 3 times. It’s pretty
unbelievable.”
Harrington notes that Kronos first came in contact with the
piece “Wa Habibi” on their very visit to Beirut. “We were with the wonderful musician and
ethnomusicologist Ali Jihad Rasy from UCLA. He took me to the Tower Record
store and I asked for the 20 greatest albums I had to hear from Lebanon and one
of them was a cassette of Fairuz singing Christian Music from Easter time and
on that cassette was ‘Wa Habibi.’ I thought it was one of the most beautiful
pieces, and depending on what music surrounds it, it can sound Islamic, it can
sound Jewish, It can sound Christian, so many things. Interestingly, in Italy
someone came up to us and said Palestrina (An early Italian composer from I
think the 16th century) wrote it. Then we were playing in France and someone
said it was a French folk song. Music can be claimed by a lot of different
people and it can be shared by a lot of people and the fact that Kronos is
playing this music in a concert of music from Muslim majority communities feels
right to me.”
Many of the compositions and composers for the concert were
chosen as a result of Harrington’s insatiable curiosity, research and
discovery. For example, he discovered
Palestinian group Ramallah Underground on the old website Myspace and then soon
he was emailing them about sending Kronos a song. “They assembled a number of possibilities for
us and I listened to all of them,“ Harrington says, adding “The one that I
thought was absolutely amazing and that I thought we had to do was
“Tashweesh,“ they created for us.”
Harrington remembers being up late one night and being wowed
by a Youtube video of an Egyptian group featuring keyboardist/composer Islam
Chipsy. “I thought this is fabulous, I
love this music, and I want every quartet in the world to be able to play music
by this man.” So Harrington, after
getting in touch with Chipsy, subsequently added a Kronos string arrangement of a Chipsy
song “Zaghlala“ to a project in progress
by Kronos for their website called “Fifty for the Future.” This project is
a commission of 50 pieces (25 from women, 25 from men) from all parts of the
musical world “for any other musician who wants to do the type of things we
do.”
“We are right in the
middle of assembling this mosaic, you can call it a cookbook or a dictionary if
you want. It’s a gathering of music for Kronos that we publish and share with
any other musicians in the world that want to play it. For free you can go on
our website right now and download the score and parts by Islam Chipsy and your
quartet can play it tonight. It’s very
hard to do in 50 pieces, and it’s always going to be unfinished, a work in
progress.”
For many of the compositions to be performed Saturday, as
well as many for the Fifty for the Future project, Harrington has been working
with Jacob Garchik. Since 2006 Garchik has done the song arrangements for many
Kronos compositions. Harrington says, “I knew Jacob when he was a little boy
because he went to school with my kids. It was many years later that we were at
Prospect Park in NYC and he was in a group called Slavic Soul Party that had
just done a soundcheck. I hadn’t seen Jacob for a long time and I was
reintroduced to him and I realized that he had done so many arrangements, that
we started working together. Jacob is a
wonderful collaborator. He has incredible instincts about what will work for us
and he is very willing to change everything if we feel it isn’t working. It’s a
real collaboration.”
Harrington is confident the audience will appreciate and
learn about the music selections in the show despite any possible
obstacles. He says, “The music will be
mysterious because the concert does start in the dark and our audience will not
likely be able to see the program and there will be no talking between pieces.”
But he adds, “if you find out the name and the creator of the third piece the
next morning, that’s ok. Learn later. Our responsibility is to make the music
the most forceful and in depth experience we can while you’re there.”
