Thursday, February 28, 2019

Talking with Kronos Quartet about Saturday’s “Music for Change: The Banned Countries”





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.”





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