by David Low, Webmanager
National Endowment for the Arts
Interview conducted on July 13, 1996 by Janet Cowperthwaite, Managing Director, Kronos Quartet.
At five in the afternoon on August 3, 1996, in Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center, the Kronos Quartet will begin to play Morton Feldman's String Quartet II. Five to six hours later, after playing without pause, the quartet will lay down their bows at the end of this rarely performed and never-recorded quartet, a meditative, haunting work dedicated to and premiered by Kronos in 1983. There is no certainty the piece will be performed again.
The occasion for the August 3rd performance is the Morton Feldman Celebration at the Lincoln Center Festival 96. The Festival will present four concerts of Feldman's music with performances by the Eos Ensemble, the New York Philharmonic, Kronos, Aki Takahashi, Joan La Barbara, Essential Music, and the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center. It will be an unparalleled opportunity to experience the work of this unique American composer.
Janet Cowperthwaite spoke with David Harrington, Kronos Artistic Director and violinist, about the upcoming performance.
Note: Shortly before the scheduled restrospective, the Kronos Quartet was forced to cancel its performance of String Quartet due to physical problems.
Janet Cowperthwaite: Do you remember the first time you met Morton Feldman?
David Harrington: Yes. The first time Kronos met Morton Feldman was the same night we met George Crumb for the first time. We had just played "Structures," his beautiful, short quartet piece. We were in Buffalo, New York, in about 1979. His Brooklyn accent was unforgettable, especially the way he said "beautiful." He was very appreciative of our work and I had the feeling he really knew what went into making a performance of his music.
JC: How did the Second String Quartet come about?
DH: The Second String Quartet was a result of the first. A performance of the First Quartet had been planned, and at some point we were sent the parts for the group that had originally intended to play it. But over the course of about 30 or 40 pages, you could see the group disintegrate. The personal relationships of the group just -- well, it was like watching a divorce happen. They started calling each other names and writing into the parts. Their writing got more and more manic and nervous. Clearly this piece was driving this group crazy. They never finished their work on the First Quartet, so we were asked to play it. We still have those parts, we still play from them.
We began to perform String Quartet Number One, which at that point was, I think, the longest quartet piece ever written. We played it for awhile and learned how to pace ourselves in that context and found it a very beautiful and challenging piece to play. A year later or so, in the fall of '82, we got a call from Morton who told us he was writing this new quartet and wanted to know if we would play it. Every time he was ever involved in a piece it was always going to be his greatest piece, and he was very enthusiastic about this piece. I told him we were very interested and asked if he would send the score. A few days later about 25 pages arrived and we played it through, which took an hour. It was really beautiful music. I liked it very, very much. I called Morton said, "I think you are right. It is one of your major pieces. It's beautiful. It's fantastic. How much longer is it going to be?" And he said, "Well, I'm not really sure. I've finished some more." So I asked him to send it out and about a week or so later, we got another 25 pages. This happened several more times. I think the score of the Second Quartet, which we play from, is about 125 pages.
Just by quick calculation it was clear to me that this quartet was five to six hours long. I called Morton and said, "This is a monumental piece. Can we do it?" I doubted whether we would have the physical strength or spiritual energy or whatever you need -- probably all of the above -- to do a piece like that. He reassured me that it was possible.
At some point he called to say that the CBC, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, wanted to broadcast the Second Quartet live on the radio. The premiere was to take place in Toronto. He seemed particularly enthusiastic that anybody in Canada listening to the radio on the night of the broadcast would hear his music. That was a major event. Sometime later, someone called from the CBC asking about the music. I found out that the concert broadcast was four hours and scheduled to start at 7:30. The national anthem, played at the conclusion of the show, would come on at a very specific time -- midnight, I think. I also learned that Morton would be interviewed before the broadcast. So the total length of the performance broadcast would be four hours and no matter what happened, the concert had to be over by a specific time. I called Morton and told him I thought the piece was too long for this broadcast. He reassured me that somehow everything would work out. We kept rehearsing. The piece was larger than anyone's imagination. We got to Toronto and, stupidly, we rehearsed for about eight hours the day of the premiere . It was really not a good thing for us to do.
Morton was always one of our favorite composers to rehearse with -- he had this ability to bring sound to life in a way that few people do. He could explain the way to make a pizzicato note better than anyone I've ever met. In fact, even now, every time I play a pizzicato I think about the way Morton talked about how the skin of your finger slowly approaches the string and the feel of the string sliding off your finger. It was amazingly tactile and sensual. You sense the grip and the release of the string into infinity. He talked frequently about the relationship of some of the chords in this piece to the music of Schubert. He would say, "Think about Schubert" and, sure enough, you would think about Schubert and his tragically short life, how much music he was able to write in those few years and the almost haunted quality of his later works. Sure enough, you'd be thinking about this and the chords of the Second Quartet would just come to life.
Anyway, this was all on the day of the concert and we got thoroughly exhausted. We decided that we had better take a watch on stage because this piece was not going to fit on that broadcast unless we made a way to make it fit. Joan [Jeanrenaud, Kronos cellist] was the watchkeeper. We agreed before going onstage that I would look over every once in awhile and get some sense of how we were doing. If it was looking desperate, in terms of the timing, I would just start pushing the tempo.
JC: Is that how the length is determined? The tempo?
DH: That's how the Second Quartet became a four hour quartet, which it has been ever since that performance. It had to fit on the CBC live broadcast.
JC: How would the length be determined without the CBC situation?
Well, we are not taking a watch on stage in New York. And I'm thinking that we might even do a ritard this time, because we're bringing the Second Quartet home to New York City, and it always seemed to me that Morton -- whether he was living in Buffalo or whenever we met him in Europe or wherever we met him -- he always seemed to embody something of New York. The larger than life quality. It seems like this is the place where we want to play our very last performance of the piece.
JC: How do you prepare for a performance like this?
DH: We've never done an entire run of the piece in rehearsal. We do a number of pages at a time. We might say OK, we are going to do ten pages now, and perhaps we'll do that twice during a rehearsal. We might practice specific techniques of rhythm. It's incredibly difficult to create timelessness when you are totally wiped out, but the Second Quartet is physically so demanding that there are points -- I think marathon runners must go through the same thing we do when we play the Second Quartet -- you go in and out of feeling your body is going to break. Even right now when I'm thinking of the Second Quartet I have a shooting pain in my back. And I'm sure every time Hank [Dutt, Kronos violist] thinks about it he feels that as well. It is the most painful piece of music physically for us to play. The way to prepare for it is a little bit at a time over a long period of time before the concert.
JC: Is the physical demand the most challenging aspect of the performance?
DH: No, it's the concentration. Having worked with Morton we're aware of the sound he wanted. It's a fantastically beautiful idea of music. The inner sound that he heard and felt is definitely the way that music has to be. To accomplish that as a group over a vast period of time is really, really difficult. You need to be thinking of the absolute balance of your body. Every millimeter of the bow length. The concentration involved in it is enormous.
JC: How do you feel when you are finished playing the piece?
DH: I remember wondering whether we could even stand up afterwards. You go in and out of this real high feeling. The first time we performed it the page numbers rolled by very, very slowly. Everything is so slow it's like being in this dream state that takes place in ultra-slow motion. By the time we got to the very last page there was this kind of elation that maybe we would be able to finish. We did finish under four hours. The first performance was three hours and 58 minutes. There is this sense of accomplishment and mastery of one's own difficulties and one's own body. It is enormously satisfying in that sense.
JC: The audience must feel that too.
DH: We've been told by people who have listened to the entire work that it totally changed their life and their way of hearing music. For me, since I'm involved in the work of making the piece happen, I'm not sure I can hear it as well as someone who is just listening. I remember the audience reaction to the first performance. We finished the piece and, not that there were hundreds of people there, but I think it was the longest applause Kronos had ever gotten. The people who survived the first performance really appreciated our work.
Now, Morton was not one not to respond to applause for his work and I remember motioning to him to stand up and take a bow. But he didn't. I thought he didn't like the performance. I wondered what was going on -- it was just not like him. There was a party after the concert, so I went over to him and asked him about it. And he said, "I had to take a pee so bad that I was afraid to stand up." So I said to him, "Well, maybe the next piece shouldn't be so long." The next piece -- actually the last piece he wrote for Kronos -- was the Piano and String Quartet, which is a mere 80 minutes.
JC: What's your favorite Morton Feldman story?
DH: When we were rehearsing the Piano and String Quartet, he had travelled all the way across the United States to be in Valencia, California, for our rehearsal. The rehearsal started very late at night -- eleven o'clock or so -- and everyone was tired. In those days Morton smoked a lot of cigarettes. At one point we had a question. I looked over at him and he was sitting there, a cigarette was still burning in his mouth, and he had fallen asleep. I went over and tapped him on the shoulder because I didn't want his lips to get burned, and without even flinching or thinking anything was out of the ordinary, he just woke up and was again part of the rehearsal. It was just so natural that I realized that that's how his music really can be listened to. People can go in and out of phase with their bodies and with their own consciousness. That really is the way to listen to his music, and that's what happens to us when we play it.