David Harrington, founder and artistic director of Kronos Quartet, describes the genesis of A Chinese Home, which receives its world premiere on November 3:
In 1992, I visited the home of composers Zhou Long and Chen Yi in New York. They shared a lot of music with me that evening, including the brilliant artistry of Wu Man, who had recently arrived in the United States. I heard all sorts of possibilities in Wu Man’s vivid pipa sound, and I got in touch with her immediately.
Wu Man has been one of Kronos’s favorite collaborators since that time. She combines the virtuosity of Heifetz with an expansive view of all things Chinese. Over the years, we have had many conversations about Chinese music, instruments, composers, culture, and traditions. In 2006, we visited Yin Yu Tang at the Peabody Essex Museum, and I remember our conversation about that experience very clearly. We decided to make a piece inspired by Yin Yu Tang, and we began our discovery of A Chinese Home.
I felt A Chinese Home should be dramatic and bold, and we would need to re-imagine our roles as performers. I wanted the piece to begin during the intermission, with a soundscape that would give an immense sense of tension, construction, activity, movement—layers of sound—to create an impression of the Grand Canyon-ness of Chinese culture.
From the wooden, postered walls of Yin Yu Tang itself, the silence of vanished time created musical questions that stirred my imagination. So many sounds of life, so many pivots of history, so many births, deaths … I embarked on a listening project that has taken me through many worlds of China. I wanted the layers of time, events, and environment to collide in a detailed musical fabric: the rural and the urban, the private and the public, the ancient and the wildly modern. Amid the seemingly endless presence of Mao and the brassy machinations of public music, the Westernized pop music of the 1930s and ’40s, the earliest recorded Chinese music from the 1890s, the latest remixes and mash-ups, the clamor of industry, mass migration, tradition, banality, religion … where was home?
It has been an amazing pleasure to explore these questions together. We have been inspired and dazzled by Chinese culture, and appalled by the magnitude of suffering in much of its history. We have tried to celebrate the constant renewal the open door of music allows us.Related events: November 3, 2009 Kronos Quartet / Wu Man
