Life Lessons: David Harrington

I feel most awake, most alive and most creative when I’m playing with the Kronos. I remember having a moment of clarity when I was 14. I was looking at the globe we had at home and it dawned on me how weird it was that all the quartets I’d played up until that point – by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert – had been written by four white guys of the same religion who all lived in a tiny geographical area.

I realised then that I had to find out what music from other cultures sounded like. I first heard these new sounds in high school, where there was a wonderful collection of music from all over the world. Listening to musicians from places like Indonesia, Ghana and South America made me want to learn how to make different sounds myself. In time, that led me towards establishing what would become the Kronos Quartet.