MILLS COLLEGE

"Oh David," said Margaret Lyon, when Harrington called Mills to report that the quartet she had
hired was now a duo, "I know you'll figure this out."

Shortly after arriving in California in 1977, and having recruited Hank Dutt on viola and Gray's wife Ella as second violin, Kronos presented a program of all 20th century music. The concert was attended by Margaret Lyon, chair of the Mills College music department, where both the Budapest and Pro Arte quartets had been in residence. Lyon came away impressed, and secured a residency grant from Chamber Music America to support Kronos joining the rich Mills tradition. In the meantime she handed the Quartet's tape to faculty composer Terry Riley, who heard the group for the first time on a car stereo in the college parking lot. But shortly before the residency was to begin, the Grays realized that raising two children and being in a full-time concertizing and teaching quartet was a physical impossibility.

"So all of a sudden it was Hank and me," says Harrington. "And Hank pulled me through, as we went through the process of auditioning all these violinists and cellists."

"Friends said, 'You have a chance to mold a quartet here, to find people who you can feel really good with,'" recalls Dutt. "Before we had played on the street in Ghiradelli Square, at weddings, and whatever we could scrape together. But with the Mills funding I realized we could attract a certain level of player. So I thought of Joan, who had been part of my quartet recital at Indiana, and called her mother, who called her in Switzerland, and before we knew it she was in San Francisco."

Harrington continues, "That same week, I was on the phone with a musician in Milwaukee, and my wife overheard and yelled out from the bathtub, 'Ask him if he knows a violinist!' " He did. Fortuitously, John Sherba arrived around the same time as Jeanrenaud, and the group was set.

Almost immediately, in the fall of 1978, Kronos settled in at Mills, concertizing regularly and "learning four new pieces every month", according to Sherba. "We went through all the major 20th century literature—all the Schoenbergs, all the Bartóks, Debussy, Ravel, Ives, Shostakovich #7-15, Prokofiev, Carter. It was great."

"At that time, most composers weren't writing quartet music any more," recalls Harrington. "It had lived its life as an art form, and was going quietly off to die. But I decided that there was one guy at Mills who just had to write for us. At the time he was studying Indian music with Pandit Pran Nath, and hadn't notated anything since 1965."

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