1998 Grammy Nominee – Best Chamber Music Performance

1998 National Public Radio New Horizon Nominee — Significant Contributions to Classical Music in America

Recorded over a three-year period, Early Music is a collection of music that spans nearly 1,200 years of composition. The 70-minute album is divided into three parts, with each section opening with a Kyrie by Guillaume de Machaut. The final work – Alfred Schnittke’s Collected Songs Where Every Verse is Filled with Grief (a string quartet arrangement of the composer’s Concerto for Mixed Chorus) – served as inspiration for the concept album, sparking a multi-year “search for a sound.”

“The Early Music album came about as an idea about sound and about listening to music and how, at one moment, you can think that you are hearing something from the past that sounds modern, [and], on the other hand, hearing something that is very modern that could sound very old,” Harrington said in an oral history interview with Caroline Crawford for UC Berkeley’s Bancroft Library. “I felt that there is this kind of web built around a listener and around a listening experience to the point where you won’t know what time it is. That became this image of – it was almost an image of perhaps responding to grief, maybe. I am not really sure. But it became the only sound that I could hear for quite a while… It was very important, to me, actually, to make that album.”

Early Music is dedicated to the memory of Harrington’s son Adam Harrington.