I’m at a soundcheck for the Kronos Quartet in the recently re-opened Beacon Hall in Bristol. The quartet aren’t actually playing their instruments, but tapping water bottles with soft xylophone sticks. Leader David Harrington has a black bottle, cellist Paul Wiancko a pink one, viola player Hank Dutt a blue one and whatever second violinist John Sherba is hitting… I can’t see what, because it’s hidden by his iPad.
It’s about getting the bottles at the right angles and hitting them in the most sonorous place. The piece is called ‘Water’, by Seattle-based composer and climate-change activist Gabriella Smith. It’s a movement from Keep Going, written for the Kronos’s 50th anniversary, and begins with a recording of trickling water followed by the tapping water bottles, the sound of rice inside a violin and the rattling of seeds in packets.
Kronos’s Bristol concert includes music by composers from the US, Iceland, Benin and Serbia, and traditional music from Iran. Needless to say, it’s like no other string quartet concert and references different styles and genres of music from all over the world. But that’s how the Kronos have revolutionised what we think of as a string quartet. They’ve commissioned over 1,100 pieces and sold over 4 million recordings.
Who are the Kronos Quartet?
For their 50th anniversary year, Kronos have been giving concerts all around the world, picking out particular repertoire for appropriate places. In New York their onstage guests included American vocalist Laurie Anderson, bluegrass fiddler Jake Blount and Inuit singer Tanya Tagaq.
Meanwhile, in London, there was the glorious Javanese singer Peni Candra Rini and djembé drum player Yahael Camara Onono. Their concerts bring together three ingredients: a musical activism in support of human rights and climate action; an omnivorous curiosity for music from all over the world; and a long-standing dedication to American minimalist composers like Terry Riley, Philip Glass and Steve Reich.
Harrington took up the violin aged nine. When he started playing quartets in his early teens in Seattle, he was puzzled that all the music came from in and around Vienna – essentially by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven and Schubert. ‘Even back then I found myself thinking there’s something missing here,’ he remembers.
How did the quartet form?
It was hearing Black Angels for electrified string quartet by the American avant-garde composer George Crumb, broadcast on the radio in 1973, that made Harrington decide he wanted to form a quartet. ‘I knew I had to start a group in order to play that piece,’ he says.
Black Angels was composed in reaction to the Vietnam War. ‘Things were turned upside down. There were terrifying things in the air… they found their way into Black Angels,’ said Crumb. The music is full of screaming, terrifying sounds that could be shattering shells, shattering lives or the shattering status quo – as well as beautiful sonorous sounds with water-filled glasses.
Harrington now realises that Seattle was quite an alternative place and a centre of protest, although at the time he was just busy playing the violin. ‘I’d see the freeway closed down and thousands of people demonstrating, or things going on at the University of Washington, where I was studying. I began to sense that something was happening.’
Looking back over the Kronos Quartet back catalogue, you might think – with a few exceptions – they’d made a decision to work only with living composers, though that’s not the case. They just enjoy working with them.
‘It’s so much fun to have the composer think about each one of us in the way we play and in the way the group plays,’ Harrington says, ‘and then to learn so much from not only what the composer says, but how they say it and maybe how they sing their music. Terry Riley is a great example. To have Terry sing his music, to gesture and to make comments is a thrill and the best way to learn the music.’
What do the Kronos Quartet sound like?
Seeing the many cables, volume controls for earpieces and bits of kit on the floor makes you realise that a Kronos concert is both a technical and musical challenge. Harrington explains that when they started touring Steve Reich’s Different Trains in 1989, they began travelling with a sound engineer: ‘We’ve been a quintet since then!’
Reich used recordings of his governess, an American railway porter, Jewish survivors of the Holocaust and of actual rolling stock, and worked them together into an extraordinary multi-layered piece – with much of the music coming from the speech melodies of the interviewees. Different Trains is a very powerful work and one of the landmark Kronos commissions to have entered the repertoire. Four out of the ten pieces performed in Bristol involve recordings and the quartet have also added a lighting designer to their line-up in recent years.
Who have they worked with?
The Kronos Quartet have worked with many performers and composers who share their sense of curiosity and adventure. One of their most frequent musical collaborators has been Chinese pipa player Wu Man. She’s a leading player of the plucked lute and works both in China and the US, where she is now based. ‘Most violinists will talk about the first time they heard Jascha Heifetz because of his searing ability and command of the instrument,’ says Harrington.
- We named Jascha Heifetz one of the greatest violinists of all time
‘I had the same feeling when I first heard Wu Man playing pipa. There was such a command of the instrument and its colours. I immediately knew I wanted to work with her.’ Their most substantial collaboration is Ghost Opera, commissioned from Chinese composer Tan Dun in 1994. Written for string quartet and pipa, it also includes water bowls, gongs, cymbals, stones and paper, plus vocals, and ritual and theatrical elements.
Where are the Kronos Quartet based?
The Kronos have been based in San Francisco since 1978. And it’s where the Kronos Performing Arts Association, their non-profit organisation, is based.
A major Kronos Quartet achievement in recent years has been commissioning 50 for the Future – 50 new string quartet pieces from composers all over the world, half of them women and half men. According to their website, the aim is ‘to guide young string quartets in developing and honing the skills required for the performance of 21st-century repertoire’.
The individual parts, recordings and extra instrumental tracks can be downloaded for free from the 50 for the Future website. Composers range from big names like Philip Glass, Terry Riley and Laurie Anderson, via world music stars like Zakir Hussain from India and Angélique Kidjo from Benin, to intriguing figures like balafon player Fodé Lassana Diabaté from Mali or Joan Jeanrenaud, who was cellist with the Kronos from 1978-99. It’s a challenging body of work in hugely diverse styles.
‘We’re now benefiting from some of the work that we’ve been doing all these years. Younger players really can navigate music like this and it’s very thrilling,’ Harrington says. Kronos are ‘among a small number of groups that have set the terms for new “classical” music over the last 50 years,’ says Richard Jones, viola player in Britain’s Ligeti Quartet.
‘They present all music, regardless of where it come from and when, as equally fascinating and essential. They encouraged us to stick to our guns and trust our instincts when it came to the music we choose to play.It’s probably the single piece of advice that has had an impact on our identity as a group, and probably the reason we are still going strong.’
Kronos Festival: an annual celebration of all things Kronos
The Ligeti Quartet spent a week with Kronos at Carnegie Hall in 2015 to launch the 50 for the Future series, and now include several of those pieces in their repertoire. There were performances of all 50 works in Amsterdam last year (by Kronos and nine other quartets) and at the Philharmonie de Paris this year (by six different quartets). And most of the pieces saw performances at last year’s Kronos Festival in San Francisco. Some 30,000 downloads of the 50 for the Future materials have now taken place, by visitors from over 100 countries.
In March, Kronos made the dramatic announcement that John Sherba (second violin) and Hank Dutt (viola), who’ve been with the quartet 46 and 47 years respectively, will be retiring after this year’s Kronos Festival in June. Replacing them will be violinist Gabriela Diáz and violist Ayane Kozasa. Harrington says: ‘This next chapter will be full of big adventures – stay tuned.’
Top pic: Lenny Gonzalez