ome people think we hate old music, but that’s simplynot true at all—I probably have the world’s largest col-lection of performances of Schubert’s C-majorQuintet,” claims David Harrington, the founder, artis-tic director and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet.Harrington is probably the chamber music communi-ty’s most visible proponent of stretching the canon

both chronologically and geographically. “In our very early days,we were playing lots of earlier European music,” he explains, “butthen more and more pieces of music were being written for us,and I found that my interest was always in the piece that hasn’tbeen written yet, the conversation with somebody who might beable to write something nobody has ever thought of yet.”

Now well into its fourth decade, the Kronos musicians canboast that more than five hundred works have been written forthem by hundreds of composers across the globe. The repertoirefirst brought to life by the quartet spans works by John Cage,Elliott Carter, Philip Glass, Sofia Gubaidulina, Henryk Górecki,Peteris Vasks, and John Zorn. Many of these compositions havealready entered music history. There’s Steve Reich’s DifferentTrains and Triple Quartet, Morton Feldman’s record-breaking six-hour String Quartet No. 2, Osvaldo Golijov’s Dreams and Prayersof Isaac the Blind for klezmer clarinet plus quartet, Tan Dun’sGhost Opera for pipa and quartet, Kaija Saariaho’s Nymphea forquartet and electronics, and 21 works to date by Terry Riley,including a concerto for string quartet and orchestra.

So when Kronos receives the Richard J. Bogomolny NationalService Award at the 2007 Chamber Music America conferencethis January, it will be in recognition of a unique legacy—anensemble’s invaluable contribution to an ongoing tradition. Intoday’s chamber music landscape—where quartets ranging from

the Cassatt, Del Sol, Larkand Pacifica to genre-defy-ing ensembles such as Etheland Invert perform newmusic extensively and insome cases exclusively—it’sdifficult to remember thepre-Kronos idea of what astring quartet was or could be. Before the 22-year-old Harringtonformed the ensemble in 1973 (he was inspired by a performanceof George Crumb’s Vietnam War-suffused Black Angels), the stringquartet and its repertoire represented a pinnacle of perfection formusicians; but, for the most part, the art form was not anchoredin twentieth-century culture. Among other things, the sonic masteryof quartet-playing lured Harrington to the medium—and he wascompelled to do something different with it. “There’s somethingabout two violins, a viola and a cello; it’s a form of perfection. Themusic I like best is quartet music, and it’s been that way for a longtime.”

To make the string quartet a more contemporary idiom, andone that would appeal to a broader audience, Harrington beganwith new music. Conventional wisdom had once decreed thatconcerts devoted only to new and unfamiliar repertoire were box-office poison, but Kronos has defiantly rewritten the rules. Itshundred performances a year usually sell out, whether the groupis playing in an underground club in Eastern Europe or atCarnegie Hall.

What distinguished Kronos from other quartets was not simplythat it performed new music and performed it with a new attitudeand image (jeans rather than tuxedos), but that it treated newmusic as repertoire rather than an isolated anomaly on a concert

41

In one-third of a century,

the San Francisco-based ensemble has proved that a string

quartet can drive the creation of a repertoire.

THE KRONOSTRADITION

BY FRANK J. OTERI

S

Kronos in 2006—Hank Dutt, John Sherba, Jeffrey Zeigler, and David Harrington

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4342 February 2007

program. The accomplishment of this goalwas made easier by the long-term commit-ment of personnel who shared the vision.While Harrington is the only member ofthe quartet who has been there from thevery beginning, Hank Dutt has been thequartet’s violist since 1977 and John Sherbajoined as second violinist only a year later.“Each new piece reveals different outlooks,emotions, and challenges. I’ve been fortu-nate to experience this with like-mindedfriends and fellow explorers,” says Sherba.“What a fulfilling way to watch the yearsgo by.”

The role of cellist is the only one that hasseen significant rotation. Joan Jeanrenaud,who joined with Sherba in 1978, performedwith Kronos for twenty years before leav-ing in 1998. “The musician I am and havebecome is largely due to these wonderfulyears with David, John and Hank,” saysJenrenaud, who in her post-Kronos yearshas continued to explore unusual collabo-rations in performance and on recordings.Jenrenaud’s immediate successor, JenniferCulp, performed with Kronos for six yearsbefore moving on (most recently to anew-music quartet called Feinsmith).Then, in 2005, Kronos signed its newestand youngest member—Jeffrey Zeigler,who had been the cellist of the CoriglianoQuartet.

For Zeigler, who was born in 1973—theyear Kronos was founded—it was the gigof a lifetime: “There was never really atime that I hadn’t heard the name Kronos.

Over the years I’d seen the group live abunch of times and, of course, I boughtmany of their CDs. But did I ever thinkthat I would one day actually play inKronos? No way.” After the first flush ofexcitement, Zeigler was overwhelmed bythe realization he had thirty-two years ofnew-music repertoire to master. “Every-thing happened really fast. A stack of musicand CDs had been overnighted to me tobe absorbed in the two days I had before Iwas to fly to San Francisco. Upon arrival,there was another stack of music and CDswaiting for me! Thirty-two years is a longtime to play catch-up, but it truly has beenan enjoyable and thrilling experience.”

By now, of course, Kronos is an institu-tion in every sense of the word. In additionto the four performers, an eight-personstaff works in the Kronos Performing ArtsAssociation, a nonprofit organization thatcoordinates the ensemble’s whirlwindschedule and its myriad commissions andrecordings. Managing director JanetCowperthwaite has been with the quartetfor 25 years, and production director LarryNeff for 20. Two others have been onboard for more than a decade. Accordingto Cowperthwaite, “The Kronos ‘manage-ment’ structure was certainly very uniquethree decades ago, and it remains uniquetoday. There is no doubt that the artisticvision has greatly benefited from manage-rial and organizational vision. The organ-ization is widely considered to be one ofthe most successful in the country and

many others seek our advice and counsel.” Dedication and perseverance also forged

bonds between Kronos and its composers.In the beginning, pure persistence onHarrington’s part broke down resistanceamong reluctant composers and engen-dered several important long-term musicalrelationships. Harrington explains: “Whenwe first started out in 1973, a lot of com-posers told me that they were just nevergoing to write string quartet music. [Forthem] the medium had concluded, it haddone its thing, and that was about it. Forme that was unacceptable. I’ve spent a lotof energy trying to change that percep-tion.”

Among those resistant composers wereTerry Riley and Steve Reich. After Riley’slandmark minimalist composition In C,the composer embarked on a series of solokeyboard compositions for his own per-formance and subsequently immersedhimself in the study of classical Indianvocal music. By the time Harringtonapproached him, he had become farremoved from the conventions of writingdown music in Western notation for othermusicians to play.

In a 1998 tribute to the quartet, Rileyconfessed: “For a year David would comeup to me in the hall and say, I hear stringquartets in your music. Then he simplyscheduled a piece with my name on it. SoI made a tentative stab at writing some-thing, and invited Kronos up to the ranch[Riley has a ranch in the Sierras] to try it

out.” And today, Riley continues to beam:“They have never failed to surprise mewith their exquisite insights and musicalrefinements and how uniquely they havefleshed out my original ideas.”

Harrington’s persistence and the amountof time that all the members of the quartetspent working through ideas with Rileyaccomplished much more than merelygetting him to write a piece for them.Thanks to Kronos’s advocacy, the stringquartet has become one of Riley’s principalmeans of musical expression; and throughRiley’s contributions, Kronos was one of the first ensembles to sail into then-uncharted chamber music waters, per-forming evening-length works as well ascompositions incorporating chorus andmultimedia.

“In the case of Steve Reich, there was a concert where we decided to doClapping Music,” recalls Harrington. “Weopened with it, and after that we playedShostakovich. For everybody out therethat thinks they should open their concertwith Clapping Music and then play a violin, viola or cello, don’t do it; it’s not agood idea! The hands swell up from clapping and then you can’t really feel thefingerboard. But what happened out ofplaying Clapping Music was I wrote toSteve and we told him that we’d justplayed his first string quartet, and so wegot this connection going by a letter. Thenext time we met was in New York at thelocal premiere of Terry Riley’s SalomeDances for Peace, and Steve brought GyörgyLigeti that night. I think the fact that Terryhad written this two-hour piece had someweight for a lot of different composers allover the place. So we talked to Steve abouta new piece, and then [philanthropist]Betty Freeman commissioned it.”

“Composing for the Kronos Quartetproduced two of the best pieces I’ve everwritten—Different Trains and TripleQuartet,” acknowledges Reich. “Composea piece for a specific ensemble and the

character of that ensemble plays a significantrole in the result. I had written DifferentTrains for multiple quartets, live and pre-recorded, along with sampled voices andtrain sounds, knowing that if any quartetcould really get all this exactly right, it wasKronos. This is a piece where the violaand cello have to imitate the speech melodiesof pre-recorded speakers, including mygoverness, a retired Pullman porter andthree Holocaust survivors. Questionsimmediately arose about exact bowings tobest capture the cadence of the speakers.They spent hours working over thesedetails with me until they were all exactlyright, and the instrument and the speakerbecame fused as one. The second piece Iwrote for Kronos was ten years later. Iremember while composing the piece Icould just hear in my head how David

Harrington would play a particular line,or Hank Dutt and John Sherba another. Icould almost see their facial expressions.Sure enough, that was how it was whenwe recorded the piece.”

Riley and Reich are the distinguishedseniors on the Kronos composer roster,but in recent years the quartet has alsobeen thinking young. Its Under 30 Projecthas upped the ante on young composercompetitions by offering emerging com-posers an opportunity to work intenselywith the group as well as to create newwork for it. Long known for connectingwith a wide range of collaborators (withperformers ranging from West Africankora virtuoso Foday Musa Suso to theMexican rock band Café Tacuba), theensemble has now created a new type ofperformance experience with the provoca-

“Composing for the Kronos produced two of the best pieces I’ve

ever written—Different Trains and Triple Quartet.”

—Steve Reich

Opposite: In Uniko, a 2004 commissionfrom Finnish accordionist KimmoPohjonen and sampling artist SamuliKosminen. Cellist is Jennifer Culp.

With Joan Jenrenaud in 1989

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tive Alternative Radio, created in collaboration with journalistDavid Barsamian and radical historian Howard Zinn. Modeled onBarsamian and Zinn’s provocative syndicated new series, Kronos’sAlternative Radio brings the newsroom into the concert hall.

And finally—a documentation of the legacy. In January 2007,Boosey and Hawkes will publish the first installment of KronosCollection, which will make available to other ensembles thescores and parts for heretofore impossible-to-track-down workspremiered by the ensemble. The first volume reflects a prettywide range, even though it only includes three works: PannoniaBoundless by the young Serbian-American composer AleksandraVrebalov; the quartet version of Escalay, by the late Nubian oudmaster Hamza el Din; and Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector,one of Terry Riley’s earliest pieces written for Kronos.

“It wasn’t easy putting these pieces together for publication,”Hank Dutt remarks. “Terry composed his piece wanting the performers to come up with their own way of playing his work:he doesn’t include dynamics, bowings or any other sort ofnuances. So parts will be clean and performers can arrive at theirown ideas as to how the music should be played. He also createdthe piece out of modules, leaving it up to members of the quar-tet to decide in which order and how often the modules shouldbe played. We’ve kept the modules in his order, though weincluded a chart of our own performance of the piece in anaddendum. In Hamza’s Escalay, we wanted to make sure that themany techniques derived from his masterful oud-style—such asslides, pizzicati, and quarter-tones—were correctly written andclearly notated. Aleksandra’s was perhaps the hardest piece to putinto score form. She drew on the untamed playing of Balkangypsy musicians, which means that most of us are playing mostof the time. One challenge this posed for us was finding sensibleplaces to set the page breaks. Holly Mentzer at Boosey under-stood our concerns and worked hard with us until we finallyfound page turns that work musically. I’ve loved playing theseworks and I’ll be excited to hear them played by other groups, tosee them live on in other quartets’ repertory.”

But don’t assume that the quartet is winding down. “Kronos isjust getting started,” Harrington states emphatically. “There areso many possibilities for the future of our music that it is staggering to contemplate. The greatest music has not yet beenwritten, the greatest concert has not been played, and the notewith the most essential human information can hardly be imag-ined much less played. The concerts of the future will hold muchthat we are struggling to find today. There is so little time but somuch to learn about and to do.”

Frank J. Oteri, a New York-based composer, is the American MusicCenter’s composer advocate and the founding editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox (www.newmusicbox.org).

Top to bottom: With Jenrenaud in 1998; on Sesame Street in 1987; VisualMusic, a 30th-anniversary multimedia evening of Reich, Zorn, Penderecki,Herrmann, Nancarrow, Grey, and others; hanging out in 1977.

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