Living traditions

The Kronos Quartet celebrate 25 Years

by Jon Garelick

The new Kronos Quartet: 25 Years (Nonesuch) confronts us once again with all that this group -- "the world's most successful chamber group," as Newsweek recently figured -- have done, and all that they haven't. Kronos were created by violinist David Harrington in Seattle in 1973, who was inspired by a recording of George Crumb's radical Black Angels that he heard on the radio. The basic line-up has been together ever since (Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, cellist Joan Jeanrenaud). By the group's own count, they've commissioned 400 new works, from as varied a field as John Adams, Steve Reich, Terry Riley, and Philip Glass to Henryk Górecki, Astor Piazzolla, and the young Vietnamese composer P.Q. Phan. They've made Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" an encore staple, recorded the music of jazz composers Thelonious Monk and Bill Evans, played on Sesame Street, and recorded with Texas country troubadour Don Walser.

Fans and critics like to argue about whether jazz is "dead," but it's the classical community who're really up against it. How many "new" recordings of complete Beethoven cycles (symphonies, string quartets, piano sonatas) are necessary? Where will new repertoire come from, especially when most major classical-music institutions are too conservative to program it? Few star performers are willing to risk their careers on new work. Pianist Peter Serkin is one, forcing promoters to accept programs of mixed old and new repertoire, including pieces he's commissioned. Mezzo-soprano Lorraine Hunt -- a brilliant young singer by just about anyone's measure -- presented a program of 50/50 "classics" and new work a couple weeks back to a two-thirds house, if that, at Jordan Hall. "It was a great tradition," a friend of mine once sighed wistfully, "but it's over."

It didn't help that in the post-war world, academic serialism was taking over in the universities -- the music derived from Schoenberg and Webern was the only way to go if you were going to be taken seriously as a composer, and it wasn't an easy pill for audiences to swallow. It also didn't help that, as David Denby pointed out in his recent New Yorker piece on Leonard Bernstein, composers like Milton Babbitt were comparing musical composition to "research in advanced physics." Kronos's music is sometimes seen as a reaction against "serialist dogma," but it's clear in talking to David Harrington, and in looking at and listening to Kronos's repertoire, that they don't really operate from a reactionary stance. Certainly, it's not that Kronos have shied away from 12-tonish or "difficult" music. When I talk to Harrington over the phone from the quartet's San Francisco offices, he's loath to make "blanket statements" about any particular kind of music. "If you listen to the fourth quartet of Alfred Schnittke [whose work is included on 25 Years], there are moments in that are as 12-tone as anything Schoenberg ever wrote." He adds, "The music we play is definitely a result of our collective personality and our relationships with the people who write for us."

But sometimes it seems critics expect the Kronos to be a panacea for the troubles of the contemporary classical world. Yes, it's good that they're commissioning new work, so such arguments go, but it's the wrong new work. For every Górecki or Crumb, there's the pop-folkish Ken Benshoof or the ever-problematic Glass. And why do they have to make Bartók sound weirder than he is? Why do they insist on making us swallow new works -- like, for instance, Lee Hyla's Howl, where Allen Ginsberg's pre-recorded reading of the poem battles for attention with the group's live playing -- that just don't work.

Of course, there's another argument to be made here: how many people would get to hear Morton Feldman's sublime Piano and String Quartet without Kronos's glorious recording -- and without their (and Nonesuch's) marketing clout? Kronos are sometimes dismissed as a pop band, and they bring to classical music all the complications of a pop sensibility. They're flashy attention-getters: sporting funky clothes and haircuts, playing Hendrix, using dramatic theater lighting and even amplification when called for by the composer. They've marketed not only "singles" (of Lutoslawski, Volans, and Piazzolla) but also "concept" albums that sustain a given mood over a wide variety of composers from different eras (Winter Was Hard, Black Angels, Night Prayers, and the recent Early Music, which spanned from Hildegard to Schnittke).

For a lot of us, Kronos represent the complications of working with a living tradition, with all its risks and faults, the hits and the misses. (The string quartet, after all, is a product of 18th-century Austro-Germanic culture, as K. Robert Schwarz writes in his booklet notes for 25 Years, and Kronos are extending it to the international contemporary tradition.) It's easy to look at the Kronos box and see what's missing: Harbison, Babbitt, the Carter quartets, Schuller, Schoenberg, Takemitsu, not to mention early modern masters like Debussy and Ravel. Yet easy conclusions are belied by the rich range of material that is in the box (17 composers on 10 discs). There are the famous minimalists, with their overlapping cyclical scales and rhythms, and their hints of the East -- Glass, Reich, Riley. But there's also the mournful, turbulent European chromaticism of Górecki and Schnittke; the American hymnal sound of John Adams's John's Book of Alleged Dances paired with the neo-medieval musings of the Estonian-born Arvo Pärt; Osvaldo Gulijov's klezmer-inflected Jewish-mystic lament The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind; the Five Tango Sensations of Astor Piazzolla, with the great Argentine composer playing bandoneón; the unclassifiable Feldman, who seems as much a part of the "New York school" of painters and poets than of any musical movement; and, of course, the piece that inspired violinist David Harrington to start Kronos 25 years ago, George Crumb's unsettling 1970 Black Angels, subtitled "Thirteen Images from the Dark Land," with its combination of rattling extended effects (it calls for amplified strings, chanting, gongs, and other percussion) and almost Japanese formal restraint.

What Schwarz calls Crumb's "cross-cultural ritualism" has informed Kronos's performance and basic approach. Kronos's dress is unorthodox, but like their theatrics it's elegant, informed by high style. Although they don't observe the usual orthodoxies, they bring their own formality to the concert hall. For many of us bred in the European traditions of classical music, for whom the classical concert hall has often felt too much like shul, Kronos have been a tonic.

WHEN HARRINGTON TALKS, you can hear how Kronos's relationship with living composers has been this quartet's life's blood. "I could tell you a story about every composer on the box," he says at one point. Piazzolla, for example, with his notorious reputation for being difficult. "We felt that he was one of the most generous and kindest guest artists we've ever had. And I know that there are a lot of stories about him. But we felt when he came to our rehearsal, that there was an enormous camaraderie and respect for what we tried to do. He felt like another member of the group. It was really special for us."

Harrington points out how particular composers changed the way Kronos played or changed the group's sound. Some did it through explicit coaching. The white South African composer Kevin Volans described the gait of a particular African animal to get the right rhythm from the quartet. With someone like Piazzolla, it was more an intangible charisma, "the intensity of his being." There was nothing verbal, not even anything in particular he did with his instrument. "It was more what he did with his face and his body. You'd look over at him and you'd find a way to play it. That's what it was. . . . It's amazing how much willpower that man had and how it translated into pulling the sound out of our instruments. I remember when I first heard the recording, I thought, `We never sounded like this before.' "

One of Harrington's most vivid stories is about Feldman. In photos, this composer, who died in 1987, at the age of 61, is a large, bearish man with thick glasses and slicked-back long hair. He's known for his remarkable minimalist pieces, some lasting no more than a few minutes, others lasting as long as four or five hours. The 1985 Piano and String Quartet in 25 Years is an 80-minute continuous piece of glacial movement and transcendent beauty, piano arpeggios answered by isolated single notes or chords from the strings. The incremental variations create a delicate web that seems to occupy T.S. Eliot's "still center of the turning world."

"Morton Feldman would be talking about this sound that he had in mind," recalls Harrington. "He would talk in his Brooklyn accent and thick smoker's voice about how it should sound like Schubert" -- here Harrington demonstrates with a hushed sibilant and extended first syllable -- "Shooo-bert . . . the way he would say `Schubert' was so special, it had more stuff in it than the way normal people say it. But somehow you knew what he meant. It sort of took you back to what you heard as a kid -- the C-major Quartet's slow movement -- you knew exactly the sound he had in mind."

It was Feldman who, in Harrington's oft-told story, explained to these experienced players the meaning of pizzicato. "He said that pizzicato is a way of approaching the string with the flesh of your finger, and that you lay your finger next to the string and hold the string and pull the string. And all the while on the side of his arm he's pulling his finger, and you begin to realize the actual physical and sensual contact that gets made, and then you start trying to do that. Then he started talking about releasing the flesh -- slowly. And then you try to do this and all of sudden you're making a totally different sound than you've ever made in your life."

Harrington is relatively sanguine about the controversies and criticism that have surrounded Kronos for 25 years; he sounds more protective of the composers than defensive about his band, and he talks about how hard it is to write a piece of music and "lay out your soul in sound." Otherwise, there's the music he feels drawn to -- "magnetized toward," as he says more than once in our conversation. As for the "meaning" of Black Angels (widely regarded as an anti-war piece after its composition), he says, "I would not want to tell another person how to listen to this or any piece of music. I think that one of the great things about music is that it's so private, each one of us has our own relationship to music and sounds and songs. . . . And I really value that a lot. I like to be free, for my own imagination to go wherever the music takes it. And I want that for our audience as well."