THE ‘THOUSAND THOUGHTS’ OF KRONOS QUARTET
So many string quartets bear names that reference a person or a place. While Kronos Quartet’s name comes from a cannibalistic god with a thing for conflict, it also deliberately alludes to the Greek word for “time.”
The quartet has for 45 years performed music composed across more than half a millennium, which is a rather sizable songbook. But Kronos has distinguished itself by connecting the oldest music it plays to pieces written by modern composers from all corners of the world who operate in all manner of musical styles. They’ve interpreted works by jazz greats like Ornette Coleman, Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk, as well as rock guys like Jimi Hendrix. They’ve hit on the great 20thcentury progressive composers like Morton Feldman, Terry Riley, Philip Glass, Arvo Part. And they’ve looked wide to Asia and Africa, not just for compositions but also instrumental collaborators.
They have attempted to rise above time and place as much as possible, while working with earthy elements like wood and wire.
So on one hand, the idea of a documentary about Kronos feels odd: Looking back at an ensemble that is always looking forward. As it happens neither the band nor the director of “A Thousand Thoughts” wanted the film about Kronos to be a simple history.
“It has made us think about some of the things we’ve done,” says David Harrington, the violinist who founded Kronos in 1973. “But I feel like it’s laying the groundwork for the future as well. To me, it’s not really a retrospective in the common sense. I’m using it as a springboard to the future.”
Documentary filmmaker Sam Green — Oscar nominated in 2004 for “The Weather Underground” — has made music-centric films before. Kronos contacted him five years ago to make a short celebrating the group’s 40th anniversary. Pleased with the results, they asked Green about making a full film.
“My heart sank,” he says, “because I don’t like music documentaries.”
What Green means is he doesn’t like boilerplate music documentaries: “Some backstory, music here and there, talking heads, more music.”
So with writer Joe Bini, he rethought the format and pitched the group a different idea. He’d dig through the group’s deep archive for visual content, and interview some prominent composers in the Kronos sphere (Steve Reich, Glass, Wu Man) and create a film in which narration and the score would be presented live.
“People ask me if it’s a lecture, a concert or a movie,” Green says. “Well, it’s all three.”
“A Thousand Thoughts” has screened seven times so far, starting in January at the Sundance Film Festival. It comes to Houston’s Cinema Arts Festival Sunday.
Even if the film isn’t a standard timeline documentary, it does tell Kronos’ story from go. Harrington cites 1973 as the starting point for Kronos in Seattle. That’s when he first heard George Crumb’s “Black Angels,” a visceral and jarring piece of music written two years prior, “in tempore belli,” per Crumb’s inscription: “In time of war.”
“That caused this need to form Kronos,” Harrington says. “Of course, it took a while before we were able to play ‘Black Angels.’ Even after we could play it, it was years before we understood how to record it, how to use a recording studio.”
Harrington has told the Kronos/ “Black Angels” origin story for years. But to my ears, some of the magic Kronos yields can be found on its “Black Angels” album, which was released in 1990. The album will loosen your teeth when it opens with “Black Angels: I. Depar-
ture,” with its wicked and angular sounds. But Harrington showed a remarkable feel for compatibility on the record. He followed Crumb’s piece with “Spem in alium,” originally a motet composed by Thomas Tallis around 1560. As interpreted by a string quartet, the Tallis piece is a black blanket of melancholy, a mournful contemplation following Crumb’s composition.
“It took me 15 years to figure out what would come after ‘Black Angels’ on an album,” Harrington says. “But I remember on a flight I thought back to my grandmother, being in her living room, and she played that Tallis piece for me. I was 13, maybe 14 years old. It stayed with me, and I realized we need something like that: something vast and vaulted. … It stretched us. But in the end, I think you can recognize our sound both in ‘Black Angels’ and in the Tallis.”
Those sorts of connections have been part of Kronos Quartet’s operating manual now for decades. The quartet has endured some personnel changes on cello, but cellist Sunny Yang plays with violinists Harrington and John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt, a core that has been in place since the late ’70s.
And that operating manual is Harrington’s belief that the string quartet offers a particularly human ability to express a broad array of feeling and sound.
“I think composers have recognized that since Haydn’s time,” Harrington says. “There’s something perfect about two violins, viola and cello that can express anything. Any composer I’ve met would tell you that, no matter what country they’re from, what culture they grew up in. You hear a string quartet, and it quickly becomes part of this palette of possibility for the future. I’ve always wanted to take advantage of that strength in the form, as well as embracing other voices. That’s what we do, find new musical colors and celebrate life.”
Some logistics of running Kronos Quartet have become more complicated. Harrington speaks just before jetting off to Las Palmas in the Canary Islands and then to Portugal and Norway. Some desired collaborators have been denied access into the United States to record.
They made a not subtle statement about the situation with a concert last month called Music for Change: The Banned Countries.
“We’ve been working with musicians from around the world for 45 years,” Harrington says. “It feels weird and wrong that these amazing creative people can’t come here to work. And sad for our country. But part of being in Kronos is figuring a way to work around it.”
And then on to the next thing. Harrington jumps between now and then with a circuitous feel for time. He talks excitedly about Sight Machine, a collaboration with artist Trevor Paglan, in which Kronos performs and a live video feed runs through multipole artificial intelligence surveillance algorithms, with the AI point of view projected onto a screen that hovers above the quartet.
Then he shifts from AI to rootsier American folk fare, like the music of Pete Seeger. More recently, he was packing for Las Palmas when he heard some music by Lightnin’ Hopkins, the Houston blues legend.
“I had never heard this one recording of his before,” he says. “And it was just unbelievable. That’s one of the great things about music. There’s so much to be inspired by, so many possibilities. The future is this unending series of variations. So I’m on the edge of my chair all the time.”