Kronos Quartet celebrates its five decades, at MassMoCA’s LOUD Weekend festival
Certain sections of the written score for George Crumb’s 1970 piece “Black Angels” are more reminiscent of a maze or an evidence board than a traditional piece of sheet music. Written for amplified string quartet as a response to the then-ongoing Vietnam War, the first two pages are entirely taken up with detailed performance directions, lists of auxiliary percussion instruments and sound-making equipment assigned to each player such as crystal glasses, thimbles, and gongs, and numerological commentary on the numbers 13 and 7. “All spoken sounds (whispering, shouting) must project!” one note reads. It’s not a piece that one (or four) can just pick up and play.
However, as soon as violinist David Harrington first heard it on the radio in the early 1970s, he knew he needed to play it.
“Hearing that that night, that was my song,” said Harrington in a Zoom interview from his San Francisco home. “I realized I don’t really have a choice. I gotta play this piece.” He searched for players to join a string quartet that — he intended — would not just be willing to tackle “Black Angels,” but would commit to learning everything it would take to play unconventional music well.
The Kronos Quartet gave its first public performance in November 1973, at North Seattle Community College. Next weekend, almost half a century later, the quartet will launch its seasonlong celebration of 50 years together with two concerts on July 28 and 29 at Mass MoCA in North Adams, headlining Bang on a Can’s LOUD Weekend music festival.
The repertoire they played at that first concert was like no other string quartet program Harrington had ever heard at the time, but in comparison with Kronos’s discography now, it feels almost conventional: music by Béla Bartók, Paul Hindemith, Anton Webern, and the Seattle-based composer Ken Benshoof, who has since written several pieces for the quartet. (“Black Angels” waited until the following spring.)
After the concert, Harrington’s wife, Regan, noticed one major omission. “She said, ‘where are the women composers?’”
It was then that Harrington realized he didn’t know a single one. “I was starting from a point of incredible ignorance about the world,” he said. “And so it’s been something I’ve worked on every day since.”
The 1973 version of him could never have imagined the repertoire they play now, he said. In its five decades, Kronos has recorded 43 studio albums and a handful of major film soundtracks on top of that, and their discography includes everything from modernist string quartets to tango (with Astor Piazzolla), West African griot music (with Trio Da Kali), and Bollywood (with Asha Bhosle). The weekend’s Kronos performances begin on July 28 with a portrait of the Canadian composer Nicole Lizée, who was born the same year the quartet was formed. “We’ve never done an allLizée program and she’s one of our favorite collaborators, so here we go,” Harrington said.
The next evening brings pieces by math-rock guitarist Stephan Thelen and Indonesian composer and singer Peni Candra Rini from the quartet’s recent “50 for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire” commissioning project. The audience will also hear a new commission by Bang on a Can cofounder Michael Gordon, and a jam session with to-be-determined guest musicians on Terry Riley’s “Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector,” the first of many pieces the composer wrote for Kronos.
The rest of this year’s Five Decades concerts follows in a similar spirit, encompassing pieces from the quartet’s long history, 10 major commissions, and selections from “50 for the Future”: a library of 50 pieces commissioned in the 2010s from composers around the globe, for which the scores, parts, and recordings are free to download. Elder statesman of minimalism Philip Glass, former longtime Kronos cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, Beninese singer Angélique Kidjo, and Indian violist Kala Ramnath are just a few of the many other artists who contributed pieces to the project.
“So far, the music has been played by hundreds of groups around the world — last I heard, it was groups from 107 countries,” Harrington said.
Harrington usually finds new collaborators like so: Someone tells him about someone whose music they think he should hear, or maybe he just stumbles on it while listening. “I listen to music as often as I have available brain cells,” he said.
Regardless, if he likes what he hears, he tends to reach out directly. He got in touch with Lizée after a radio host in Ireland recommended her music to him. And he connected with cellist and composer Paul Wiancko after stumbling across his piece “Lift” on a recording by the Aizuri Quartet.
“The first thing he said was like, where have I been? How have I not heard of you until now?,” Wiancko said in a Zoom interview. “I was so flattered. I said ‘David, literally no one has ever heard of me, so don’t worry.’ But his first response was almost panicked that he missed me.”
Wiancko, who was born in 1983, grew up listening to the quartet. When he listened to his sister’s copy of their 1990 recording of “Black Angels” at age 8, he was “scared [expletive] less.” Kronos had been “a presence and a sort of guiding force for me my whole life,” he said, so when Harrington asked him to write a “50 for the Future” piece, he eagerly accepted.
He had known Kronos cellist Sunny Yang from their time together at University of Southern California, and when she went on parental leave, she recommended him as her substitute for
LOUD WEEKEND Presented by Bang on a Can and Mass MoCA. July 27-29. Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams. 413-662-2111, www.bangonacan.org
‘Hearing that that night, that was my song. I realized I don’t really have a choice. I gotta play this piece.’
DAVID HARRINGTON, on how hearing George Crumb’s 1970 piece “Black Angels” led to him founding the Kronos Quartet
a tour starting in early 2020, which ended up being cut short by COVID after a few dozen concerts. Two years later, when Yang announced her intent to leave the group after 10 years, Wiancko was the first name on the quartet’s list.
“It took me about 60 seconds to decide,” Wiancko said about getting the offer. “I guess I’m not a very good negotiator. I was like hmm … yep.”
He was the new kid on the block among musicians who had been playing together since before he was born — Harrington, now 73, since day one, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt since 1978. Knowing that, he was prepared for the group dynamic to be tense when he first played with Kronos during Yang’s leave, but he was pleasantly surprised. “All three of these guys are such gentle, funny, caring, human beings. I felt instantly accepted and respected,” Wiancko said. “I sensed an openness there: OK, there’s a new person in the family, it’s a little different, it’s not a bad thing.”
Harrington said that Kronos surely won’t disappear from the concert stage after the Five Decades events, but plans to prioritize longer term residencies and other such projects over conventional tours. They still can get up early every morning to head to a new town, sound check, play, rinse and repeat, but it’s “not the kind of thing that we find energizes us as much as it might,” he said. “We realized we really like the aspect where you can actually spread out a little bit, get to know other artists, and know the community you’re playing in more. So that’s how I’m looking at our future.”