Back in the U.S.S.R. : The 21-year-old Kronos Quartet continues on its unconventional track. Its 17th album is a lyrical journey to the former Soviet Union.

A kind of multicultural convergence is under way in the name of music. Seated around the table in a Thai restaurant in Palms: a bearded composer from Uzbekistan and his interpreter, an Argentine composer by way of Boston, a record company representative in from New York and, at the center of this confab, a mild-mannered violinist and iconoclast from San Francisco whose ensemble has taken the music world by storm.

The scene might strike some as unusual, but all is well in the world according to the Kronos Quartet and its chief architect, first violinist and founder David Harrington. The specific agenda of this gathering is to talk about “Night Prayers,” the quartet’s 17th release on Elektra/Nonesuch and one of its strongest yet. This year’s model consists of music mostly from what once was the Soviet Union, including works by Uzbekistani Dmitri Yanov-Yanovsky and Argentine Osvaldo Golijov, whose “K’Vakarat” features Russian cantor Misha Alexandrovich. They spoke over lunch and Thai iced coffee.

At the ripened age of 21, the Kronos Quartet has made its name synonymous with unconventional approaches to the conventional medium of string quartet music. Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud have focused on 20th-Century works and, girded by an increasing financial stability and a feverish will to commission, built up a by-now massive library of new pieces written for the Kronos.

In recent years, the search for the new has led them evermore into far corners of the world, beyond the traditional stamping ground of Western classical enterprise.

Said the increasingly itinerant Harrington: “What it takes in order to do the music that we play now frequently includes at least one translator and perhaps an ethnomusicologist. There are all kinds of things that are involved in being a musician in 1994 that I could not have even conceived of several years ago.

“For me, it simply has to do with where your ear goes. As a musician, that’s what you have. One experience somehow leads to another, and it’s maybe only later that you find the connections. Sometimes, it’s making recordings that allow you to explore those connections. I think that’s something that this album is about.”

The new album makes connections between the rough-hewn folkish strains of Tuvan “throat singers” to the Quartet No. 4 by respected composer Sofia Gubaidulina. Along the way, extra-string quartet guests include soprano Dawn Upshaw and recently celebrated Armenian duduk player Djivan Gasparian.

By sheer numbers and cachet, the Kronos Quartet can be called superstars of the classical world. “Pieces of Africa” (1992), with music by composers from African nations, is the group’s best-selling album to date.

Despite any resemblance to pop music marketing in the Kronos camp, music is still the thing; don’t expect them to “tour with the album” by focusing on material from the new release. This week, the group is coming to Southern California to present three different programs, including an evening devoted to the string quartets of Russian composer Alfred Schnittke at UCLA on Thursday. On Saturday, the group will give the world premiere of a new 10-movement quartet piece by John Adams at the Center for the Arts in Escondido. Staying in one place is against the Kronos ethos.

‘N ight Prayers” might well be considered a logical exten sion of the “Pieces of Africa” concept--call it “Pieces of the Former USSR.” One clear distinction with the new collection of music, and a factor that will no doubt limit its commercial potential, is its generally somber, meditative surface.

“For me, there are moments of incredible exhilaration on this album,” Harrington allowed, “but no, it’s not dance music. It’s not the kind of music by which to kick back and have a beer. There is almost a sense of timelessness to much of the music on ‘Night Prayers.’ You can actually lose track of the beating of time.

“I feel that it’s a celebration of sound and of voices, the way voices can be united with strings, especially bowed strings.”

Sometimes the process of commissioning new works for Harrington involves creative collaborations and resourceful match-making.

“I found out that Djivan Gasparian actually lived in Los Angeles for a while,” he said. “His sound is so exquisite, I just wanted to be in the same room with him as he played. We met a young composer from Armenia, Tigran Tahmizyan, who also lives in Los Angeles. The idea of bringing them together came up.”

In addition to working on commissions for ensembles mostly outside of his homeland, Yanov-Yanovsky scores experimental films in Uzbekistan. Despite influences and opportunities in the West, he feels compelled to remain in his native country.

There, he often communicates or collaborates with other artists and musicians.

“It is very important since all the republics are separated since the breakup of the Soviet Union,” he said. “There is no information system. The information that does exist only goes through personal contacts.”

Added Harrington: “That’s one of the qualities that I’ve noticed in doing this album. Franghiz (Ali-Zadeh, a composer from Azerbaijan) knows (the album’s Giya) Kancheli and Gubaidulina as well. If you look on the map, there are huge distances separating them, and yet the composers are very well aware of each other’s music.”

Yanov-Yanovsky explained that “before the breakup of the Soviet Union, the position of the composer was different. Many of them were forbidden public use. And since they were forbidden, that created additional interest. The public audience was interested in listening or getting inducted to the new music, like Gubaidulina or Schnittke. When the ban was lifted, the interest disappeared. This was not only in music. It was also in movies and the theater.

“There is certain arts liberation now, but I don’t know if it’s good or not. Thinking about recent times, I can’t think of a worthwhile novel or composition done. It seems that people don’t know what or how to do it. Earlier, it was just very clear. There was a net, and an artist would choose whether to be on this side or the other side. When the net was lifted, it’s difficult to choose, because you are not oriented for that.”

Although Golijov is the only composer on the album not from the former Soviet Union, he has Russian ancestors.

“Sometimes other music I don’t understand, but Russian music I usually get the essence of,” he said. “There must be something to that. If you were born in Kansas, then liking country music comes natural to you.”

T he issue of nationalistic music is a touchy one. Harrington resists thinking of “Night Prayers” as a musical portrait. Yanov-Yanovsky said, fervently, that “people should just write music, not just Russian music, Uzbek music, Jewish music, whatever. I never targeted it before. I never wanted to put a name on it, to write Uzbek music.”

To hear Harrington tell it, the Kronos Quartet was set into motion after he was exposed to George Crumb’s anti-war opus “Black Angels” (which the quartet recorded in 1990). “When I heard that in August of 1973, I knew that I had heard my music. All of a sudden, I knew how I wanted to spend the rest of my life.”

To the chagrin of some and the delight of many, the group departed from conventions immediately, in repertory and in stage attire, often favoring multicolored, multicultural garb over concert wear formalities. But Harrington denies that there was a grand scheme afoot:

“If you were to diagram or somehow write about the way we got to know each composer and each piece, it would be very natural and very organic.

“Quite consciously, though, I thought it was important to move the center of quartet music out of Vienna. If you think about the origins of the string quartet, with Haydn, Mozart, Schubert, Brahms and then later Webern and Berg and Schoenberg, you could think that there’s only one way of approaching this medium, or that it needs to come from only one place. It could seem like a very exclusive kind of music.

“That having been said, all of us in Kronos started out playing the earlier quartets. Webern was the first music that we ever played. So I feel very close to that music.”

O n the one hand, the Kronos mandate for a steady flow of new works has immeasurably expanded the string quartet repertory. In Los Angeles last month, for instance, the Schoenberg String Quartet performed Louis Andriessen’s classical be-bop piece “Facing Death,” originally written for the Kronos. But there is also something self-enclosed about the Kronos world. Often, concert programs now consist entirely of works written for the group, to the exclusion of staples of the idiom, or even older works in the Kronos library. The emphasis seems to be on forward momentum, in a race against time and stasis.

In his travels, Harrington carries a treasured satchel of tapes and CDs of music by potentially commissionable composers. Talking later on the phone from his hotel in New York, before heading off to a European tour, Harrington described the significance of his satchel with typical explorer zeal:

“I enjoy attracting tapes and CDs. I must, or else I’d get tired of carrying them around. It’s life for me. Just to give you an idea of how it really works for me, one piece leads to another piece. You’ll talk to a certain composer and somehow there will be an idea that will emanate from something else. I have meetings later today with two different composers, one from China--a fantastic composer named Tan Dun.

“That’s how our music happens. It’s verbal, it’s social. It’s the texture of life.”*