The World on Their Strings

The Kronos Quartet is named for the Greek god of time, and the aspect of its namesake deity that has absorbed this string quartet most has been the inexhaustible present. With little interest in the past and less in posterity, the group has been playing new music now for 25 years--an anniversary it is celebrating, appropriately, without much retrospection.

True, the record company Nonesuch has persuaded Kronos to indulge in a 10-CD anthology of its career, which is to be released later this month, and there are works the quartet has been playing since it began. But even as its jubilee tour alights next Sunday at UCLA’s Royce Hall and at the Barclay Theater in Irvine the following day, there is always something fresh and forthcoming to add to a repertoire of more than 400 works written for the group. The ur-minimalist Terry Riley has offered Kronos three new pieces (which they are taking on the road); the quartet recently recorded a new soundtrack by Philip Glass (to the 1931 silent film “Dracula”); and Steve Reich is working on his second string quartet for them.

The Kronos Quartet has irritated whole bushels of purists with its use of colored stage lights and its evolving designer wardrobe of late-show-style outfits, but even critics concede that the group deserves a lot of credit for cajoling a generation or two of composers into believing that the venerable string quartet was not a worn-out genre.

“I’m a collector of musical experiences,” says David Harrington, the quartet’s founder, first violinist and designated visionary. Talking over a midnight pizza and cranberry juice a few blocks from the Kronos office and from Golden Gate Park, the 48-year-old Harrington has the serious, sleep-deprived look and conversational urgency of a late-blooming adolescent. He is dressed in the grunge costume of his native Seattle--T-shirt, open flannel shirt, black jeans and tattered Converse All-Stars--and his hair is a shag of graying bristles. Enthusiasm is the principal tool of his trade, along with his fiddle: “I can’t wait to play this piece,” is a frequent refrain.

It is the direct contact with the imagination behind the notes on a mute page that energizes Harrington and his colleagues--the way they can translate between the person and personal expression, between a composer’s thoughts and physical sound. The quartet’s style and fiber, its sound and technical habits, are a sum of all the creative musicians they have ever met, and Harrington describes lovingly the experience of learning about plucking a violin string from composer Morton Feldman, who wrote a string quartet for Kronos that is an uninterrupted, four-hour meditation on shades of quiet: “We had a late-night rehearsal, and he was talking about pizzicato and feeling the string leave the skin of your finger, and the way he was describing it was in such slow motion, but so amazingly sensual and infinitely gentle, that his words have become a part of my playing.”

A couple of days after our pizza, I follow Harrington and the rest of the quartet--second violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud--over the Golden Gate Bridge, out of the glum fog of San Francisco into Marin County and up miles of switchbacks to Skywalker Ranch, a sort of entertainment monastery owned by film producer George Lucas. For a couple of weeks nearly every August, the Kronos Quartet retires to this vast estate of sound stages, visual effects studios, stables, baseball diamonds and scrub-covered hills. The four musicians and their producer, Judith Sherman, hole up in a studio as spacious as a church nave to record whatever music they have ready.

On the agenda for this particular morning is “Mario, Dreaming,” by the Seattle composer Ken Benshoof, a brief, delicate and melancholy piece that sounds like a sapling growing out of the base of Bach’s suites for solo cello. It’s a relatively light morning in a grueling week. But the session is freighted with history and emotion. Not only is this piece a memorial for Jeanrenaud’s child Mario, who was stillborn in 1994, but Benshoof is, in a sense, Kronos’ musical godfather. He was the first composer to write a piece for the quartet--”Traveling Music,” which is included on the Nonesuch set--and, years before that, the first living composer whose music Harrington ever played.

“I can’t imagine our work without that,” Harrington says. “It was amazing to me, going over to his house and looking at the manuscript as it was being written.”

“David was 16 when he showed up on my doorstep, which, unbeknownst to me, made me a mentor to him,” recalls Benshoof in the control room, while out in the studio the microphones are being positioned. “We had a lot of talks, which often would be on long walks or sitting in the tavern or in my house, and they’d last all night.”

Curiously for a pair of musicians immersed in contemporary music, their joint ideal was not one of the radicals or modernist giants from the early part of the 20th century, but a violinist who composed short, alluring encores full of tenderness and Central European charm: Fritz Kreisler.

“There’s a kind of magic in Kreisler’s music,” Benshoof muses. “The surface is very elegant, very transparent, but just beneath it is a sense of reaching into something deeper. You can hear that in the composers David’s chosen to work with.”

Harrington does not acknowledge that the composers who have written for Kronos have much in common: “I look at every new piece as something that points in its own direction,” he says. Still, Benshoof has a point: The bulk of the Kronos repertoire aspires to clarity and the rhythmic definition that marks a waltz, and much of it is as redolent of its place of origin as Kreisler’s compositions are with the pine-y scent of the Vienna Woods. Tan Dun’s “Ghost Opera,” for instance, makes use of Chinese instruments and Beijing Opera techniques; “John’s Book of Alleged Dances” is a suite of urban hoe-downs and other roughhewn American dances by John Adams.

“The only thing that’s interesting is people who are writing with a sense of their own neighborhood,” said conductor Michael Tilson Thomas recently, and it’s a credo that the Kronos Quartet seems to live by. Kronos has explored far-flung neighborhoods, however, and the group’s catalog includes composers from areas far outside the string quartet’s traditional stamping grounds in Central Europe: Africa, Siberia, Australia, Argentina. “What makes them unique as a group is that they’re the first string quartet to have a world view,” says Riley, one of Kronos’ longtime collaborators. “It’s caused them to work with folk musicians from around the world.”

This is more than merely voracious eclecticism: Kronos members like to bring out startling kinships between their own and deeply foreign approaches to music-making. Earlier this year, for example, the group hooked up in London with the Romanian Gypsy band Taraf de Haidouks, who perform in a fluid group improvisation, playing different music in every take--not a technique classical musicians are accustomed to.

“I would say, ‘Can you please count?,’ ” said the composer Osvaldo Golijov, who wrote the arrangements, “and they said, ‘No, no, no, just listen.’ They were like a school of fish, able to change directions together instantly, but they would just leave Kronos hanging there. Somehow, the concert came off incredibly well, but it was a miracle.”

Harrington received much of his musical education during his high school years in the listening booths at Seattle’s Standard Records and Hi-Fi, where a patient staff allowed him to plow undisturbed through Bartok, Stravinsky, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. The Budapest Quartet recording of Beethoven’s Opus 127 staggered him--”I fell in love with that sound and those amazing E-flat major chords,” he remembers, “and I decided that I had to do that and make those sounds myself, if possible.”

He had more desire than discipline, though: After he graduated in 1967 and “floated in and out” of the University of Washington, Harrington stopped playing the violin, which “didn’t feel right.” He turned to poetry, married at 21, and only picked up his instrument again as a way of avoiding the draft, joining a Canadian orchestra for a season until the lottery passed him by and it was safe to return to Seattle.

In 1973, Harrington was neither a student nor a professional, but just an aimless artist-type with a vague sense of having something important to express--until late one night, when an epiphany arrived by radio. “You have to remember Vietnam and the feeling of hopelessness,” he says. “Suddenly on the radio there was this music that didn’t sound like anything I had grown up with, and it felt so right.”

The piece was George Crumb’s 1970 “Black Angels,” for electric string quartet, a gloomy, gritty, even nihilistic work. “Black Angels” consists of “Thirteen Images From the Dark Land” arranged in a trinity of sections, and each episode is a story full of furious sounds. The microphones rigged up on each instrument magnify every note and scrape. Tremolos scurry everywhere, bows are drawn across gongs and the rims of crystal wine glasses filled with water.

Crumb’s music is hallucinatory and pessimistic, but it is also gripping, theatrical and emotionally transparent, and Harrington immediately formed the Kronos Quartet to play it--though it would be a year before the original group actually did and nearly 20 before an almost completely revamped ensemble would record it.

Suddenly, Harrington had a mission, and he began frantically drumming up concerts--in nursing homes, schools, churches and wherever anyone was willing to listen to an eager if grainy foursome play music not many had ever heard. By 1975, the quartet had landed a two-year residency at State University of New York in Geneseo. When that ended, the group made a collective decision that the one place in America hip enough to have a hope of understanding Kronos was San Francisco. The four musicians and their families moved again.

In 1977, membership in the Kronos Quartet could hardly have been called a job. “We played in restaurants, at weddings, outdoors in Ghirardelli Square,” recalls Dutt, who had joined while the group was still in Geneseo. “We earned very little money, but we rehearsed seven hours a day. It was total dedication.”

On the strength of one of its few legitimate concerts, Kronos was hired as the quartet in residence at Mills College in Oakland. But the penury and intensity of the Kronos lifestyle took its toll. Four days after the birth of Harrington’s second child, a son (a daughter had been born in 1975) and a few hours before a concert, the second violinist and the cellist, who were married to each other, arrived at Harrington’s apartment and announced that to save their marriage, they were moving back to Seattle. In an instant, that evening’s concert, the Mills residency that was to start in a month, all prospects of income and the quartet itself seemed to vaporize. Five years after founding the quartet, Harrington was its only remaining original member.

Fortunately, Dutt, in his not-so-long-ago student days, had played quartets with Jeanrenaud, who after being tracked down in Switzerland agreed to get on an airplane and come to audition immediately. The buzz about Kronos had reached violinist John Sherba in Milwaukee, too, and the two players converged on San Francisco on the same day.

“It just clicked,” Sherba recalls, as if describing a bolt of romance. So 1998 marks the 20th anniversary of this Kronos Quartet--four people who have been professionally soldered together virtually their entire adult and professional lives.

Mills College had a history of incubating distinguished musical experiments: John Cage had taught there in the 1940s, and so had Darius Milhaud. In the fall of 1977, when Kronos arrived, the chief maverick on the faculty was Terry Riley, who in 1965 had opened the floodgates of American minimalism with his radically simple “In C,” an incantatory assemblage of short repeating patterns that never budges from its harmonic roost.

Harrington badgered him daily for a piece, though Riley, who was absorbed in the improvisational tradition of North Indian classical music, was reluctant even to notate his ideas. Eventually, he wrote a number of string quartets, but his scores, then as now, were virtually devoid of details about how to play the notes because he believed that such matters needed to be worked out in the flesh. Rather than the juicy, throbbing vibrato all string players are raised on, Riley asked for paler shades of sound, different brush strokes made by using less (or no) vibrato in the left hand and varying the speed and pressure with which the bow slips across the string. He also wanted the group to explore microscopic shifts in intonation, similar to the North Indian customs he had learned.

The result was that Kronos began developing a malleable sound, one that could absorb the technical vocabularies of composers’ disparate cultures. “They can’t become fluent in these traditions, that would be impossible,” Riley says. “But they’re assimilating ideas and techniques.” As Harrington puts it, “I want to be involved in a sound that is the right one for whatever note we happen to be playing.”

By 1980, the Kronos Quartet had become too busy and too popular--on the West Coast, at least--to handle its business the way it always had: out of Harrington’s living room. A resourceful 21-year-old college student who had a taste for rock and had never even been to a string quartet concert, Janet Cowperthwaite, joined the quartet as an all-purpose assistant and soon became its manager. While the mark of early success for most classical musicians is joining one of the management stables on New York’s 57th Street, the Kronos Quartet has always handled its affairs on its own, booking itself into the sorts of places where 57th Street has no contacts: jazz festivals and clubs such as the Great American Music Hall in San Francisco.

In 1984, the quartet rented the small, jewel-like Carnegie Recital Hall (now Weill Hall) for its official New York debut. Among the few dozen people in the audience was Robert Hurwitz, who had recently taken over Nonesuch Records and was casting about for ways to channel his interest in contemporary music. The day after the concert, Hurwitz arranged to meet Harrington, who arrived with a wish list of some 30 records he would like to make--a list that, despite the 26 recordings they have since made together, has gotten longer with every passing year.

Harrington wanted to make recordings that people would listen to the way he had in the booths of Standard Records and Hi-Fi: utterly absorbed, like reading a book, and not as an unobtrusive accompaniment to a cocktail party or a household chore. Consequently, Kronos has constructed most of its recordings like long poems or epic narratives, with a story to tell or a message to impart. (It’s worth noting, though, that Kronos’ most successful CD, “Pieces of Africa,” which has sold more than 300,000 copies, is also the one that works best as background music).

Take “Early Music,” one of the quartet’s few forays into the past. The album manipulates time, leapfrogging over centuries, touching down in the 14th for a brief Kyrie by Guillaume de Machaut, in the 9th for a Byzantine hymn, in the 20th for a touch of latter-day antiquity by Arvo Part and a quick “Quodlibet” by John Cage. Kronos time moves in all directions without seeming to move at all, and what constitutes early music depends on where you start. An excerpt of Schnittke’s 1985 Concerto for Choir, arranged by Harrington, stands near the end of the recording as a beacon to everything that comes before it. The single, eight-minute movement is a magnificent piece of contrapuntal writing, full of mystery (but not boilerplate mysticism), a rare glimmer of redemption in Schnittke’s generally pessimistic world. The multiple pasts that come before the Schnittke are there not to establish his lineage, but to bring out spiritual relationships buried in randomness. After the Schnittke is over, the sound of bells “should make you realize that those bells have been there throughout,” Harrington says, “and make you feel like you want to hear the whole thing over again.”

As the quartet grew in stature, so did its distance from the conventions of music-making that still grip the classical music establishment, and so, too, did the criticism that accused the group of rampant gimmickry. Reviews that concentrated on the music were by and large enthusiastic, but many still dwelt on the musicians’ multicolored stage clothes and defiant shades, the glum-rocker attitudes they struck for publicity photos, and their use of lighting, plunging audiences in darkness and illuminating only their own tight huddle. The Kronos members are firm, though, that their image is something that grew out of the music.

“We were trying to create something musical that was out of the norm of the regular concert-going experience,” says Dutt. “Here you have fashion changing in the art form itself. Why succumb to traditional garb?” Besides, Jeanrenaud, points out, being willing to shuck off encrusted conventions has a way of loosening the imagination. Borrowing theatrical lighting techniques led naturally to conceiving of music in dramatic terms, and Kronos now performs “Black Angels” (among other works) as a fully staged piece of theater.

“Sound was the same thing,” Jeanrenaud says. “When we did ‘Different Trains’ [which requires amplification], we realized that you don’t spend day in and day out on your balance, then go on tour and turn it over to a different house sound guy every night. So we started traveling with a sound engineer. That led to all these other possibilities, because then we could do pieces with electronics and tape.”

What began as a seat-of-the-pants collective has formalized into a business with a board of directors, a $1.6-million budget, a $250,000 annual commissioning fund and a remarkable history of record sales: The quartet has finished every one of the last 10 years with a CD on Billboard magazine’s Top 10 classical chart.

The quartet’s members had to confront their middle age in 1996, when they had to pull out of a plan to perform the six-hour version of Morton Feldman’s grueling quartet for fear of injury. Grief, too, has become a part of their body of experience--not just the loss of Jeanrenaud’s Mario, but that of Dutt’s partner Kevin Freeman, who died of an AIDS-related illness in 1993, and of Harrington’s son Adam, who died of a heart attack at age 18 in 1995. (Riley’s most recent works for Kronos are a trilogy of requiem pieces.)

But as the Kronos Quartet has accumulated experience and incorporated it into the elemental material of its art, the group has guarded its most important resources: openness and awe. “They have such respect for everything,” says composer Golijov. “They are open to the possibility of discovering depth in what seems to be the silliest thing. David reminds me of my 8-year-old son and the way he’ll pick up a little rock and examine it--there’s that possibility of being as serious as a child is.”

Indeed, what fuels the Kronos Quartet is a childlike eagerness to move on to the next new thing and to claim the whole world as its own. “What I’m continually reminded of is how much we haven’t done,” Harrington says. “Music is a huge place.”*

*

Kronos Quartet, Royce Hall, UCLA. Next Sunday, 4 p.m. $13-$30. (310) 825-2101. Also at Irvine Barclay Theatre, 4242 Campus Drive, Irvine. Oct. 12, 8 p.m. $18-$28. (949) 854-4646.