Kronos Quartet Essentials

It was a Damascene moment that led to the birth of Kronos Quartet. David Harrington remembers hearing, in 1973, George Crumb’s 1970 work for string quartet, Black Angels, a searing avant-garde commentary on the Vietnam War. “The American involvement in Vietnam had ceased,” Harrington tells Apple Music Classical, “but the effects of that war were all over our society. Our young musicians were trying to figure out the right music to play.” With Black Angels, Harrington had found his music. “I had to start a quartet—I didn’t have any choice. We had to play that piece.” Kronos held its first rehearsal on 1 September 1973 (“I hoped there would be a second one,” remembers Harrington). Fifty years on, the diverse members of the Kronos Quartet (Harrington is the only member to have stayed the entire course) have continued pushing boundaries while collaborating with musicians from all genres and reinventing the notion of chamber music. Along with the many highlights of their discography—including the thrilling 1987 White Man Sleeps, Steve Reich’s haunting Different Trains and superbly nuanced renditions of Philip Glass’ quartets from 1995—they have won a whole new audience. Kronos have also commissioned over 1,000 new works, signalling them as one of the most important forces in contemporary music. The depth and breadth of Kronos’ work, live and recorded, would not have been possible without each player’s curiosity and constant quest for the new and exciting. “I try to have my ears open 23 and a half hours a day,” says Harrington. Each connection, he adds, leads to another: “We’re really lucky. We get to hear music and then converse with each other and share our passions and our notes and the things we’ve discovered.” And it’s in rehearsal that much of their musical alchemy begins to form. “It’s where developments really occur,” he reveals, “where a suggestion is thrown and then each person takes that suggestion to a realm that only they can imagine.” Those burgeoning connections, helping to pile up of layers of experience, have produced some of Kronos’ most iconic recordings. Their relationship with the minimalist Terry Riley, whom they met in 1979 while in residence at Mills College in Oakland, California, became one of the fulcrums of their growing influence in contemporary music. “I remember when Steve Reich brought Ligeti to BAM [Brooklyn Academy of Music], and we were playing Terry Riley’s Salome Dances for Peace, a two-and-a-half hour piece. And they came to that concert. They were both amazed at the variety of sounds that we were able to make. Terry had provided a world of sound for us to inhabit and for our imaginations to just go nuts in. And that led to Steve Reich writing for Kronos.” Reich would go on to compose three of his most acclaimed works for Kronos: Different Trains, Triple Quartet and WTC 9/11, all of which have formed parts of the quartet’s most seminal recordings. It was Terry Riley, too, who introduced Kronos to Egyptian composer Hamza El Din after hearing them play Kevin Volans’ White Man Sleeps. Soon after, Philip Glass led them to the Gambian musician Foday Musa Suso. Both encounters formed the seed that, eight years later, would grow into Pieces of Africa, Kronos’ ground-breaking album of music by African composers. In 2024, the album was selected as one of 25 recordings to be inducted into the Library of Congress’ National Recording Registry. In a discography of over 70 albums, the Kronos legacy is more extensive and varied than any other artist of any genre. Harrington, however, alights on a handful of albums he believes forms the core of its recorded achievements. Placed alongside Different Trains and Pieces of Africa are 2002’s Nuevo, a collage of Mexican sounds and songs that serves as a tribute to Harrington’s late son; and from 2000 there’s Caravan, a riotous exploration of musical traditions from Portugal, through to Iran and onwards to India. And there’s Philip Glass, too, whose quartets have become synonymous with Kronos, and whose String Quartet No. 5 was composed for the ensemble. “There are moments in it that are so beautiful and so perfect,” says Harrington. Beyond the 50th celebrations, Harrington is bullish about Kronos continuing with its innovative explorations into all aspects of the musical world, even with prospective new players following the retirement in June 2024 of violinist John Sherba and viola player Hank Dutt. “We’re going to find ways to bring music to people that have never had a chance to hear our music,” he says. “Schools that don’t have music programmes, disenfranchised communities… I think the energy we get from it is going to propel our music in new ways. “All I’ve ever wanted to do is add new vocabulary to the string quartet medium, and bring things into it that reflect our time and our ability to connect with musicians from so many different backgrounds, religions and musical pathways.”