When composers write music for a particular ensemble's very specific sound and enormously wide-ranging aesthetic, can that work be performed again? Or are we looking at something closer to the pop music model, in which music is generally very specifically associated with only one artist or band?
A weeklong Carnegie Hall "Perspectives" residency given by the Kronos Quartet this March provided a snapshot of the group's work in 2010. While the success of each of the four evenings fluctuated wildly, from an evening of transcendent music by Terry Riley and breathtaking collaborations with Azerbaijani singers Alim Qasimov and Farghana Qasimova as well as with Inuit vocalist Tanya Tagaq, to pedestrian outings with composers JG Thirlwell and Victor Gama. In all of its highs and lows, however, the series was a showcase for the quartet to present music that is very much of the moment. (Kronos also used their allotted concerts to not just as performers but also as curators, and used sections of their concerts to present artists ranging from toy and prepared piano player Margaret Leng Tan to the Swedish folk-electronic duo Hurdy-Gurdy.)
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More than 35 years after its founding by violinist David Harrington, Kronos is in a enviable position: not only do they continue to be innovators and empathetic collaborators--so far, there have been more than 650 works written for Kronos--but they are also mentoring young artists as well, and not just instrumentalists: several of the composers whose work they presented during "Perspectives" are at least 30 years younger than most of the quartet's membership. (While the quartet's lineup was in flux during the group's first five years, violinist John Sherba and violist Hank Dutt have been in Kronos since 1978; the group's third cellist, Jeffrey Zeigler, joined the quartet in 2005.) |
Not that Kronos shows the least sign of slowing down as the group approaches its 40th anniversary three seasons hence, but these artists are turning their attention to a pressing issue for groundbreaking creators: creating and sustaining a legacy. By that, I don't mean the truly unanswerable question of which pieces of music being written right now (or twenty or even fifty years ago, for that matter) will be played three centuries from now, but the question of mainstreaming musical idioms that even in 2010 are most decidedly still not part of a traditional conservatory education. Whether it's incorporating non-Western instruments or welcoming laptops and digitally manipulated sounds into the concert hall, younger string quartets may not come to the kinds of works commissioned by Kronos with a clear sense of how to get inside them and bring them to life.
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With Kronos--a group that is so closely identified with composers like Terry Riley and who have collaborated with everyone from Sigur Ros to Asha Bhosle with incredible ease--the question becomes: Is it possible to transmit that kind of work from generation to generation? When composers write music for a particular ensemble's very specific sound and enormously wide-ranging aesthetic, can that work going to be performed again? Or are we looking at something closer to the pop music model, in which music is generally very specifically associated with only one artist or band?
For this quartet, the answer seems to lie in their mission to coach younger musicians in "their" music. During their "Perspectives" series at Carnegie, the quartet led a week of workshops for three young string quartets (as well as two Chinese pipa players) who had competed for the chance to be guided in music very closely associated with Kronos: the Annex Quartet from Canada, the Netherlands' Ragazze Quartet, and the Callino Quartet, whose members come from England and Ireland.
| It's always fascinating to watch and listen to young musicians finding their foothold in pieces that are new to them. But to be working on music with the musicians for whom a given work was written adds even more dimensions to the experience. Coaching sessions I attended were led by violinists David Harrington (working with Chinese pipa master Wu Man to coach the Annex Quartet and Taiwanese pipa player Wei-Mao Huang on Terry Riley's The Cusp of Magic) and John Sherba (helping the Ragazzes with Aviya Kopelman's piece Widows & Lovers, with the composer also in attendance). In those sessions, the dialogues between the elder artists and the younger ones alternated between questions of architecture and detail--how to break down the count a certain section in Riley's piece, for example--and issues of creating a more overarching vision. |
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One of the violinists in Holland's Ragazze Quartet joked that it was just her group's luck, as the only non-native English-speaking group invited to the Kronos workshop, to be the ones to play the 32-year-old Kopelman's Widows & Lovers, a piece that includes a significant spoken-word component. In the course of rehearsal, Kopelman mentioned to the players that Allen Ginsberg's iconic poem Howl was a huge inspiration for her. David Harrington asked Kopelman if she had ever heard the poet read his work out loud; when she responded "no," he immediately summoned up the classic Ginsberg performance on his MP3 player for her and the musicians alike. For older artists working with younger ones, Howl is an important cultural reference point, for sure--but there was yet another layer of resonance as well: Kronos' work with composer Lee Hyla in a musical setting of Howl, in which the quartet accompanied a taped recording of Ginsberg's recitation.
During his coaching session, Harrington often started his sentences with the phrase "I invite you to consider..." Perhaps no phrase sums up Kronos' work better: Harrington and his colleagues invite fellow musicians, composers, and not least of all audiences, to consider other perspectives, visions, and realities. And if that is at least some small part of what Kronos ultimately delivers in its work with younger artists, then they will be incredibly successful indeed.
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