FOUR HUNDRED CANDLES: THE CREATION OF A REPERTOIRE
by Carol Yaple

Photo by William Wegman ©

Kronos Quartet Marks 25^th Anniversary in 1998

"I've always wanted the string quartet to be vital, and energetic, and alive, and cool, and not afraid to kick ass and be absolutely beautiful and ugly if it has to be. But it has to be expressive of life. To tell the story with grace and humor and depth. And to tell the whole story, if possible." —David Harrington

Twenty-five years represents a milestone for any musical ensemble. For the Kronos Quartet, the anniversary also celebrates the creation of a repertoire—400 new string quartets, from composers spanning six continents and at least four generations—commissioned and premiered since 1973.

After a year playing violin in a Canadian orchestra to avoid the draft, David Harrington crossed back over the border to his native Seattle. "The war was still very present in everybody's mind. One night I turned on the radio and heard something wild, something scary. It was Black Angels by George Crumb, his musical response to Vietnam. I didn't even know it was quartet music at first, but it was a magnetic experience. All of a sudden it felt like this was absolutely the right music to play." The 22-year old Harrington picked up the phone and called Ken Benshoof, with whom he had studied composition as a teenager. "I'm starting a group," he announced, "because I have to play that music." Benshoof answered with a piece of his own, Traveling Music, which Harrington commissioned with a bag of doughnuts. The Kronos Quartet began with performances of these two works—along with Bartók's Third Quartet and Webern's Six Bagatelles—at North Seattle Community College before an audience of friends and family.

Harrington hasn't stopped calling composers since, and 25 years later Kronos is responsible for the creation of 400 new string quartets—more than twice the number by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Brahms combined. They have played at Carnegie Hall and Central Park, at La Scala and the Montreux Jazz Festival. Their over thirty recordings have received Grammy, Deutscheschallplatten, and Edison awards. And they have introduced new music and new composers to an international audience numbering in the millions.

A double dedication—to quartet playing, and to the vitality of the form—is shared among violinists David Harrington and John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. Add to this a sense of collaboration, with which Kronos brings pieces of music to life in rehearsal with composers, and craftsmanship, their view that each work is literally handmade, and you have the ingredients that have created a legacy that is as personal as it is prolific.

Based in San Francisco with its own staff and organization, the Kronos history reads with a seeming degree of inevitability. But the members' decision to concentrate exclusively on new music; their work with hundreds of composers, including some of the most significant of this century, to emerging voices; and their responses to 20 years of playing together offer another side: that their achievement, like their repertoire of over 600 works, has been made the old-fashioned way—piece by piece.

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