KRONOS Quartet
Program Notes

Steve Reich (b. 1936)
Pendulum Music (1968)
for microphones, amplifiers, speakers, and performers

“A totally oddball piece” is composer Steve Reich’s description of this rarely performed composition in relation to the balance of his work since the mid-1960s. Not only does Pendulum Music forsake traditional instruments for a series of feedback pulses between microphones and amplifiers, the piece also features no written notes, relying instead on chance operations, as each microphone moves through space in a pendular arc. Fittingly enough, the composition itself was inspired by an act of chance.

“I was spending the summer in New Mexico,” Reich recalls, “living and working out there in ’68. I went up to Boulder to collaborate with a friend of mine, William Wiley, who’s a painter. We were trying to put together a ‘happening’ with sculpture, black light. While we were working on that, Bruce Nauman, who was a student of Wiley, stopped by. The three of us were in this room and I had one of these Wollensack tape recorders—they’re these funky 1950s models with a cheap electric microphone. It was an old machine by then. I was holding the microphone, which was plugged into the back of the machine so it could record. The speaker was turned up. Being out West, I let it swing back and forth like a lasso. As it passed by the speaker of the machine, it went, ‘Whoop!’ and then it went away.

“We were all laughing at this and the idea popped into my mind that if you had two or three of these machines, you would have this audible sculpture phase piece…It’s me making my peace with [John] Cage. If it’s done right, it’s kind of funny.”

In his performance instructions for the finished work (revised in 1973), Reich states: “Three, four, or more microphones are suspended from microphone boom stands, or some other three to six-foot-high support, by their cables so that all hang the same distance from the floor and are all free to swing with a pendular motion. Each microphone’s cable is plugged into an amplifier which is connected to a loudspeaker. Each microphone hangs a few inches directly above or next to its loudspeaker. Before the performance, each amplifier is turned up just to the point where feedback occurs when a microphone swings directly over or next to its speaker, but no feedback occurs as the mike swings to either side…The performance begins with performers taking each microphone [and] pulling it back like a swing…Performers then count off “one, two, three, four, release” and release all the microphones in unison. Thus, a series of feedback pulses are heard which will either be all in unison or not, depending on the gradually changing phase relations of the different microphone pendulums…The piece is ended sometime shortly after all microphones have come to rest and are feeding back a continuous tone by a performer pulling out all the power cords of the amplifiers.”

Program note by Matthew Campbell

Traditional/Jimi Hendrix (1942–1970)
The Star-Spangled Banner (1969/arr. 2003)
Arranged by Stephen Prutsman (b. 1960)

On the morning of Monday, August 18, 1969, guitarist Jimi Hendrix took the stage in Bethel, New York, as the final performer at the Woodstock Festival. His legendary set included a solo guitar version of The Star-Spangled Banner, a former British drinking song that is now better known (with lyrics written by Francis Scott Key) as the national anthem of the United States. The controversial performance became an emblematic moment of the late 1960s.

About Hendrix’s performance, David Harrington says:

“It’s hard to know what Jimi Hendrix was feeling when he played The Star-Spangled Banner at Woodstock. But that single, radical performance in a time of war gave listeners a new way to think about this song. Sometimes, what our government does in our name compels a response like The Star-Spangled Banner.”

Stephen Prutsman’s arrangement of Jimi Hendrix’s interpretation of the ‘Star-Spangled Banner’ was written for the Kronos Quartet.

Irving Berlin (1888–1989)

Campaign Songs #1 (God Bless America) (2020)
Arranged by Michael Gordon (b. 1956)

Campaign Songs #1 is the first in a series of Campaign Songs developed by Kronos and Michael Gordon as part of Kronos’ ongoing efforts to get out the vote ahead of the U.S. presidential election of November 2020. Each song presents a new take on a traditionally patriotic tune, distorting it to reflect the tumultuous time in which it was arranged. Conceived and created during the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown, the original releases were recorded individually from home by Kronos, and feature original video by Joshua Higgason.

About Michael Gordon:

Over the past 30 years, Michael Gordon has produced a strikingly diverse body of work, ranging from large-scale pieces for high-energy ensembles to major orchestral commissions to works conceived specifically for the recording studio. Transcending categorization, this music represents the collision of mysterious introspection and brutal directness. His interest in exploring various sound textures and adding dimensionality to the traditional concert experience has led him to create numerous works for film, traditional orchestra, theater, opera, dance, and chamber works, including Potassium, The Sad Park, and Clouded Yellow for the Kronos Quartet.

Born in Miami Beach in 1956, Gordon holds a Bachelor of Arts from New York University and a Masters of Music from the Yale School of Music. He is co-founder and co-artistic director of New York’s legendary music collective Bang on a Can.

Stacy Garrop (b. 1969)
Glorious Mahalia (2017)

Stacy Garrop is a freelance composer whose music is centered on dramatic and lyrical storytelling. Garrop has received the Barlow Prize, a Fromm Music Foundation grant, three Barlow Endowment commissions, and the Sackler Music Composition Prize, along with prizes from competitions sponsored by the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, Civic Orchestra of Chicago, Omaha Symphony, New England Philharmonic, Boston Choral Ensemble, Utah Arts Festival, and Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble. Theodore Presser Company publishes her chamber and orchestral works; she self-publishes her choral pieces under Inkjar Publishing Company. She is a recording artist with Cedille Records with pieces on nine CDs; her works are also commercially available on ten additional labels. She is currently serving as Composer-in-Residence with the Champaign-Urbana Symphony Orchestra, sponsored by New Music USA and the League of American Orchestras. For more information, please visit her website at www.garrop.com or her all-things-composition blog at www.composerinklings.com/

About Glorious Mahalia, Garrop writes:

“Louis ‘Studs’ Terkel, the Pulitzer Prize-winning writer and oral historian, hosted a daily nationally syndicated radio broadcast show from Chicago’s WFMT station from 1952 to 1997. Studs’ curious, inquisitive nature led him to interview people from all walks of life over the course of his career. For WFMT alone, he conducted over 5,000 interviews. Before he worked for WFMT, Studs had a radio program called ‘The Wax Museum’ on WENR in Chicago. It was on this radio network that Studs first featured the glorious voice of Mahalia Jackson.

“Studs heard Mahalia sing for the first time around 1946. He was in a record store in Chicago when Mahalia’s voice rang out over the store’s speakers. Studs was captivated; he had to meet the woman who possessed that remarkable voice. At that time, Mahalia was gaining fame as a singer of gospels and spirituals in black churches both within Chicago and out of it, as she did a fair amount of touring around the country. Outside of these black communities, however, Mahalia wasn’t yet known. With a little sleuthing, Studs discovered where she regularly sang, at the Greater Salem Baptist Church on the South Side of Chicago. Studs went to the church, introduced himself to Mahalia, and invited her to sing on his radio program. Studs and Mahalia developed a close friendship over the ensuing decades, and they occasionally worked together professionally. As Mahalia rose to international fame and became known as the greatest gospel singer of her time, she and Studs never lost contact.

“In researching WFMT’s Studs Terkel Radio Archive, I found several broadcasts when Studs featured Mahalia Jackson and her recordings on his show. Two broadcasts in particular stood out. The first broadcast occurred in 1963, when the pair sat down for a conversation that covered a wide range of topics, including Mahalia’s experiences of working in the South, the continuing hardships she faces being a woman of color, and the civil rights efforts of Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Reverend Ralph Abernathy, and many others (including Mahalia, who was a staunch supporter of Dr. King). The second broadcast dates from 1957; it features Mahalia performing a number of gospels and spirituals for a live audience at a hotel in Chicago. In crafting my composition, I decided to highlight many of the salient points of Studs’ and Mahalia’s 1963 discussion, with a musical performance from the 1957 concert featured prominently in the work.

“Glorious Mahalia consists of five movements. In movement 1, Mahalia discusses the origin and meaning of the spiritual Hold on. In Stave in the ground (movement 2), she and Studs talk about the work she did when living in the South, and the continuing prejudice she faces. This is followed by a more heated discussion between Studs and Mahalia in Are you being treated right (movement 3). The fourth movement features Mahalia’s soulful performance of the spiritual Sometime I feel like a motherless child. The piece concludes with This world will make you think (movement 5), in which Mahalia speaks of her hope that we can unite as one nation.

“Kronos Quartet commissioned Glorious Mahalia for Carnegie Hall’s The 60’s: The Years That Changed America concert series. I wish to thank Kronos Quartet’s violinist David Harrington for suggesting Mahalia Jackson’s interviews with Studs Terkel as the topic for the piece, as well as Tony Macaluso, Director of the WFMT Radio Network and the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, and Allison Schein, Archivist for the Studs Terkel Radio Archive, for their help in locating and securing my chosen broadcasts within the Archive.”

Voice of Studs Terkel courtesy of the Estate of Studs Terkel. Voice of Mahalia Jackson courtesy of the Estate of Mahalia Jackson. Studs Terkel Radio Archive, courtesy Chicago History Museum and WFMT Radio Network.

Stacy Garrop’s Glorious Mahalia was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Carnegie Hall, with support from David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

Antonio Haskell
God Shall Wipe All Tears Away (1935)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

When Mahalia Jackson first recorded “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” in 1937, she was relatively unknown, an aspiring artist who had migrated ten years earlier to Chicago from her New Orleans birthplace. The song—based on Revelation 21:4 in the King James Bible: “And God shall wipe away all tears from their eyes; and there shall be no more death, neither sorrow, nor crying, neither shall there be any more pain: for the former things are passed away”—was composed in 1935 by New Orleans native Antonio Haskell. The 25-year-old Jackson recorded her seminal version for the Decca Coral label on May 21, 1937, along with “God’s Gonna Separate the Wheat from the Tares,” “My Lord,” and “Keep Me Everyday.” The session was a commercial failure.

But seven decades later, well after Jackson became internationally renowned as the Queen of Gospel, and “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” was ensconced as a gospel masterwork (recorded by Dorothy Love Coates & the Gospel Harmonettes, the Pilgrim Travelers, and many others), Jackson’s performance caught the attention of Kronos Quartet founder and artistic director David Harrington. “The song was on the first CD of a French box set of the complete recordings of Mahalia Jackson,” Harrington recalls, “and it totally jumped out at me—the tempo, the sound of the organ, the emotion in her voice—it was all astounding. I just loved this song.”

Jacob Garchik initially arranged “God Shall Wipe All Tears Away” for the quartet’s collaborations with the Malian ensemble Trio Da Kali—in concert and on the 2017 recording Ladilikan. With singer Hawa Kassé Mady Diabaté delivering the vocal in an impassioned contralto akin to that of Jackson, the strings supplied the accompaniment that had been played on organ by Estelle Allen in 1937. Retooling the piece for Kronos’ performance repertoire came naturally. “I looked at the arrangement,” Harrington explains, “and realized that [violinist] John [Sherba] and [cellist] Sunny [Yang] and I could play all the chord notes—most of the time we’re playing double stops—and that Hank [Dutt] could play the melody on viola.”

All four musicians pored over the 1937 Mahalia Jackson recording. “It became like a score, really,” Harrington says. “Hank, in particular, studied Mahalia’s vocal vocabulary. The biggest challenge was getting the emotional message of the voice.” For Harrington, Sherba, and Yang to sound even more organ-like, Kronos employs a sound design originally developed for their interpretation of the Swedish folk song “Tusen Tankar”, on which, Harrington says, “we needed to approximate a harmonium.” With Dutt filling Mahalia Jackson’s lead role, the other three musicians use heavy, metal practice mutes that dampen the strings, and sound engineer Scott Fraser adds various effects, including an octave divider on the cello.

“It’s an extension of our work,” Harrington notes. “It’s very natural. The more I’ve played with Hank over the years, the more I’ve known that his sound and Mahalia’s deserve mention in the same sentence. The performance brings together something that belongs together.”

Program note by Derk Richardson

Tanya Tagaq (b. 1975)
Colonizer (Remix) (2021)
Arranged by Tanya Tagaq, Kronos Quartet, and Joel Tarman

From Ikaluktutiak (Cambridge Bay, Nunavut), internationally celebrated artist Tanya Tagaq is an improvisational singer, avant-garde composer and bestselling author. A member of the Order of Canada, Polaris Music Prize and JUNO Award winner and recipient of multiple honorary doctorates, Tagaq is an original disruptor, a world-changing figure at the forefront of seismic social, political, and environmental change. Tanya’s latest album, Tongues, is released through Six Shooter Records on January 21, 2022.

About Colonizer, Tanya Tagaq writes:

“Colonizer is a statement. There is guilt in complacency. Accountability means taking action. Nothing will change until we demand it changes. The gavel needs to change hands.”

Abel Meeropol (1903–1986)
Strange Fruit (1939, arranged 2016)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

Best known from Billie Holiday’s haunting 1939 rendition, the song Strange Fruit is a harrowing portrayal of the lynching of a black man in the American South. While many people assume that the song was written by Holiday herself, it actually began as a poem by Abel Meeropol, a Jewish schoolteacher and union activist from the Bronx who later set it to music. Disturbed by a photograph of a lynching, the teacher wrote the stark verse and brooding melody under the pseudonym Lewis Allan in the late 1930s. Meeropol and his wife Anne are also notable because they adopted Robert and Michael Rosenberg, the orphaned children of the executed communists Julius and Ethel Rosenberg.

Strange Fruit was first performed at a New York teachers’ union meeting and was brought to the attention of the manager of Cafe Society, a popular Greenwich Village nightclub, who introduced Billie Holiday to the writer. Holiday’s record label refused to record the song but Holiday persisted and recorded it on a specialty label instead. The song was quickly adopted as the anthem for the anti-lynching movement. The haunting lyrics and melody made it impossible for white Americans and politicians to continue to ignore the Southern campaign of racist terror. (According to the Center for Constitutional Rights, between 1882 and 1968, mobs lynched 4,743 persons in the United States, over 70 percent of them African Americans.)

The lyrics read, in part: “Southern trees bear a strange fruit, / Blood on the leaves and blood at the root, / Black bodies swinging in the southern breeze, / Strange fruit hanging from the poplar trees.”

Adapted from notes by Independent Lens for the film Strange Fruit.

Jacob Garchik’s arrangement of Strange Fruit by Abel Meeropol was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.

John Coltrane (b. 1926)
Alabama (1963, arranged 2017)
Arranged by Jacob Garchik (b. 1976)

John Coltrane isn’t usually the first artist that comes to mind when thinking about the politically outspoken improvisers who changed the course of jazz in the 1950s and early ‘60s. While vanguard bandleaders and composers such as Charles Mingus, Max Roach, and Sonny Rollins coupled their creative breakthroughs with powerful statements denouncing white supremacy and supporting the struggle for civil rights, Coltrane channeled his energy into spiritual masterpieces like A Love Supreme and Meditations. But no musician ever responded to an atrocity with more soulful, anguished humanity than Coltrane’s “Alabama,” a piece the saxophonist wrote in the aftermath of the infamous 1963 KKK bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Baptist Church that killed four little girls. Released on the 1964 album Live at Birdland (Impulse!), but actually recorded in the studio just weeks after the bombing, the elegy features Coltrane’s classic combo with pianist McCoy Tyner, bassist Jimmy Garrison, and drummer Elvin Jones.

Coltrane structured “Alabama” around the speech that the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. gave in the church’s sanctuary three days after the bombing, moving from unfathomable sorrow to steely determination. Kronos commissioned Jacob Garchik to create an arrangement as part of Carnegie Hall’s winter 2018 festival “The ’60s: The Years that Changed America,” with the intention of premiering “Alabama” as an encore for that concert, “but we ran out of time,” David Harrington says. “Now we have this beautiful version, where each one of us gets to pay homage to the sound of John Coltrane.”

“Alabama” isn’t Kronos’ first Trane ride. Working with tenor sax great Joe Henderson, the quartet performed a Jimmy Heath arrangement of Coltrane’s sublime ballad “Naima” back in the ‘80s, a collaboration that went undocumented. But Harrington only discovered “Alabama” recently after Songlines editor Jo Frost wrote about listening to the piece on the same day that white supremacists marched in Charlottesville. Coltrane’s music is timeless, but “Alabama” is infuriatingly timely once again. Harrington quickly sought out the recording and was struck again by Coltrane’s elemental power, “one of the most central sounds in American music,” Harrington says. “Minutes later I was in touch with Jacob.”

For Garchik, the assignment came as something of a surprise. Though the jazz trombonist is widely respected on the New York scene, his work for Kronos usually involves arranging “all kinds of music I’m not familiar with from faraway places,” he says. “This was close to home. I tried to capture the subtly and simplicity of ‘Alabama’ with an arrangement that lets the quartet concentrate on the beautiful lines that Coltrane created. I kept the melody intact, but focused on the recitation part at the beginning, and accentuated its intensity. It’s a very striking and mysterious piece, unlike anything else that Coltrane wrote.”

Program note by Andrew Gilbert

Zachary James Watkins (b. 1980)
Peace Be Till (2017)

Zachary James Watkins studied composition with Janice Giteck, Jarrad Powell, Robin Holcomb and Jovino Santos Neto at Cornish College. In 2006, he received an MFA in Electronic Music and Recording Media from Mills College, where he studied with Chris Brown, Fred Frith, Alvin Curran and Pauline Oliveros. Watkins has received commissions from Documenta 14, Kronos Quartet, The Living Earth Ensemble, sfsound and the Seattle Chamber Players, among others. His Suite for String Quartet was awarded the Paul Merritt Henry Prize for Composition, and has subsequently been performed at The Lab’s 25th anniversary celebration (San Francisco), the Labor Sonor Series at kunsthaus KuLe (Berlin), and as part of the Town Hall New Music Marathon (Seattle) featuring violist Eyvind Kang.

In 2008, Watkins premiered a new multi-media work entitled Country Western as part of the Meridian Gallery’s Composers in Performance Series, which received grants from the American Music Center and The Foundation for Contemporary Arts. An excerpt of this piece is published on a compilation album entitled The Harmonic Series. He recently completed Documentado / Undocumentado, a multimedia interactive book in collaboration with Guillermo Gómez Peña, Gustavo Vasquez, Jennifer Gonzalez and Felicia Rice. ARTLIES described his sound art work Third Floor::Designed Obsolescence as ” a metaphor for the breakdown of the dream of technology and the myth of our society’s permanence.”

Watkins has performed in numerous festivals across the United States, Mexico and Europe. His band Black Spirituals opened for pioneering Drone Metal band Earth during their 2015 European tour. He releases music on the labels Sige, Cassauna, Confront (UK), The Tapeworm and Touch (UK). Novembre Magazine, ITCH, Walrus Press and the New York Miniature Ensemble have published his writings and scores. Watkins has been an artist in resident at the Espy Foundation, Djerassi and the Headlands Center for The Arts.

About Peace Be Till, Watkins writes:

“My compositions are interested in questions most of which I have yet to define. One clear concern is high vibration resonance. This can be understood any way you wish, as each of the three words have complex meanings. For me this phrase represents an interest in imagining radical energy exchange / transformation. Composing relationships that have potential to excite, resonate, grow, energize.

“Over time my output for new through-composed works has focused on site specificity, individuals, economy of resources. I often attempt single-page scores and I always try to write for specific individuals and rooms if at all possible. Strategies designed to investigate high vibration resonance.

“Peace Be Till written for the Kronos Quartet is my first truly substantial commission. When David Harrington contacted me in early 2017, I was absolutely beside myself. We met soon after and he proposed a vision that involved an important historical time and place: Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I have a Dream Speech” during the March on Washington on August 28, 1963. David shared an inspiring moment during this speech when Mahalia Jackson, artist and close friend of Dr. King, shouts: “Tell them about the Dream! Tell them about the Dream!” This instinctual cry to action is understood to have inspired Dr. King to stray from his prepared speech and launch into an improvised version of “I Have a Dream” that comrade Clarence Jones played a role in drafting.

“Peace Be Till is about the legacy of America’s Civil Rights Movement, the important role artists play in critical Social Justice movements and the necessary dreams today. As an American born in 1980 of mixed raced African and European American heritage, I feel that I am a direct result of this struggle. A family that believed that we are one and that America is capable of embracing diversity. From day one I have always experienced racialized America and yet feel a privilege being male and heterosexual. Times are still tough. This piece pays homage to the artist’s instinct to inspire and activate, as well as our ability to wrestle with the sensitive nature of things. In my case I deal with the physics and potential power of sound.

“In the Spring of 2017, David Harrington and I met with Dr. King’s personal lawyer and speechwriter Dr. Clarence B. Jones at the Women’s Audio Mission in San Francisco. We placed microphones in a room and recorded a conversation that focused on Dr. Jones’s own upbringing, his love of music, how he met Dr. King (a life-changing event which he calls “the making of a disciple”), the powerful “I have a Dream” speech, as well as sharing ideas about current realities. These recorded stories became my blueprint for this composition. The role of Mahalia in our human story is equally substantial and I invited a close friend and collaborator Amber McZeal to contribute by resonating her energy and voice sympathetically throughout the accompanying sound collage. This work explores simultaneous threads that weave in and out of each other with an intention to nurture and breathe.

“I want to deeply thank the Kronos Quartet for believing in me; Dr. Clarence B. Jones for his power and service to each of us; Amber McZeal for her love, depth and inspiration during this intense process; Mahalia Jackson for her unbelievable artistry and strength; and lastly Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., for living, breathing, sacrificing for love and social justice.”

Zachary James Watkins’s Peace Be Till was commissioned for the Kronos Quartet by Carnegie Hall, with additional support from the David Harrington Research and Development Fund.