Aged 14, studying the globe in his family home in Seattle, David Harrington – now known as the founder of the intrepid ensemble Kronos Quartet – had a revelation. It struck him that all the string quartet music he’d so far heard had been written by just four composers, all hailing from a tiny dot on that geographical orb – the city of Vienna. As he tells me from Abu Dhabi, where he’s completing a series of performances and teaching engagements, “I thought to myself, ‘There are a lot of other cities in the world, a lot of other countries, languages and religions, and what do they contribute to the world of music?’”
Since their formation in 1973, Kronos has been characterised by a commitment to performing not only works from across the globe and from a plethora of styles outside the Western classical tradition, but works of which they are the first performers. With around 950 pieces having been commissioned for the group during its lifetime, they decided to check their privilege and ask why the wealth of new music they’d enjoyed bringing to audiences across the world couldn’t be picked up by younger, up-and-coming ensembles. “Where do you get the music of Terry Riley, or the music of Steve Reich or Sofia Gubaidulina?” asks Harrington. “You get it from publishers, but frequently it’s very expensive. You can’t go to a library, like I did when I was 12, and check out that music and play it with your friends.” To redress the issue, the quartet and its nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association formulated Fifty for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire, a project that aims not only to commission new work by 50 composers (split equally between male and female) over a 5-year period, but to make the scores, parts, recordings and instructional videos available for free online. Consequently, if an amateur string quartet in Russia or a group of high school students in Chicago wants to widen its repertoire with brand-new music created by artists working at the forefront of contemporary classical, experimental, folk music and beyond, they can do so without having to fork out for expensive scores.
The sheer breadth of genres and disciplines pulled together by the works in Fifty for the Future is staggering, made even more impressive by the fact that the curation is controlled solely by the quartet – “This is what I spend the entirety of my waking life thinking about”, says Harrington. Contemporary classical giants like Philip Glass (whose piece for the project premiered a few weeks ago) rub shoulders with outlier electronic artists such as Jlin, along with Korean folk musicians, occultist art-rockers, Indian classical virtuosi and more. A contributor of particular importance to Harrington is Fodé Lassana Diabaté of Trio da Kali, the Malian troupe whose collaborative album with Kronos, Ladilikan, came out last year. The idea for having Diabaté, who plays a kind of wooden xylophone called a balafon, as a composer in the first year of the project came out of the recording sessions for the album: before each take, he would perform a mood-enhancing improvisation, “a perfect musical gem”, as Harrington says. Diabaté went on to compose a work specifically for Fifty for the Future called Sunjata’s Time, having the sections transcribed and arranged by Kronos collaborator Jacob Garchik. But a surprise came when the quartet actually came to perform the piece with its composer: “I had thought these pieces were probably [more] improvisations,” says Harrington. “Actually, they’re fully composed pieces. Lassana played every single note with us. So the idea that composed music exists only as notated music was disproved at that moment.”
Connecting with artists from outside the Western classical tradition has always been part of Kronos’ modus operandi, but in making scores, recordings and other learning materials readily available, Fifty for the Future has the potential to broaden the stylistic and practical horizons of many other ensembles. Harrington enthuses about hearing a New York high school group performing a piece by the Indian classical violinist Kala Ramnath, and how a piece by tabla master Zakir Hussain will soon be available with accompanying recordings, allowing quartets to “play with” the virtuoso – “a high experience of the beauty of rhythm”. In translating the work of musicians from outside the orchestral arsenal – such as the guttural growls and overtones of Inuit throat singer Tanya Tagaq – Kronos want to throw young musicians in at the deep end of experimental techniques and exploring the potential of their instruments: “The fact that you can make your instrument sound like Tanya Tagaq is empowering. It gives you confidence and belief in the future, that you’re able to do something that you never thought your instrument could do.” Similarly, Kronos’ strings-based approximation of the wild keyboard sounds of Islam Chipsy – purveyor of the Egyptian “wedding rave” style electro chaabi – may well leave violinists who want to expand their instrumental language salivating. “I can’t wait for it to get out there for other groups to play”, says Harrington of the piece. “There’s nothing else like it in the world of the string quartet, it will be very beautiful and vital addition to music.”