Extra Listening

I've been neglecting my shelves of CDs lately in favor of YouTube, so I'm going to be pulling stuff off the shelves for a while. I have a great box of Kronos Quartet discs that was issued to commemorate their first 25 years. Ten CDs of pretty remarkable music. Disc one has John Adams and Arvo Pärt. This is Fratres.

Kronos 25: Discs 9/10

Disc 9 is devoted to the music of Alfred Schnittke, a Russian/Jewish composer born in the Soviet Union. His father was posted to Vienna and so the young composer began his education exposed to the musical traditions of Viennese classicism which influenced his later work. He graduated from the Moscow Conservatory where he taught from 1962 to 1972. He is sometimes regarded as an heir to Shostakovich because of the extremes of parody and despair in his music. Like Shostakovich he tends to quote stylistic elements if not literally from historical pieces. He was plagued by ill-health much of his life. Kronos play the Second and Fourth Quartets as well as their own transcription from the Concerto for Mixed Choir. This is some of the most challenging music in the whole collection and in many ways it reminds me of the very late works of Shostakovich in its bleak intensity.

You might think of Disc 10 as the "post-colonial" disc as it contains music by Australian Peter Sculthorpe, Vietnamese P. Q. Phan and South African Kevin Volans. I know some of this music as it was on a Kronos album I bought in the 80s with music by Sculthorpe and Volans. Both composers were very influenced by the indigenous music of their countries as was Phan. On one of the pieces by Sculthorpe, he adds two didgeridoos, instruments native to the Australian aborigines, to the quartet. But for the most part the influences are in the area of rhythmic ideas.

For our envoi, here is Kronos with a movement from the Volans piece White Man Sleeps.

What I really miss from this collection is their absolutely best ever string quartet encore, their transcription of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze"

Summary? This is a pretty good cross-section of the four hundred-some works commissioned by Kronos, certainly the most adventurous and prolific string quartet active today and the model for many other young string quartets. Is there any truly great music here? There is some very good music by the usual suspects: John Adams, Arvo Pärt, Morton Feldman and Steve Reich, and there is some interesting music by most of the other composers. What was valuable to me in listening to these ten discs is to get a sort of overview of what is going on with the string quartet these days. What I didn't hear too often was structurally interesting music. There sure were a lot of interesting surface textures, though. There was nothing coming up to the level of quartets by the Viennese masters (Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, but also Schoenberg, Berg and Webern), or Bartók or Shostakovich.

Kronos 25: Discs 7/8

Disc 7 consists of two pieces that are pretty central to the contemporary string quartet repertoire. The first piece is Different Trains (1988) by Steve Reich that is a kind of musical documentary using vocal fragments and melodies derived from them. The conceit of the piece is a kind of connection between the trains Steve Reich rode from New York to Los Angeles when he was a child, traveling between one parent and another, and the trains that took the Jews of Europe to the death camps like Auschwitz. The piece is for live string quartet accompanied by three pre-recorded quartets and recorded voices and train sounds. Rather a miracle of coordination. The music was written for Kronos and yes, they pretty much own it.

The second piece, Black Angels (1970) by George Crumb, was what inspired David Harrington to form Kronos to play pieces like it and as many more new pieces for quartet as they could persuade composers to write. The piece is an icon of contemporary music and is written for amplified string quartet and exotic percussion. Some of the names of the movements are evocative: "Night of the Electric Insects" and "Sarabanda de la Muerte Oscura." It seems a lot more durable than a lot of other pieces from that era and in the Kronos performance, is powerful and convincing.

What unites these two composers is that they are both East Coast guys as opposed to the composer on Disc 8, Terry Riley, most certainly a West Coast guy. I could never quite figure out if I was a West Coast Canadian guy (I grew up on Vancouver Island) or an East Coast Canadian guy (I spent over a decade living in Montreal) so I resolved the problem by moving to Mexico.

Terry Riley is something of a legend in 20th century American music. After inventing minimalism in 1964 with his piece In C, he disappeared for a couple of decades. It was Kronos that lured him into composing notated music again. Disc 8 contains two complete pieces and excerpts from a third. Riley's music is a fusion of Eastern and Western elements together with ones from Native Americans. You can certainly hear the results of his study of North Indian vocal music. The first piece Cadenza on the Night Plain (1984) incorporates cadenzas for all four instruments into the suite structure. G Song, with its scalar material has just a slight resemblance to Philip Glass.

UPDATE: I forgot to say anything about the last piece on the Riley disc: this consists of excerpts from a much longer piece Salome Dances for Peace (1985-86). There are a lot of ornamented drones and one section that sounds like where Lady Gaga got her lick from Bad Romance.

Here is G Song, the first piece written for Kronos by Terry Riley.

Kronos 25: Discs 5/6

Nice diverse repertoire on Disc 5:

• Osvaldo Golijov: The Dreams and Prayers of Isaac the Blind (1994)
• Sofia Gubaidulina: Quartet No. 4 (1993)
• Franghiz Ali-Zadeh: Mugam Sayagi (1993)

Whatever happened to poor Osvaldo? A few years back he was in high demand, but then a couple of accusations of plagiarism surfaced and he was unable to deliver some new commissions on time and then he just disappeared. The piece on this disc is a lovely example of cultural globalism: intense, wailing klezmer music written by a Jewish composer born in Argentina, educated in Israel and the US and played by some folks from California.

Gubaidulina is currently one of my favorite composers for her spiritual yet exploratory music and because she has written quite a lot for guitar. In her Quartet No. 4 she uses a number of unique techniques including ricocheting a ball off the strings. There are also two prerecorded quartet parts. The piece is in one brief, twelve minute, movement. The ricochet effect makes the strings sound like an eerie quartet of skeletal mandolins.

Ali-Zadeh is an Azerbaijani composer educated in Western Europe and currently living in Germany like Gubaidulina she has explored the folk traditions of her country and incorporated them into her musical conceptions.

The three composers are connected to three different religious traditions: Judaism, Russian Orthodox and Islam.

Disc 6 has two quartets by Henryk Górecki. They are in reverse order on the disc:

• Quasi una Fantasia, Quartet No. 2 (1990-91)
• Already it is Dusk, Quartet No. 1 (1988)

Górecki is of course best known for his Symphony No. 3 which in 1993 stormed not only the classical charts but also the popular ones in Europe. Both of his quartets were written for Kronos. Sometimes his music is described as "spiritual minimalism" akin to that of Arvo Pärt. The Quartet No. 2 takes its time developing short enigmatic motifs. Górecki is not only strongly influenced by folk music, he is also a devout Catholic and elements of Polish liturgical chant can also be found in his music.

How odd, in a supposed post-religious world, that all of the composers on these two discs are influenced by their religious roots and traditions.

Here is the Quartet No. 1 by Górecki in the Kronos recording (isn't it odd that you can search for the Kronos recordings on YouTube, but you can't embed them?):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dd0lzLjQ6YE

Kronos: 25/Discs 3 & 4

Disc three is devoted to one long (80 minutes) piece by Morton Feldman. A good friend of mine, Anthony Genge, did a doctorate in composition with him at SUNY Stony Brook. Feldman wrote a lot of very long pieces in his later years and the Salzburg Festival is doing a mini-festival of his music next summer. Listening to Piano and String Quartet from 1985 is a strange experience. The piece is simplicity itself, with slow arpeggios on the piano answered by quiet sustained chords from the string quartet. The music slowly changes like the movement of clouds in the sky, or the slow advance of the tide on a lonely beach. As the music goes on, the piano and quartet change roles, occasional pizzicati appear, but the simplicity remains. One realizes that this music has a healing quality. It is as if a hundred hours of bad, crashing, awkward and unpleasant music was slowly washed away by the honest simplicity of these chords.

This is a performance by Víkingur Ólafsson (piano), Sigrún Edvaldsdóttir (violin), Bryndís Halla Gylfadóttir (cello), Una Sveinbjarnardóttir (violin) and Thórunn Ósk Marinósdóttir (cello) from a festival in Iceland in 2013:

Disc four has String Quartets 2, 3, 4, and 5 by Philip Glass. They are so terribly busy after listening to the Feldman. At this point Glass' music is hardly surprising. He somehow manages to find more possibilities within the fairly narrow range of rising minor thirds, lots of eighth notes and diatonic scales. Mirabile visu, Glass has managed to construct a new tonality that offers a stable, repeatable platform for any number of string quartets, symphonies (is he up to ten by now, or eleven?), concertos, operas and so on. He is the Vivaldi of the late 20th century avant-garde.

For some reason Blogger won't embed the Kronos recording, so here is the Catalyst Quartet with the Closing of the Mishima quartet, No. 3:

As I recall, we had the Catalyst Quartet down here for a winter series chamber concert a few years ago and they may have even played this piece.

Kronos Quartet: 25 Years

At my talk yesterday, one person asked about the Kronos Quartet. Coincidentally, that same day I received from Amazon the box of ten CDs of their 25th Anniversary collection.

The Kronos Quartet, as we learn from the extensive notes in the booklet accompanying the discs, was founded in 1973 in Seattle by violinist David Harrington. In the first few years there was some turnover of personnel before settling into the long-term lineup that included violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. The plan from the very beginning was to reconceive the string quartet in a new way that would be an ideal medium for composers in the last quarter of the 20th century and on into the future. They were spectacularly successful in this regard and ended up commissioning some four hundred pieces by a wildly diverse group of composers. They created an audience of young, enthusiastic listeners who were open to all sorts of new kinds of music.

What the heck, let's review the box. Disc 1 is devoted to John Adams and Arvo Pärt. I have mixed feelings about John Adams--some pieces I really love, but others I find tedious. The music here, John's Book of Alleged Dances (1994) is new to me and on first listening, it is a real winner, displaying Adams' humorous side with titles like "Dogjam" and "Toot Nipple." The music is a suite of crazed and inventive dances that continues to surprise. This is followed by four pieces by Arvo Pärt that, while not very surprising if you know his music, are certainly a faithful performance of his mystical, hazy harmonies. The piece new to me was the Missa Syllabica for string quartet and quartet of singers.

Disc 2 is music by Ken Benshoof, the first composer commissioned by the quartet (first commission payment was a bag of donuts!) and Harrington's composition teacher at the University of Washington. The  first piece, the original commission, Traveling Music (1973), is a real delight, moving imperceptibly from downhome sashaying to more incisive expression. Also included is a newer piece, Song of Twenty Shadows (1994). The rest of the disc is devoted to music by Astor Piazzolla and the quartet are joined by the composer himself on bandoneón. This is a very faithful performance of Piazzolla which means that since I didn't like his music much before, I like it even less now. Sorry! But I find Piazzolla to be tedious in the extreme with his meticulous exploration of two and only two moods, neither of which I care for.

Up next are two discs devoted to Morton Feldman and Philip Glass which I will take up in a future post. For now, let's have an envoi of Ken Benshoof's Traveling Music:

Kronos at 40

The Guardian has a review up of the Kronos Quartet's 40th anniversary concert at the Barbican in London.

The Kronos Quartet has packed a lot into 40 years. It has redefined what a quartet might look like – Rio-era Duran Duran, for part of the 1980s. It has met Big Bird. Most importantly, it has commissioned two new works for every month of its 40 years. This concert added two more.

Kronos was formed by violinist David Harrington after he heard George Crumb's Black Angels. But there was no music as wild as that here; indeed, what was striking about this programme was how conservative much of it seemed.

I am a bit ambivalent about a lot of modernism, but that just means that I pick and choose between what seems to have been genuinely innovative and valuable (the Beatles, Steve Reich, Arvo Pärt) and what was more superficial and trivial (Led Zeppelin, Andy Warhol, George Crumb). The Kronos Quartet have consistently over the years been one of the most creative ensembles working in the area of modernism (and post-modernism, however we define that). I have been a fan of theirs ever since buying one of their early albums in the late 1980s:

This came out in 1986 and was preceded by three other albums, one released in 1982 and the others in 1985. This one was particularly interesting to me because, while it had music by Philip Glass, the Australian Peter Sculthorpe, the American but resident in Mexico Conlon Nancarrow and the Finn Aulis Sallinen, it also had a piece by one Jimi Hendrix and as a musician who had myself passed from rock to classical, I was fascinated to hear how a string quartet would handle that kind of music.

But first, let's have a listen to some of the other music on the album. Here is the String Quartet No. 8 by Peter Sculthorpe, written in 1969:

You should probably ignore the images on the video because, as we learn from the liner notes to the album, this music was not at all inspired by the Aborigines of Australia, but rather by the music of Bali.

The piece by Philip Glass on the album was composed in 1983 and began as incidental music to the play Company by Samuel Beckett. Here is a performance, not by Kronos, but by the ReDo Quartet:

So that gives you a bit of a sense of the album. Placed at the end, as a sort of encore, is the piece by Jimi Hendrix, Purple Haze from the album The Jimi Hendrix Experience, recorded and released in 1967. Should we listen to the two versions side by side? Well, sure, why not. Here is the original:

And here is Kronos:

Incidentally, that is a concert performance, not the one from the album, which was a bit quicker.

I loved this when I first heard it and I still love it. I'm not sure exactly why. Perhaps because it suggests to me that powerful musical expression is something that transcends genre and style. Coming to the string quartet from rock music and doing a lot of listening to the Beethoven late quartets in my early 20s, I certainly didn't need for a string quartet to be "cool". But on the other hand, if you decided to be cool with the integrity shown by Kronos, then that was fine by me.

I suppose the real message I take from this Kronos album is that there is some remarkable and unusual music out there that remains to be discovered. I hope that this will always be the case.

To end with, here is a piece by the South African composer Kevin Volans, from a later album: