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Kronos Quartet

For more than 40 years, the Kronos Quartet—David Harrington (violin), John Sherba (violin), Hank Dutt (viola), and Sunny Yang (cello)—has pursued a singular artistic vision, combining a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to continually re-imagining the string quartet experience. In the process, Kronos has become one of the most celebrated and influential groups of our time, performing thousands of concerts worldwide, releasing more than 50 recordings of extraordinary breadth and creativity, collaborating with many of the world's most intriguing and accomplished composers and performers, and commissioning more than 850 works and arrangements for string quartet. In 2011, Kronos became the only recipients of both the Polar Music Prize and the Avery Fisher Prize, two of the most prestigious awards given to musicians. The group’s numerous awards also include a Grammy for Best Chamber Music Performance (2004) and “Musicians of the Year” (2003) from Musical America.

Kronos’ adventurous approach dates back to the ensemble’s origins. In 1973, David Harrington was inspired to form Kronos after hearing George Crumb's Black Angels, a highly unorthodox, Vietnam War–inspired work featuring bowed water glasses, spoken word passages, and electronic effects. Kronos then began building a compellingly diverse repertoire for string quartet, performing and recording works by 20th-century masters (Bartók, Webern, Schnittke), contemporary composers (Sophia Gubaidulina, Bryce Dessner, Aleksandra Vrebalov), jazz legends (Ornette Coleman, Maria Schneider, Thelonious Monk), rock artists (guitar legend Jimi Hendrix, Brazilian electronica artist Amon Tobin, and Icelandic indie-rock group Sigur Rós), and artists who truly defy genre (performance artist Laurie Anderson, composer/sound sculptor/inventor Trimpin, and singer-songwriter/poet Patti Smith).

Integral to Kronos’ work is a series of long-running, in-depth collaborations with many of the world’s foremost composers. One of the quartet’s most frequent composer-collaborators is “Father of Minimalism” Terry Riley, whose work with Kronos includes Salome Dances for Peace (1985–86); Sun Rings (2002), a multimedia, NASA-commissioned ode to the earth and its people, featuring celestial sounds and images from space; and The Serquent Risadome, premiered during Kronos’ 40th Anniversary Celebration at Carnegie Hall in 2014. Kronos commissioned and recorded the three string quartets of Polish composer Henryk Górecki, with whom the group worked for more than 25 years. The quartet has also collaborated extensively with composers such as Philip Glass, recording a CD of his string quartets in 1995 and premiering String Quartet No. 6 in 2013, among other projects; Azerbaijan’s Franghiz Ali-Zadeh, whose works are featured on the full-length 2005 release Mugam Sayagi; Steve Reich, from Kronos’ performance of the Grammy-winning composition Different Trains (1989) to the September 11–themed WTC 9/11 (2011); and many more.

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Live Review

Kronos Festival at SFJAZZ Center

Read "Kronos Festival at SFJAZZ Center" reviewed by Harry S. Pariser


Kronos Quartet SFJAZZ Center Kronos Festival 2022 San Francisco, CA April 7-9, 2022 Founded in 1973, Kronos Quartet has long been one of San Francisco's musical treasures. Yet, because the quartet tours internationally, a performance in its home city is an event to take note of. The three-day Kronos Festival has been a local tradition since 2014. Over 900 compositions have been composed for the group, which is famous for its collaborations with musicians ...

Album Review

Stephan Thelen: World Dialogue

Read "World Dialogue" reviewed by Mario Calvitti


Il chitarrista Stephan Thelen, californiano trapiantato in Svizzera dove risiede e lavora, è uno dei musicisti più interessanti tra quelli che nel corso del nuovo millennio si sono adoperati per rinnovare il linguaggio della chitarra, cercando nuove forme e tecniche espressive per esplorare le illimitate possibilità dello strumento. La sua discografia annovera diversi album da solista e con il gruppo SONAR (la cui musica è stata paragonata alle geometrie contorte e alle illusioni prospettiche delle incisioni di Mauritius Cornelius Escher ...

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Album Review

Stephan Thelen: World Dialogue

Read "World Dialogue" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


Stephan Thelen's compositions for his band Sonar have a minimalist groove that clearly relates to other groups in the experimental sphere like Swiss pianist and composer Nik Bärtsch's band Ronin. These works for string quartet are not stylistically far removed from Thelen's Sonar music, but the classical chamber music context establishes them in the world occupied by composers like Steve Reich. Thelen's desire to compose for the Kronos Quartet was the driver for this album. He composed the ...

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Album Review

Kronos Quartet/Terry Riley: Sun Rings

Read "Sun Rings" reviewed by Mark Sullivan


In addition to their performance of 20th century classics, modern music specialists The Kronos Quartet have a long history of commissioning new works from contemporary composers. But their relationship with minimalist pioneer Terry Riley is a special one. After composing the open-scored In C in 1964, Riley increasingly turned his attention towards improvised performances with tape-delay and organ—later adding voice (inspired by studying Indian raga singing with Pandit Pran Nath) and substituting synthesizer for organ. When Riley and ...

Live Review

Il Kronos Quartet all' Auditorium Arvedi di Cremona

Read "Il Kronos Quartet all' Auditorium Arvedi di Cremona" reviewed by Vincenzo Roggero


Kronos Quartet Cremona Jazz 2017 Auditorium Giovanni Arvedi 21.05.2017 Doveva accadere prima o poi, quasi fosse scritto nelle stelle che si dovessero incontrare. E così è stato. L'Auditorium Arvedi, cuore pulsante e capolavoro architettonico/acustico del Museo del violino di Cremona ha ospitato il Kronos Quartet, quartetto d'archi di musica contemporanea a suo modo rivoluzionario per la trasversalità di approccio al materiale compositivo, per una storia di incontri sorprendenti documentata da dischi eccellenti, per la capacità ...

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Live Review

Kronos Festival 2017

Read "Kronos Festival 2017" reviewed by Harry S. Pariser


Kronos Quartet SFJAZZ Kronos Festival 2017 San Francisco, CA February 4-6, 2017 “I'd started playing string quartets when I was 12, and one day when I was 14, I was gazing at a map of the world and suddenly realized that all the quartet music I'd ever heard--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert--came from a single city: jny: Vienna. A simple question came to me: 'What did music from other cities and countries sound like?' A ...

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Album Review

Kronos Quartet / Wu Man: Terry Riley: The Cusp of Magic

Read "Terry Riley: The Cusp of Magic" reviewed by John Kelman


Of the many artists whose work the longstanding Kronos Quartet has commissioned, none has been approached more often than Terry Riley. Riley is one of the founding fathers of minimalism, the late-1960s classical sub genre where repetition of a number of varying length musical fragments creates an ever-shifting landscape often defined by its hypnotic and transcendent nature. As a composer, Riley has evolved significantly since his classic A Rainbow in Curved Air (Columbia, 1969), a trance-inducing masterpiece of overdubbed keyboards, ...

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Book / Magazine

Holiday Gift Idea: New Book Features Kronos Quartet, Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakatmoto, Arvo Pärt, Jon Hassell, Michael Price And The Art Ensemble Of Chicago

Holiday Gift Idea: New Book Features Kronos Quartet, Brian Eno, Ryuichi Sakatmoto, Arvo Pärt, Jon Hassell, Michael Price And The Art Ensemble Of Chicago

Source: All About Jazz

The Moderns vol.2 explores the world’s great avant-garde artists. BADD PRESS announces the launch of The Moderns vol. 2, the second installment of a series dedicated to the world’s great avant-garde artists. Featuring more than 200 reviews and interviews, the book introduces readers to established and emerging music leaders from around the world. “The first volume was so warmly received,” says author Kevin Press. “Since its publication at the beginning of this year, I’ve been sent music from all over ...

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Video / DVD

CD/DVD: Kronos Quartet - Rainbow: Music of Central Asia Vol. 8 (2010)

CD/DVD: Kronos Quartet - Rainbow: Music of Central Asia Vol. 8 (2010)

Source: Something Else!

Volume 8 in the Smithsonian Folkways series on the music of Central Asia paired the Kronos Quartent with Afghan rubâb virtuoso Homayun Sakhi and Azerbaijani father-daughter singing duo Alim and Fargana Qasimov. The results of the collaborations were almost too good to be believed. The stories of how the compositions were put together are fascinating. In the case of Quasimov, the vocalist arranged five Azerbaijani songs, adding sections for improvised vocals and instrumentals. Kronos arranger Jacob Garchik then took the ...

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Recording

The Kronos Quartet Performs "Uniko" with Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen

The Kronos Quartet Performs "Uniko" with Kimmo Pohjonen and Samuli Kosminen

Source: Gapplegate Music Review by Grego Edwards

There are musical works that come along now and then that go beyond what categorical pigeonholing comfortably handles. Such music is all-the-more welcome in the sense that it expands the boundaries of possibility for music as we understand it in the present tense. Such is most assuredly the case with the new Kronos Quartet offering Uniko (Ondine 1185-2), featuring the music of Kimmo Pohjonin and Samuli Kosminen. First of all, this neither sounds like or is a typical string quartet-chamber ...

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Music

Recordings: As Leader | As Sideperson

World Dialogue

RareNoiseRecords
2020

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Sun Rings

Nonesuch Records
2019

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Terry Riley: The Cusp...

Nonesuch Records
2008

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Mugam Sayagi: Music...

Nonesuch Records
2005

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Pieces of Africa

Landmark Records
1992

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Pieces Of Africa

Landmark Records
1992

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