The celebrated Kronos Quartet is scheduled to perform in Taipei on March 4 and in Kaohsiung on March 6. The program both times will consist of the same single work, Sun Rings, which is composed of mysterious sounds recorded in space, plus the quartet itself, a chorus, a large amount of video material, and then, in the final section, spoken matter.
“I’d always assumed that space was silent, but it seems that this isn’t entirely the case,” said David Harrington, founding member and first violin of the quartet. “The reality is that the Voyager expeditions managed to record some sounds using a ‘plasma wave receptor’ — it’s the plasma in space that causes them, apparently. These sounds they recorded were very low, and hence inaudible, but when they were speeded up they became audible to the human ear.”
“There are hundreds of hours of these recordings, and my first reaction when I heard them was that they were like nature in some way, but different from anything you might encounter in nature here on Earth,” the San Francisco-based musician told the Taipei Times ahead of the quartet’s visit to the Taiwan International Festival of Arts next weekend. “Anyway, the birth of our project was when the director of NASA’s Arts Program asked me if we’d like to consider using them as the basis for a new musical work.”
Photo Courtesy of The Kronos Quartet
I asked Harrington whether there was a composer, or if the quartet had evolved the piece themselves.
“Oh no, it was written by Terry Riley,” Harrington said. He’d always considered Riley the most talented composer of his generation, he said, and his was the name that immediately came to mind for such a commission. “Terry has been writing for Kronos since 1979.”
That was some 10 years ago, and I asked if the reason they were still performing Sun Rings now was because it had been so successful.
Photo Courtesy Of The Kronos Quartet
“It’s isn’t that exactly,” Harrington replied. “It’s more because we don’t get the chance to perform it that often. It’s really exceptionally complicated to stage. The only other time it’s ever been performed in Asia was in South Korea. But the Taiwan International Festival of Arts seemed an ideal opportunity.”
Riley had started work on it before Sept. 11, 2001, Harrington said, but the day after that event, on Sept. 12, he’d heard the poet Alice Walker chanting a prayer for peace she’d written on the radio, and decided to see if she would allow him to incorporate her lines into Sun Rings. They now form the basis of the work’s final section. Also included are words of an astronomer talking about the view of Earth from space.
“As for the visuals, we visited NASA’s jet propulsion lab and saw a lot of the footage they have there,” Harrington said. “The entire visual side of the show has been put together by Willie Williams, the stage designer who’s been responsible for many U2 concerts, among other things.”
The space sounds are not at all what you might expect. Rather than the muted, mystic murmurs you might imagine, they sound instead like some sort of demented dawn chorus in a particularly savage patch of jungle. Donald Gurnett, a physics and astronomy professor at Iowa University, has been responsible for collecting many of them, and they can be heard on his various Web sites.
Kronos’ greatest claim is arguably that it transcends the tired and profitless opposition of classical and pop. What it proclaims, as well as incorporating from time to time both the aforementioned styles, is a third way. To begin with, it’s nothing if not international, accessing with an almost obsessive enthusiasm the musical traditions of Eastern Europe, Central Asia, South America and more.
The group situates itself a long way from the abstruseness of classical modernism in quartet writing. While modernist abstraction has all the feeling of being the end of the line — the final whimperings of a European classicism that has finally painted itself into a corner, and lost almost all its audience in the process — Kronos stands for everything that’s different, and is invariably outgoing and optimistic.
First, it’s more than eager to work with musical traditions that have never written their music down. Second, it’s part of its very nature to perform with amplification, elaborate theatrical lighting and gorgeous projections. Third, it wants above all else to combine any popularity it receives with the best artistic creativity of the day. And what’s extraordinary is that Harrington and Kronos have so often succeeded in these lofty aspirations.
Since Harrington founded the group in Seattle in 1973 on a wave of anti-Vietnam War impassioned desperation, the group has worked with, among very many others, US composers John Adams, Steve Reich and Philip Glass, and Eastern Europeans Henryk Gorecki and Arvo Part. They’ve collaborated with Tom Waits, David Bowie and Allen Ginsberg, commissioned more than 650 new works for string quartet (often combined with other effects), recorded almost 50 albums, and sold some 2.5 million CDs.
This will be Kronos’ second visit to Taiwan. “We were there last spring when we performed with the Taipei Chinese Orchestra,” Harrington said. “We’re very excited to be going back to such a wonderful, and wonderfully vibrant, society. And the Taipei Philharmonic Chorus will be taking part in Sun Rings.”
If someone were to argue that Kronos is just a group of intellectual former hippies still plugging away at the old themes of peace and love, man’s threat to the environment and the beauty of the universe, so what? The only word there that’s out of place is “old.” If anything, these issues are more pressing today than ever, and concern with them is not to be denigrated by a cheap labeling whereby every decade is expected to come up with something new, and anything with its roots in the past is automatically condemned as antiquated.
Moreover, many of the musical traditions Kronos works with aren’t associated with any particular decade. The traditional folk music of the world is essentially uninterested in fashion, and a concern for fashionability — which implies something is good because it’s new, not because of its essential qualities — is arguably one of the weakest aspects of the pop music scene.
“I’ve been the talent scout for Kronos for 38 years,” Harrington said. And scouting around for the best talent is what Kronos is all about. It’s as if the group makes itself available to any fine artists, be they singers, writers, composers or traditional musicians, to use as they will.
Even so, Sun Rings must by any standards be a quintessential Kronos product. It’s spectacular to watch, uses a famous contemporary composer who has no truck with abstruseness or aridity, and is concerned with the great issues of the magnificence of space and the threat mankind poses.
Once upon a time the greatest story in the world was seen by Europeans as centered on the life and death of Jesus Christ, and hugely gifted composers such as J.S. Bach dedicated their greatest efforts to celebrating this. Today many people see the world rather differently and are aware of the broader, cosmic dimensions of human existence, and indeed of all life.
These are the sort of people who, in the last analysis, the Kronos Quartet and Sun Rings aspire to speak to.
■ The Kronos Quartet will perform on March 4 at 7:30pm as part of the Taiwan International Festival of Arts in the National Concert Hall, Taipei. Tickets are NT$1,200 to NT$1,600,
■ The group also performs at 7:30pm on March 6 at Kaohsiung Cultural Center’s Chihteh Hall (高雄市文化中心至德堂), 67 Wufu 1st Rd , Greater Kaohsiung (高雄市五福一路67號). Tickets are NT$500 to NT$1,800
Tickets can be purchased through NTCH ticketing or online at www.artsticket.com.tw
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