Reflections on a More Than 30-Year Collaboration with Kronos Quartet

This study examines the creative layers and continuities evident within the composition and rehearsal processes of Nicole Lizée’s Golden Age of the Radiophonic Workshop (Fibre-Optic Flowers), written for the Kronos Quartet in 2012. Lizée’s compositional approach to the historic and the new, and the mechanical and the human, are interpreted through Simon Emmerson’s three themes of combination, transformation, and control, and his three “impulses within composition” that combine live and acousmatic soundworlds – integration, antithesis, and co-existence. These concepts also help to articulate the way the players engage with the physical, psychological, and expressive demands of the piece. Discussions arising from the Kronos Quartet rehearsing the piece with the composer reveal how extensions are made to the performers’ mind and body experiences when they are required both to initiate and integrate sounds emanating from unfamiliar, analogue machines into their acoustic, yet amplified soundworld. Creative layers and continuities are seen to evolve from compositional experimentation and from composer–performer and co-performer dialogues in rehearsal in the BBC Maida Vale studio prior to the world premiere at a BBC Prom concert on 24 July 2012.

Nonesuch Records:Sui Generis Johanna Keller (bio) After supper, my husband and I usually repair to the living room to read and to listen to music. One evening, as we do frequently, we loaded in six CDs and punched the random play button. First the estimable pianist Richard Goode played a Bach partita, followed by soprano Dawn Upshaw singing a stylishly warm rendition of a Broadway standard. An imaginative ten-minute meditation by jazz guitarist Pat Metheny gave way to a version of a fourteenth-century canon by the ensemble Alarm Will Sound with added percussion that highlighted its complex cross-rhythms. Next, Stephin Merritt's gravelly bass voice sang one of his sad love ballads with the Magnetic Fields band, followed by the Kronos Quartet performing a pan-Arab hit tune arranged by the quartet and Argentinean composer Osvaldo Golijov. In its breadth of music, this was a fairly typical listening evening for us. Spanning roughly four centuries, and encompassing what used to be thought of as high and low culture, the music came from several continents and encompassed jazz, Broadway, world music, classical music, contemporary and early music. The transitions from one track to the next—chosen at random by the CD player—were surprising, often jarring. But the juxtapositions refreshed the ears and opened the mind to new connections. What was unusual was that all of the recordings were released on one label—Nonesuch. Nonesuch has been a bellwether since it was founded in 1964 as a budget classical label. Under the early leadership of iconoclastic producer Teresa Sterne, and in recent decades the supremely talented Robert Hurwitz, the label has been eclectic and genre-busting. Its quirky back story consists of a parade of now-legendary releases that became cultural game-changers. It was Nonesuch that introduced 1960s mass audiences to world music through its Explorer Series, and later sold a million copies [End Page 423] of music by Scott Joplin, setting off the craze for ragtime jazz. Nonesuch put out the early works of John Adams and Philip Glass, John Zorn and the Kronos Quartet, which became surprise hits—unheard of for serious contemporary music. It was Nonesuch that released Henryk Górecki's Third Symphony, selling more than three million copies. Who would have guessed that hits could also be made out of the Bulgarian State Television female choir? Or tangos by Astor Piazzolla? Nonesuch has a global reach, encompassing The Gipsy Kings, the Buena Vista Social Club, Brazilian pop star Caetano Veloso, Wilco, the Black Keys, Youssou N'Dour and Gidon Kremer, and Laurie Anderson—just to name a few. A handful of recent releases illustrates the vision—and the risk-taking—that has always characterized Nonesuch. The Kronos Quartet's recent album, Floodplain, has a geopolitical theme. The liner notes explain that the dozen tracks come from "lowlying places bordering rivers, and the places where human civilization was born and first flourished," that is to say places like Serbia, Kazakhstan, Iran, Azerbaijan, Iraq, Lebanon and Palestine—spots often more associated with roadside bombings than with music. This is not an ethnomusicological compendium of traditional music, nor is it a Western string quartet playing arrangements; instead, like the music of Yo-Yo Ma's Silk Road Project, what is offered here is a thoughtful blend of cultures—artistic appropriations that do not purport to be purely authentic in either the historical or ethnic sense. The album's catchy opening, "Ya Habibi Ta'ala" (My Love, Come Quickly), is an Egyptian song from 1940 turned into a slithery tango, arranged by Osvaldo Golijov and played by the quartet along with Jamie Papish on riqq (an Arabic tambourine). In "Getme, Getme" (Don't Leave, Don't Leave), the quartet collaborates with the father-and-daughter singing duo, Alim Qasimov and Fargana Qasimova, and their ensemble from Azerbaijan; at times the quartet members play along with the traditional lines, and at other moments, they break into a kind of Western contemporary improvisation—it's a fascinating blend of contexts. In "Tèw Semagn Hagèré" (Listen to Me, My Fellow Countrymen), Jeffrey Zeigler plays an instrument inspired by the Ethiopian begena (a lyre with a buzzing...

This article explores the phenomenon of the Kronos Quartet, principally through their recordings, and discusses how, in adopting some features of popular music while retaining elements of their classical heritage, they have redefined conventional musical and cultural notions of the string quartet. This study also argues that Kronos has helped to establish a hybrid, cross-cultural style that might be called “world minimalism” — a style that combines musical traits shared among some world musics with analogous elements found in classical minimalism. The critical literature on the group is considered, especially the charge that the quartet exhibits “postmodern sterility”; although certain pieces in their repertoire might be described as “postmodern,” and while they have been described as a postmodern group in the mass media, the Kronos quartet is actually thoroughly modernist in its approach and presentation, drawing strongly on its classical heritage. The article concludes by arguing that the long-term effect of the Kronos Quartet's existence has been a substantial re-drawing of the boundaries that existed in recorded music, and that their belief in and promotion of contemporary music has been an extremely beneficial force in the music world.

Steve Reich's Different Trains is a 27–minute work for string quartet and tape, written in 1988 to a commission from the Kronos Quartet. It has already enjoyed a wide circulation: the Kronos have toured it extensively (in Britain they premièred it in the Queen Elizabeth Hall, a performance that was recorded for a subsequent television broadcast) and recorded it for Nonesuch. Reich's reputation has never been confined to ‘serious’ new music circles and the combination of. his (so-called) ‘crossover’ credentials with those of the Kronos (and the pairing on record of Different Trains with Reich's Electric Counterpoint, written for the equally cultish Pat Metheny) is the stuff of record company executives' wilder dreams. If one assumes that the meaning of any musical work owes as much to the means of its production and dissemination as to the sounds themselves, then Different Trains is a contemporary cultural phenomenon whose significance is quite different from that of most new music and almost certainly unique amongst new works for string quartet. The present article is an attempt to explicate that significance, not so much through a note-to-note analysis of the music as through an analysis of the ideas the music articulates.

Rainbow: Kronos Quartet with Alim and Fargana Qasimov and Homayun Sakhi. 2010. Music of Central Asia, 8. Smithsonian Folkways Recordings SFW CD 40527. Recording engineers: Joel Gordon and Scott Fraser. Annotated by Theodore Levin. 44-page booklet with foldout; notes in English. Translations of Azerbaijani song lyrics by Aida Huseynova and Anna Oldfield. c. 70 colour photographs, 1 map. 4-item discography,

Recording with Kronos Quartet

By examining the creative and interactive processes that take place between members of the Kronos Quartet and musicians from non-Western traditions, the research discussed in this chapter extends beyond the standard conventions of the classical string quartet repertoire to embrace unusual and unpredictable combinations of notation and improvisation. Examples of Kronos rehearsing with singers and instrumentalists from Central Asia, and with Ukrainian vocalist Mariana Sadovska, illustrate how conventional Western constructions of composer and performer become blurred when musicians work together across cultural boundaries. The chapter uses rehearsal and interview data to address questions regarding roles and responsibilities, the distribution of creativity in rehearsal, and the way composition, performance and improvisation are defined and re-defined in this context.

This book is the first full-length biography to be written about the American composer and electronic musician Wendy Carlos (b. 1939). With her debut album, Switched-On Bach, Carlos brought the sound of the Moog synthesizer to a generation of listeners. She not only blazed new trails in electronic music for decades but also intersected with many aspects of American culture during the second half of the twentieth century and well into the twenty-first. Her story features an eclectic cast of characters, including Arthur Bell, Leonard Bernstein, Allan Kozinn, the Kronos Quartet, Stanley Kubrick, Robert Moog, Ron Nelson, Stevie Wonder, and “Weird Al” Yankovic. Carlos’s identity as a transgender woman has shaped many aspects of her life, her career, how she relates to the public, and how the public has received her and her music. Cultural factors surrounding the treatment of transgender people affected many decisions that Carlos has made over the decades. She remained in hiding for more than a decade after she transitioned to female because she feared for her personal safety and professional reputation. Once she disclosed her transition publicly, many journalists and fans began to focus almost exclusively on her gender instead of on her music. Eventually she retreated again, giving very few interviews and never speaking about her gender on record. The fact that she is transgender is just one dimension of her story, however. This text presents her life as completely as is currently possible and relates her life to many dimensions of American culture.

Being a Friend with the Kronos Quartet

Re-Drawing Boundaries: The Kronos Quartet

This chapter examines censorship in the Soviet Union during the Cold War by focusing on the experience of composer Alfred Schnittke (1934–1998). More specifically, it looks at Schnittke’s evolving interactions with Soviet political and aesthetic strictures, as well as the representation and interpretation of those interactions abroad, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. The chapter explores the increasingly complex, globalized musical economy in which late Soviet censorship played a key role. It also discusses the “harsh censorship” that Schnittke had to endure and how it gave him prominence, and ultimately prestige, with the help of various agents such as Gidon Kremer and the Kronos Quartet, the Soviet copyright agency VAAP (All-Union Agency for the Protection of Authors’ Rights), and the BIS record label. Finally, it highlights the actors (performers, producers, impresarios, critics, and listeners) who affect the way music is shaped and received, bought and sold.

I. String Quartet II In the summer of 1996, the Kronos Quartet was scheduled to present Morton Feldman’s String Quartet II (1983) at the Lincoln Center Festival in New York. The performance was being promoted as the centerpiece of a much larger Feldman tribute and retrospective that was to go on for several days. Feldman’s legendary quartet had never before been given in its entirety, which, if faithfully done would last, uninterrupted, around six hours. Shorter versions had been performed in the 1980s—in Toronto, in Darmstadt—abridged by Feldman himself to fit specific programs, or to accommodate the pleas of musicians, but the composition in all its intended dimension had not been heard. Like a well-concealed object, the complete string quartet’s non-performance seemed only to heighten the anticipation and the uniqueness of the upcoming event, the silence surrounding this monumental piece contributing to its growing aura. No one had heard it, and yet much had been heard about it. More than any other contemporary composer, Feldman over the years had become known for the length of so many of his pieces, their extreme duration seen as both a compositional strategy and a recognizable signature statement of his late work. Asked about it, he would sometimes cryptically justify the unusual length of his music as his way of adding “a little drama” to the work, or that he was “tired of the bourgeois audience” and their conventional expectations, or, more seriously perhaps, he would quote Varese’s comment that people “don’t understand how long it takes for a sound to speak” (Give My Regards 44). And though much of Feldman’s music of the late 1970s and 1980s ranged from one hour to four (breaking what he saw as the stale durational mold of

Abstract: Nicole Lizée is an award-winning classical music composer and performer who composes for string quartet, electronic music, turntable, film, and other media. She has emerged as a major new voice in new classical composition, winning the coveted Canada Council for the Arts Jules Léger Prize (2013) for new Canadian chamber music with her work White Label Experiment. She has been commissioned by the Kronos Quartet among many other prestigious ensembles. This interview engages her relation to various aspects of her work, from marketing and promotion to inspiration and creation in the context of “avant garde” music. How can marketing continue to be part of the art itself? Does instinctively not fitting into a box allow for greater freedom to explore classical and chamber music in the broader context of film and other media? What other factors may be contributing to the inspired vitality of her work?

Reviewed by: Gatz Sara Jane Bailes Gatz. Written by F. Scott Fitzgerald . Created by Elevator Repair Service, Walker Art Center, Minneapolis. 21– 2409 2006. Devised by New York downtown theatre ensemble Elevator Repair Service (ERS), Gatztakes as its premise the delivery of an unabridged verbatim reading of F. Scott Fitzgerald's classic American novel, The Great Gatsby. Over its six-and-a-half-hour staging (on two consecutive nights or in one sitting) the show invites audience members to collude with performers by taking on the task of imagining. We translate (rather than adapt) the novel into and out of the setting of a drab contemporary office witnessing what is effectively a performed reading and a performance that interrogates reading. The show begins in an understated manner. A man (Scott Shepherd) enters, and we hear a drone of industrial noise in the background as he swings the door open and stands poised for a moment in the dark before entering a room cluttered with dilapidated furnishings, brownish walls, and the dull institutional lighting of a lowbrow office. Upstage, a windowed corridor leads to a smaller room in which we later observe scenes within scenes through its glass panes. In habitual manner, the man switches the light on, hangs (practically throws) his coat onto a stand, sits down, and glances at his desk clock (this becomes a recurring and humorous motif), which remains fixed at twenty minutes to ten for the duration of the performance. As the piece continues, this faulty clock takes on significance, reminding us that in reading a novel, the individual seems to suspend his relationship with real time as the temporality of another world floods the imagination. This mixed and suspended temporality applies equally to the audience watching the world of Gatsbyunfold effortlessly in the unlikely setting of this drab office. Dressed in casual work attire the man switches on his computer, which (of course) refuses to start despite his frustrated key-tapping efforts to trick the machine into action. This failure of modern technology allows both Shepherd and his audience to glide effortlessly into the glamorous old-fashioned world of the novel, for at this point he slides open a black Rolodex on his desk and pulls out a well-thumbed copy of The Great Gatsby. Opening the book, intermittently sipping his take-out coffee, he begins quietly and casually to read out loud while trying to boot up the computer. Shepherd instantaneously becomes Nick Carraway, the book's nostalgic narrator, while the role he has already established (distracted, bored office worker) maintains the actor's position as semidetached witness to Nick's narration: he is both inside and outside the novel, and this clever principle sets up one of the conventions that defines the piece, allowing the performers to float between office persona and characters from the book. Nick continues reading aloud until some 182 pages and a quarter of a day later he reaches the novel's end, at which point he closes the book, the lights go out, and the show ends. In that time, some twelve other performers, all part of this mismanaged outfit, join Nick onstage, each going about the mundane business of office life (sorting mail, signing and filing letters, answering telephones, gossiping) as they become increasingly interpolated in the grander tragic fictions that stake out the heart of the novel. Augmented by subtle but exact ambient sound design (Ben Williams with John Collin's assistance) and the boldly eclectic musical score typical of the company's work (including Duke Ellington, Kronos Quartet, and the Afro-Cuban All Stars), The Great Gatsbyis summoned before us by staging humorous and simple solutions to the problem of representation. The show works by galvanizing the audience's too-often neglected capacity to imagine detailed scenarios such as the languid hot summers of Long Island's rich during the Jazz Age: cocktails and all-night parties; affairs and deceptions; flamboyant trips into New York City; and the stark social and emotional poverty, corruption, and violence that encroaches upon the lives of the characters—Gatsby, Daisy, Jordan, Tom Buchanan, Wilson, and so on. It all somehow manages to flit in and...

The Wexner Center for the Visual Arts opened to the public on November 16, 1989 with lavish ceremonies, including the J.D. Steel Gospel Singers, dancer Trisha Brown, the Kronos Quartet, and Laurie Anderson, and moderated by Colleen Dewhurst.A debate considering Elsenman and Trott's facility was opened by Philip Johnson and moderated by Kurt Forster, and included Henry Cobb, Michael Graves, Charles Gwathmey, Richard Meier, Robert Siegel, and Stanley Tigerman. The first exhibition is scheduled to open in the Wexner Center in February.