David Harrington may be a 53-year-old classical violinist, but before he leads the Kronos Quartet onstage he's likely to admonish the group in the following way: "Let's kick ass."
"We always kick ass," nodded cellist Jennifer Culp, seated in the lobby of the Hanover Inn last week. The quartet was in residence at Dartmouth for a few days leading up to their Spaulding Auditorium concert Saturday night.
It's a shame that Kronos is billed as a string quartet, because your instinct while watching them perform is to yell and whistle as though you were at a rock concert. Adhering to the standards of stale classical-music decorum didn't seem a fitting response to pieces of music that require the musicians to catcall, bark like a dog or use their Stradivarii as percussion instruments.
You could tell from their nervous laughter that some of the gray-haired set that made up much of the audience was expecting something a little more traditional. But the Kronos Quartet is a rare breed: a classical ensemble that mostly plays the work of living composers -- and inventive ones, at that.
As usual, Saturday night's performance was all over the musical map. In the first half, the quartet tackled works by jazz-influenced John Zorn, the post-rock group Sigur Ros and the contemporary composer Scott Johnson before premiering a new piece by 22-year-old college student Alexandra Du Bois.
Du Bois, a violinist and composer studying at the Indiana University's School of Music, won the Under 30 Project competition, arranged by Kronos and Dartmouth. Last year over 300 young composers from 32 countries submitted recordings and scores for Kronos' consideration.
The quartet listened to them all before selecting a piece by Du Bois called "Requiem for the Living."
Harrington was so intrigued by "Requiem" that he immediately listened to it again after hearing it for the first time -- something he rarely does.
When Harrington left a message on Du Bois' answering machine on behalf of Kronos to tell her she'd been chosen, the usually staid Du Bois began jumping up and down.
"Kronos could have told me they were giving me $10 million, and it wouldn't have mattered, just because of the honor of working with them," Du Bois said.
The quartet commissioned a new piece from her, and the result was "Oculus Pro Oculo Totum Orbem Terrae Caecat," a dark, brooding piece she says is a meditation on the dawning of war. The title is a Latin translation of Gandhi's observation that "An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind."
"I didn't want [Du Bois] to think that she should write the same piece since we really liked this one piece," Harrington said.
For her part, Du Bois said she tried to remain unswayed by Kronos' reputation.
"I didn't want to be taken by virtuosity or eclecticism," she said. "I didn't want to alter my style too much."
Both Du Bois and the quartet stressed the value of working together on the piece, which they rehearsed together for several days leading up to its first performance on Saturday. Du Bois even making a last-minute change hours before the concert.
Du Bois didn't offer up much about her own style of composition, instead dropping cryptic hints like "I tend to feel more comfortable if something is shocking" and "I try not to think of myself as having influences."
At the premiere of "Oculus" on Saturday, the piece began slowly, almost cautiously, before it began to sprawl in unexpected directions. Bombastic one minute and nuanced the next, the quartet toed the line between cohesion and chaos, but never crossed it. By the end, the music became more fluent, and dark beauty emerged.
"Dawn is not only beautiful but also very ominous," Du Bois writes in the program notes. "Beauty and peacefulness, and preparation for destruction and terror exist in equal proportions at dawn."
An instrumental work might seem an unlikely statement against war, but Du Bois and Kronos made a valiant effort. Kronos will continue to perform the piece in North America and Europe throughout the coming year.
Harrington, for one, has also spoken out passionately against the American invasion of Iraq. He appeared on National Public Radio's "Morning Edition" to describe his experiences as an American musician recently touring in Europe, where he said he was frequently asked if he was embarrassed to be an American. His answer: he is embarrassed only for the U.S. government.
"I'm not talking about the cultural contribution and the freedoms we're able to enjoy. I'm as proud of that as possible," he said. "I separate that from the actions of the government or the military, and I resent that when someone says that's un-American."
Perhaps not coincidentally, chaos, soaring beauty and war were all themes that had already been addressed by the concert's first three pieces.
The opener, Zorn's "Cat O' Nine Tails," was a string quartet with attention-deficit disorder. The 1988 piece is an example of one of Zorn's favorite techniques: compose short musical snippets on index cards and then arrange them to create a cohesive work.
At times, "Cat O' Nine Tails" was maddening to hear. Just as a musical idea was introduced, Kronos jumped into a new one, often jarringly different. Jazz riffs and country hoedowns sneaked their way in between stretches of Mozartish traditionalism. It was only near the end, when some of the snatches started to break the 10-second mark, that the music began to gel into a unified whole.
The evening's highlight for many audience members must have been the second piece, "Flugufrelsarinn," an adaptation of a song from Sigur Ros' 1999 breakthrough album "Agaetis Byrjun." The music lends itself to this kind of treatment especially well for a rock band, since the songs emulate classical music in their adagio ebb and flow.
Stephen Prutsman's adaptation for Kronos was faithful to the original, but didn't assign as much prominence to the melody that Sigur Ros singer Jonsi Birgisson warbles in a made-up language called Hopelandish. Mixed in with other strings, the violin carrying the melody just became part of the mix. The result was a performance that was less moving than the original, but even more ethereal -- the adjective probably most often used to describe Sigur Ros' music.
"There's nothing more unholy than a holy war," the late journalist I. F. Stone intones over and over on a looped recording that forms the backbone of Scott Johnson's "How It Happens," the third piece on the program.
Johnson likes to embed taped and sampled elements into his music. When Harrington approached Johnson about writing a piece based on the words of Stone, Johnson latched onto Stone's nearly musical vocal patterns, and the result is a work that's as melodic as it is political.
As Stone's recorded voice railed eloquently against the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan (but it might as well be the U.S. invasion of Iraq), the Kronos Quartet latched onto key phrases, turning them over and over with their bows and fingers in exactly the same way Dan the Automator or DJ Shadow might with their turntables.
In some ways "How It Happens" was the most exciting piece Kronos played, because it challenged the classical tradition in the most relevant ways. Covering Sigur Ros and making 10-second scurries into other genres seemed like baby steps compared with Johnson's opus, which took all the best elements of the string quartet and combined them with the brightest bits of the progressive electronica ethic.
After the premiere of "Oculus" and an intermission, the quartet focused on pieces from their latest recording, 2002's "Nuevo." All the pieces had Mexican themes, creating a sonic cohesion where the first half had been linked only thematically, if at all.
Severiano Briseno's raucous "El Sinaloense" led off, as Kronos tried to recapture with strings and bows the brassy sound of mariachi music. Then they segued into an Osvaldo Golijov adaptation of the Agustin Lara-penned hit "Se Me Hizo Facil," followed by the evening's funniest performance, Juan Garcia Esquivel's "Mini Skirt." Latin jazz with a kitschy lounge touch, "Mini Skirt" had the quartet whistling catcalls and yelling out exclamations like 1950s bohemians.
Field recordings of Catholic-based rituals in Chiapas informed the next piece, Golijov's "K'in Sventa Ch'ul Me'tik Kwadulupe" (Festival for the Holy Mother Guadelupe), which worked better as a sociocultural exercise than as musical entertainment. It was followed by an adaptation of Chalino Sanchez's "Nacho Verduzco," a popular ballad about drug runners.
The highlight of the second half was Cafe Tacuba's "12/12," the final piece apart from a brief encore. Violist Hank Dutt began the piece by twirling a stick with a cord attached to a whistle in the air. The music progressed through five movements, veering between Caf Tacuba's rock-en-espanol roots, more Mexican Catholic mysticism and Kronos' own classical training. As in "How It Happens," the interplay between the quartet and the pre-recorded samples and beats was a joy, more exuberant and more danceable than anything else they tackled during the evening.
The experience of a Kronos Quartet concert is a visual as well as an auditory one, thanks to the group's traveling lighting technician, Larry Neff. As the musical styles morphed, so did the audience's view of the performers, ranging from near-darkness during the bleakest parts of Du Bois' "Oculus" to festive color during many of the Mexican selections. Meanwhile, on the curtain behind the players, subtle waves of color grew and spread.
In a post-perfromance discussion, Hopkins Center Director of Programming Margaret Lawrence tried to explain the value of Kronos' approach.
"Music is not this dead canon that is just inside libraries," she said. "[Kronos] is even still learning from it. It's something that's evolving around us every day."
