So much music. So much time.
Since the Kronos Quartet’s founding in 1973, critical response to their work has focused on the many aspects of time suggested by their name.
Indeed, the recent 50th anniversary of the ensemble makes the passage of time an inevitable idea, one taken for a dazzling ride by writer/director Sam Green in the live film “A Thousand Thoughts,” presented Friday evening by La Jolla Music Society at the Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center. The Conrad by the La Jolla Music Society Friday evening. Green’s idea, a brilliant one, is to present a film of the quartet’s history, narrated by Green himself, accompanied by a musical soundtrack played live by the ensemble.
It would be difficult for anyone who has paid attention to music over the last number of decades to be unaware of the variety and volume of the Kronos’ output. Their energy and cagey ability to reinvent their focus helps to account for their visibility in the musical landscape.
While they may not be the only ensemble to disrupt the conservative world of art-music performance or to work to redefine both the canon and the idea of it, they are the group that must come to mind first in any mainstream survey of the new music territory of the last 50 years. Their intimate partnering with living composers, inclusion of world and popular music traditions (their 1980s version of Hendrix’s “Purple Haze” was a concert staple) and ubiquity in cultural venues from “Good Morning America” to “Sesame Street” has allowed them rise to the top of any search engine query for “exciting modern string quartet.”
The film by Green and his co-writer Joe Bini and its concept are extraordinary. In much the same way that “Forrest Gump” uses the narrative thread of its protagonist to shepherd viewers through important, often traumatic, historical events, Green’s images — made up of interviews, news broadcasts, landscape scenes and performances — lead us on a moving odyssey that begins during the Vietnam War and continues to the present moment. It touches upon post-’60s West Coast hippiedom, the Reagan and Bush presidencies and the ensuing Middle East wars, the HIV/AIDS epidemic, the Los Angeles riots of the ‘90s and the 9/11 attacks. These cultural vignettes and their fallout are set to, and framed within, the thrilling and challenging sounds of the group’s musical evolution from those years.
Pieces as groundbreaking as George Crumb’s “Black Angels” for electrified string quartet (complete with choirs of water-filled wine glasses played with bows), as pastoral as Terry Riley’s Northern-California psychedelic musical meditations, and as starkly dissonant as their accompaniment to Tanya Tagaq’s Inuk multiphonic vocal improvisations were played, characteristically, as if they are somehow kin. The Kronos’ knack for tempering musical extremity with a gentle insistence on open-minded inquiry remains unchanged, and has been a central part of their appeal.
While the quality of the playing on Friday may have been, well, incidental, we heard the group almost as much in our minds as live. The superbly edited film invited the audience to move between their own memories of the events on the screen and an awareness of the onstage performance by the virtuosic players. The current Kronos lineup is David Harrington and John Sherba, violins; Hank Dutt, viola; Paul Wiancko, cello, and their collective performance level is what is has been for half a century in numerous configurations: technically precise, empathetic and gesturally poetic.
The Kronos’ roster is soon to change, with longtime members Sherba and Dutt retiring this year, leaving Harrington as the sole original member. Whoever steps in to fill those chairs, we can safely assume that the group’s long-established commitment to the new and the bold, will continue to push against boundaries while pulling in new devotees.
