Dave Lampson wrote:

>Jon Johanning:
>
>>Not really true, I think.  They are noted for pioneering "Black Angel," but
>>it has been done by others as well.
>
>Yes, but did their efforts, for all their hip appeal, really do anything
>to popularize these works among classical music lovers?  Have other
>quartets picked up this repertoire having been shown the way by Kronos?
>have the crossover fans of Kronos begun to appreciate the rest of the
>quartet repertoire?  I see very little evidence of this.  I think what they
>have done is to popularize themselves as performers.  That's OK too as far
>as I'm concerned, but as I've said before, I'm more interested in the music
>than the personalities of the performers, and when I look at the music I
>find it wanting.

Kronos has popularised among some people and some musicians a particular
approach to music.  It happens to be one of the subterrenean groups of
classical music discussion:  the people who look at avangt-garde classical
music of the 20th century and a certain stripe of rock and roll as "hip".
There's a pretty coherent ideology and aesthetics to what they are doing,
and there is a fairly vocal group of supporters.  In essence the hipster's
philosophy is an updated version of Ives:  a more or less conscious attempt
to replace previous *topoi* of music with an experimentalism of sound
unrelated to higher structuralisation.  What's interesting as a musical
movement is what this means for playing:  Webern interests such people
not because of all of the reference to previous structures and tropes,
but because he provides a surface of dissonant sounds that can be taken
as themselves, unconnected to any argument of key or mode.

Kronos plays their material then with an emphasis on surface that points
to this connectedness between the two musical styles, and has a devoted
following, most especially among people who view music in this form.  It
makes the avant-garde classical far more accessible because it strips away
the layers of intersecting meaning which make up the works genisis, it
provides a smooth slick, rock and roll surface, which is the core part of
the aestehtic anyway.  It should surprise people that this has happened,
every other musical movement has produced offspring that tossed much of the
original movements baggage and just got into the sound - there's no reason
why Crumb or Webern should be any more immune to this than Beethoven or
Wagner was.

But because of this, they really are the first string quartet of a
new style, a style which emphsasizes the flatness and hence the surface
elements of the "sound" which is the basis for the aesthetic and the symbol
of the ideology behind it.  There will be others, and in fact there already
are.  Since the range of pure sound that a quartet can be made to produce
is quite wide, tehre is a great deal of unexplored territory.  That is, if
you want to live with it.  Kronos views the old quartet rep much as the
way rock viewed rock and roll - limited by its unimaginative use of the
instruments.  All of the subtle nuances of quartet playing are out,
because, simply, that isn't what they are doing.

Stirling S Newberry
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