To add to the specialness of the occasion, the four works on the program include the West Coast premiere of Transylvanian Horn Courtship, the latest in a series of unique works that the great Terry Riley has written for the ensemble. One of Kronos’ favorite composers, Riley has an uncanny ability to write music that opens portals into other dimensions.
“We wanted to bring together a number of our recent pieces to give listeners a sense of Kronos’ current outlook,” quartet founder David Harrington modestly explained by phone from Kronos’ San Francisco headquarters.
“One of the things Vladimir does that no other composer I know of does is bring the classical musical past into the present, even into the future. Previously, he wrote this amazing piece for us while his father was dying. While recalling playing Mahler’s Das Lied von der Erde with his dad on four-hand piano, he transformed his father’s breathing into these unbelievable chords as the Mahler slowly takes over the breathing.”
It was on the basis of that work that Harrington felt Martynov was the perfect person to bring some moment of Schubert’s quintet into the 21st century, and enable Kronos to again perform with Jeanrenaud. The quartet’s current cellist, Jeff Ziegler, grew up listening to his predecessor, and they’ve since become good friends. Hence, the occasion will take on an aura of a family reunion.
For some time, Harrington had wanted to introduce Terry Riley to Walter Kitundu, a San Francisco–based builder of “amazing” instruments. Harrington specifically had in mind the Stroh instruments that Kitundu had designed for Kronos. Somewhat resembling the instruments that were played on early acoustic recordings, Kitundu’s Stroh strings have “trumpet bells” extending from the bridge that give them their unique sound.
“The idea of a piece that would include newly made instruments with the same sound as on acoustic recordings really attracted me,” says Harrington. Kitundu obliged with a complete set, and Riley followed through with a new tuning that lowers the pitch and quality of the sound so that the violins sound something like violas, the viola like the cello, and the cello like an entirely different instrument.
According to Harrington, the piece includes some “really cool” live sampling that, together with the instruments, produces “amazing acoustical phenomena.” If you note that Transylvania Horned Courtship is a fogged-out reference to THC, you can begin to imagine the kind of altered state that Riley’s piece leads listeners into.
Both Bryce Dessner’s Aheym and Mizzy Mazzoli’s Harp and Altar were written for an outdoor Kronos performance in Prospect Park, Brooklyn. Dessner’s piece, which is marked by great forward momentum, grew out of a discussion he had with Harrington about his grandmother’s emigration from Poland. Mazzoli’s love song to the Brooklyn Bridge, which includes a recorded track of lines from Hart Crane’s famous poem about the bridge, is far more intimate and subtle.
You may need more than the handful of cheap beads that early settlers traded for the isle of Manhattan to be able to hear these pieces. The Cal Performances concert is sold out. (Contact the box office to get on the waiting list, or to snare last-minute ticket returns.) As a consolation prize, don’t miss David Harrington’s free talk, “Sonic Immersion: An Exploration of Eclectic and Unusual Sounds and Musics,” in UC Berkeley’s Morrison Hall, near Bancroft and College Avenues. Speaking with David Wessell of the Center for New Music and Audio Technology, Harrington will share music from his fabulous recording collection. Harrington is also giving at talk at 125 Morrison Hall on Monday Dec. 7 at 7 p.m.