KRONOS QUARTET ORIGINS
In a sense, the origin of Kronos Quartet dates back to when a 12-year-old, Seattle-based violin student named David Harrington first heard the sound of a string quartet—a recording of Beethoven’s Opus 127 in E flat major that arrived in the mail as a record club selection. Transfixed by the opening chords, Harrington was instantly determined to create that sound himself. Before long, he had convinced some fellow members of the Seattle Youth Symphony to join him in learning the work.
“The sound of it made a very big impression on me,” Harrington said. “I feel like basically I have been doing the very same thing since that time—if there is something that magnetizes me as a listener then I try to find a way of incorporating it into the work that I am doing. ”*
Fast-forward to August of 1973 and the true spark of inspiration behind the Kronos Quartet: the now-23-year-old Harrington happened to be listening to the radio one night when he heard the sound that would set him on a musical path of fifty years and counting: George Crumb’s Vietnam War–inspired quartet Black Angels.
“It changed my life,” Harrington said. “I knew I had to get a serious group together. Black Angels was unlike any other music for string quartet that I had ever heard. It used electric instruments and all sorts of percussion effects. It merged the worlds of Hendrix, Schubert, Bartók, and early music. It made an impression that no other piece of music had ever made on me. I needed a group that would be serious about rehearsing and making musical events.”**
In short order, in an echo of his Beethoven experience, Harrington formed a new group with the goal of performing Black Angels. Brainstorming along with his wife, Regan, Harrington settled upon the name “Kronos” for the ensemble, inspired by the Greek god of time, Chronos—but with a catchier “K” up front.
As Harrington recounted the story: “When I was a kid, there was an article in Reader's Digest about how Kodak got its name. They spent thousands of dollars, and it was decided that “K”–– K-O-D-A-K––was more exciting that ‘Chodach,’ I guess. I just remembered that: ‘K.’ There’s a certain strength there, and so I thought, ‘Well let’s just change the ‘Ch’ to a ‘K.’
Several years later, we were playing a concert at U.C. Santa Barbara, and someone from the Ancient History department came up to me and said, ‘Do you know who Kronos was?’ And I said, ‘Oh sure, he was the god of time and timeliness, and the one that chronicled things.’ And then he says, ‘Well, actually, he’s the father of the gods—the one that ate all his children except for Zeus. And then he got castrated. The remains became the fish in the ocean.’ And at that point, I just gave up. It was too late to change the name.” †
In addition to the Black Angels inspiration, an early decision of Harrington’s would help set the course for decades of musical collaborations to come: in lieu of performing all existing works, Harrington decided to commission a new work for Kronos from his high school composition teacher and friend, composer Ken Benshoof. At that early date in Kronos history, the “commissioning fee” involved a bag of donuts. The resulting work, Traveling Music, became the first of more than 1,100 Kronos-commissioned new works and arrangements to date, as well as the starting point of a commitment to expanding the string quartet repertoire across nations, cultures, genders, and genres. Under the auspices of the nonprofit Kronos Performing Arts Association (KPAA), Kronos has continuously pushed the boundaries of what the string quartet is and can be, with milestones including 1992’s Pieces of Africa, the first album ever devoted to quartets by composer from that continent; the KPAA legacy project Kronos Fifty for the Future, an educational repertoire featuring 50 works from international composers, available for free online; and the ten new commissioned works of the KRONOS Five Decades season being shared by Kronos around the world in 2023–24.
*As told to Caroline Crawford in Kronos Quartet: Musicians without Borders, The Bancroft Library Regional Oral History Office, 2009.
**As told to j. poet in the East Bay Express, August 23, 2023
† From the Kronos “live documentary” A Thousand Thoughts, written and directed by Sam Green and Joe Bini, 2018.