Can Kronos Quartet save classical music?

As has been widely reported elsewhere, classical music is dying. The public isn't exactly clamoring for the next great symphony or opera. Modern classical (there's no good word for this category of music) composers are out of touch with what anybody wants to hear.

There is a lot of great music being written, but much of it is called jazz. That's a whole other discipline, but it's interesting to see what happens when a top flight string quartet takes on the challenge.

Kronos Quartet is known for attacking unusual projects. Listen to this piece from their album Pieces of Africa. More recently, they have recorded an album of music by Thelonius Monk and another by the great pianist Bill Evans. There's something completely wrong about a string quartet playing music that is meant to be improvised, but there's also something completely right.

Take for example a song I've recently become obsessed with, partly because I love to play it myself: Very Early. Here it is played by the Bill Evans trio. It's haunting, it's lovely, its rich dark chords fit together in classic Evans style. This song is often covered. Here's a version by a singer you've never heard of named Sandra Booker.

Here's what Kronos Quartet does with it. They cheat a little by adding a fifth player -- the bassist Eddie Gomez who played with Bill Evans for many years. They're breaking the rules, but breaking the rules is just what classical music needs.

Comments

[Larry Osterman]

Very nice.

[Alan Polinsky]

Perhaps if modern composers would produce something people would actually like to HEAR, there would be greater interest in their music. Most of the stuff produced by these indiviuals is completely unlistenable.

Alan

[Tom Harpel]

Jim, this is great stuff. Thank you for improving my Sunday evening considerably. The Bill Evans chords are so *tight*, leaving me to question whether there really are just 12 piano keys available in the space of an octave; maybe Evans played a custom piano with 18 keys? And the Kronos interpretation: stunning. I love the violin/viola (?) stabs behind the bass solo. Great stuff.

Is classical music dying? Don't know enough to speak to the question. I did once correspond with a young composer who produces some pretty hot stuff [1] that is pretty much diametrically opposed to the music offered here.

[1] http://tandoku.com/2003/June/steven.bryant.is.a.great.composer.with.a.web.site.php

[Shelby]

We are using the Kronos Quartet for our current production of King Lear. How funny that a group that never made my radar is now hitting me from multiple sides. I'm liking them...

[Tim Jarrett]

Kronos are great. One factual correction--the Bill Evans and Thelonious Monk sets come from the beginning of their career, 1984 and 1985 respectively. In my opinion Pieces of Africa marks a high point in their career. They haven't yet released another such a thematically consistent and musically excellent disc again, in my opinion, though Night Prayers and the Glass disc had their moments.

[Robert Sistrunk]

Jim H,
If classical music is dying, I suggest it because the powers that be--who determine what the public should be listening to--are fundamentally intimidated by the new composers' departure from 400 years of harmonic predictability and slow gradual change. Consequently, serious composers today find very few outlets for performing or recording their works.
Serious modern classical music often sounds radically different from what came before. Noise, random elements, non-traditional instruments, computer enhancement, atonal and modal variants...to name a few factors involved...tend to overwhlm the average classical music listener. And, they frequently fail to perservere until grokking what's really going on
and how beautiful and satisfying this can truly be.