Grandfathered In

The adventurous approach of Kronos Quartet, which forever changed how we think about a string quartet, dates to 1973. Back then, violinist David Harrington formed the group after hearing George Crumb’s Black Angels, an innovative, Vietnam War–inspired work featuring bowed water glasses, spoken-word passages, and electronic effects, which the quartet still regularly performs. 

Harrington, now 75, cites earlier inspirations, too, including a moment of clarity at age 14 that he recalled for Tom Stewart in The Strad magazine: “I was looking at the globe we had at home, and it dawned on me how weird it was that all the quartets I’d played up until that point—by Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, and Schubert—had been written by four white guys of the same religion who all lived in a tiny geographical area. I realized then that I had to find out what music from other cultures sounded like…” Through thousands of concerts, more than 70 recordings, collaborations with composers and performers representing many cultures and styles, and via more than 1,000 commissioned works, Kronos has indeed fostered the vast, diverse chamber music world Harrington envisioned.  

On the phone from San Francisco—”in the very chair I rehearse in”—Harrington mentions a young composer working on a piece for Kronos. (“If somebody writes for us, I find it important to talk with them about life,” he says.) She was a new mother, which led Harrington to mention that he’s a grandfather. “I explained that such life passages don’t make us feel older, but rather take us back to an earlier, and in my case, rebellious, energy.”  

Harrington has never stopped searching or rebelling. He spent four months last year digging into far-flung archives, as Kluge Chair in Modern Culture at the Library of Congress. He’s planned three ambitious Kronos releases for the first half of 2025 and for a March concert at Carnegie Hall, of a piece by Norwegian artists Benedicte Maurseth and Kristine Tjøgersen, Kronos will play a bespoke set of Hardanger instruments. 

Now, he’s immersed in creating Triptych: US at 250 (its working title), slated for premiere in 2026 to mark the 250th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence. It draws inspiration from Crumb’s Black Angels, which is a triptych, and Hieronymus Bosch’s three-paneled oil painting, The Garden of Earthly Delights. Harrington’s Triptych will be three pieces “that connect much like the painting’s hinged doors”—a panoramic work focused on the contributions, joys, suffering, sounds, and images of three groups: Native Americans, African Americans, and Asian Americans. Harrington describes it as a curated piece drawing upon several composers and a variety of sonic and visual sources (for instance, Charlton Singleton, a South Carolina trumpeter and composer of Gullah descent, will compose the second “panel.”) “It’s the most ambitious thing Kronos has ever taken on,” he says. 

These days in Kronos, alongside violinist Gabriela Díaz, violist Ayane Kozasa, and cellist Paul Wiancko, Harrington sits among musicians roughly half his age. “Playing every day with these remarkable musicians, who seem to know more about the history Kronos and its effect on music than I do, lifts me up and changes my perspective,” he says. “It’s a little like becoming a grandparent in the musical sense.”