Jazz Articles about Kronos Quartet
About Kronos Quartet
Instrument: Band/orchestra
Article Coverage | Calendar | Albums | Photos | Similar ArtistsKronos Festival at SFJAZZ Center

by Harry S. Pariser
Kronos Quartet SFJAZZ Center Kronos Festival 2022 San Francisco, CA April 7-9, 2022 Founded in 1973, Kronos Quartet has long been one of San Francisco's musical treasures. Yet, because the quartet tours internationally, a performance in its home city is an event to take note of. The three-day Kronos Festival has been a local tradition since 2014. Over 900 compositions have been composed for the group, which is famous for its collaborations with musicians ...
read moreKronos Quartet/Terry Riley: Sun Rings

by Mark Sullivan
In addition to their performance of 20th century classics, modern music specialists The Kronos Quartet have a long history of commissioning new works from contemporary composers. But their relationship with minimalist pioneer Terry Riley is a special one. After composing the open-scored In C in 1964, Riley increasingly turned his attention towards improvised performances with tape-delay and organlater adding voice (inspired by studying Indian raga singing with Pandit Pran Nath) and substituting synthesizer for organ. When Riley and ...
read moreKronos Festival 2017

by Harry S. Pariser
Kronos Quartet SFJAZZ Kronos Festival 2017 San Francisco, CA February 4-6, 2017 I'd started playing string quartets when I was 12, and one day when I was 14, I was gazing at a map of the world and suddenly realized that all the quartet music I'd ever heard--Haydn, Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert--came from a single city: jny: Vienna. A simple question came to me: 'What did music from other cities and countries sound like?' A ...
read moreKronos Quartet / Wu Man: Terry Riley: The Cusp of Magic

by John Kelman
Of the many artists whose work the longstanding Kronos Quartet has commissioned, none has been approached more often than Terry Riley. Riley is one of the founding fathers of minimalism, the late-1960s classical sub genre where repetition of a number of varying length musical fragments creates an ever-shifting landscape often defined by its hypnotic and transcendent nature. As a composer, Riley has evolved significantly since his classic A Rainbow in Curved Air (Columbia, 1969), a trance-inducing masterpiece of overdubbed keyboards, ...
read moreKronos Quartet: Mugam Sayagi: Music of Franghiz Ali-Zadeh

by John Kelman
Well-known for a broad world view and a modernistic avoidance of the purely classical tradition, the Kronos Quartet has become something of a yardstick by which other contemporary string quartets are measured. Other quartets out there may be similarly fearless in their openness to new ideas and techniques, not to mention technologylike Ethel, which is as much in search of ways to keep the string quartet moving forward. But Kronos' reputation, built on a career that has lasted over thirty ...
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