Since its establishment in 1973, the Kronos Quartet has emerged as a leading force in contemporary chamber music, persistently and effectively dismantling divides that once separated distinct musical traditions as well as performers from their listeners. Alongside Rinde Eckert and Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ, the ensemble released Jonathan Berger: Mỹ Lai in 2022. By that point the quartet had already requested more than 1,100 new pieces and transcriptions, encompassing not only standard string-quartet formats but also expanded forces and additional sonic elements. Throughout the 2023-2024 season the group marked its 50th Anniversary by issuing three fresh recordings, re-releasing two earlier titles on vinyl, and appearing in numerous cities across North America and Europe.
David Harrington, the ensemble’s founder and first violinist, decided to assemble the group after encountering George Crumb’s Black Angels. Toward the close of the 1970s, Kronos coalesced into a stable lineup featuring Harrington, violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud, establishing its operational base in San Francisco, California. From the outset, the powerful response to that initial inspiration and to live performances encouraged the musicians to concentrate exclusively on new music and to present it in informal settings unlike conventional chamber-music concerts. Their breakthrough recording arrived with 1987’s White Man Sleeps, while the 1989 account of Reich’s Different Trains earned a Grammy for Best Contemporary Composition. Jeanrenaud departed in 1999, after which Jennifer Culp assumed the cello chair.
A particularly sustained partnership has linked the quartet with Terry Riley. NASA commissioned Riley in 2002 to compose Sun Rings, incorporating audio and visual material captured by the agency’s instruments across the solar system. Enduring creative alliances also formed with Philip Glass, Steve Reich, and Henryk Górecki, among additional composers. Nuevo, released in 2002, received nominations for both a Grammy and a Latin Grammy, and the 2003 recording of Berg’s Lyric Suite brought the ensemble another Grammy. The group’s catalog mirrors its wide-ranging curiosity about jazz, global traditions, emerging creators, and cinema, while its concerts display equal breadth in choice of spaces and in joint projects that have included numerous choreographers and multimedia artists.
Culp exited after the 2005 sessions for You’ve Stolen My Heart: Songs from R.D. Burman’s Bollywood and was succeeded by Jeffrey Zeigler. Despite further personnel shifts, Kronos has continued to attract diverse audiences and to earn acclaim for championing singular repertoire. Shortly after the appearance of Uniko, a project uniting the quartet with accordionist Kimmo Pohjonen and sampling artist Samuli Kosminen, the musicians were awarded both the Avery Fisher Prize in the United States and the Polar Music Prize in Sweden for their distinguished contributions. In 2013 Sunny Yang replaced Zeigler.
Following a series of joint appearances in New York and London that honored Nonesuch’s 40th Anniversary alongside Oliver Chaney, Rhiannon Giddens, Natalie Merchant, and Sam Amidon, the quartet reconvened with those collaborators to document Folk Songs. Issued in 2017, the album presented several traditional pieces in newly crafted arrangements. The next year brought Landfall, a collaboration with Laurie Anderson drawn from her encounters with Hurricane Sandy. After the Nonesuch celebrations, filmmaker Sam Green was invited to create a documentary portrait of the ensemble; the resulting A Thousand Thoughts (2018) became a live touring presentation in which Kronos supplied the soundtrack while Green provided narration. The quartet received a 2020 Grammy for Best Engineered Album for Terry Riley’s Sun Rings and, later that year, issued Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger on Smithsonian Folkways. A return to the same label in 2022 yielded the recording of Jonathan Berger’s Mỹ Lai with vocalist Rinde Eckert and multi-instrumentalist Vân-Ánh Vanessa Võ. That same year the group completed its 50 for the Future: The Kronos Learning Repertoire initiative, having commissioned fifty new works offered free of charge to assist other ensembles in acquiring fresh skills and techniques.
To observe the 50th Anniversary during the 2023-2024 season, the quartet integrated composer and cellist Paul Wiancko into its membership, replacing Yang, and staged numerous celebratory programs that included three albums of fresh material together with vinyl reissues of its Philip Glass and George Crumb: Black Angels recordings. In 2024 the ensemble announced that Sherba and Dutt would retire once the anniversary tour concluded, at which time violinist Gabriela Díaz and violist Ayane Kozasa would join to inaugurate the group’s next decade.
