Few things in life are certain, but
it’s safe to say that the Kronos Quartet will never put out a
bad album. It’s equally likely that you’d never hear
about it one way or the other, though, because you, poor,
patronized reader/consumer, aren’t supposed to care about
contemporary string quartets. Never mind that Kronos has released
more than 30 full-lengths since violinist and artistic director
David Harrington formed the ensemble in 1974, that it’s
commissioned more than 450 new pieces, that its massive repertoire
includes works by Ornette Coleman, John Zorn, Thelonious Monk, Jimi
Hendrix, and scores of other geniuses well outside the purview of
contemporary classical music. Whether they’re interpreting
Béla Bartók or Cafe Tacuba, Harrington and his
colleagues — violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt, and
cellist Jennifer Culp — make extraordinary music that’s
unfairly tagged as “difficult.” Call it
“challenging” or “inaccessible” or
“highbrow” or whatever bogus euphemism you use for
music that can’t be hummed in the shower, but the fact
remains: It does not have a good beat, and, unless you’re
some kind of superfancy Martha Graham type, you can’t dance
to it. The members of Kronos might be the world’s most famous
disciples of the difficult — they’ve won Grammy awards,
for crying out loud! — but they’ll never make the cover
of Spin.
Mugam Sayagi,
Kronos’s first album since 2002’s Nuevo, consists of four
pieces by the Azerbaijani pianist/composer Franghiz Ali-Zadeh,
three of which were commissioned by the quartet. Ali-Zadeh, who was
born in Baku in 1947, synthesizes myriad, often disparate
influences in her work, an approach that’s perfectly
compatible with Kronos’s genre-blurring sensibilities. Her
music combines the traditional folk melodies of her native country
with the 12-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and the cerebral
lyricism of Alban Berg and Gustav Mahler. At once Western and
Eastern, modern and ancient, ethnic and universal, Ali-Zadeh’s
compositions defy the conventional wisdom that experimental music is
for theory freaks and eggheads.
A musical form native to Azerbaijan, mugam consists of
various scales meant to convey specific emotions; the album’s
title means “in the style of mugam.” Rather like an Indian raga, the mugam is monophonic, a
hypnotic drone that gradually ascends to a euphoric climax. Adapted
for strings and, on two pieces, piano, these mugams are more harmonically
complex than their traditional counterparts, layering polyphonic
overtones and melodies that veer from harmonious to dissonant. The
title track, for example, deconstructs a melancholy folk song,
enlisting a synthesizer and a tambura to provide the requisite drone. A clanging
gong and sawing strings create an ominously martial mood, which
comes as no surprise: Ali-Zadeh wrote the quartet in 1993, when
Azerbaijan was at war with Armenia.
“Oasis,” the CD’s opening
cut, begins almost inaudibly, with the sound of dripping water and
the faintest pizzicati. An astringent violin pierces the miragelike
shimmer, bobbing and weaving as whispering male voices give way to
slashing chords and deep, foreboding cello. “Apsheron
Quintet” interpolates long, shuddering waves of dissonance
with lush, almost Romantic-sounding piano and violin figures. In
its dreamlike second movement, the musicians conjure a nocturnal
landscape in which the violins whine like monstrous mosquitoes and
the piano flutters like a trapped moth. Kronos lets Ali-Zadeh
handle “Music for Piano” all by her lonesome, but you
might not realize at first that it’s a solo effort. By
draping a necklace over the strings of the middle register, she
jerry-rigs the instrument into a surprisingly effective
approximation of the traditional tar; the lyrical passages twitter delicately above the
roiling lower keys and the buzzy, clattery center, creating a
triolike effect that’s both mysterious and familiar, like
hearing Debussy in the desert.
This article appears in May 19-25, 2005.
