KRONOS at GPAC

This Saturday evening I had the opportunity to see the Kronos Quartet perform at the Germantown Performing Arts Center. Kronos began over thirty years ago with a single vision to combine "a spirit of fearless exploration with a commitment to expanding the range and context of the string quartet." And in this they are extremely successful. Their work combines everything from recorded sounds from the Canadian tundra accompanying their string instruments to almost "pop-like" sounds of synthesized drums and keyboards. It is a new and exciting genre of music that takes a classical form of artistic expression and experiments with musical varieties of the technological age.

The audience for this event was varied in age and was overall receptive of the work. The actual concert used lighting effects to highlight the quartet players, and their instruments, equipped with microphones, mixed with the synthesized or recorded effects to play out of large speakers on either side of their seating arrangement. With this set up they could transport the audience wherever they wanted, they could blow out your eardrums or bring the sound down to a whisper. The group is quite innovation and expressive.

What I found myself wondering through the performance, though, was when we use these technical elements in music in this way, do we need live performance? For example, when you go to the opera or a choral concert, you desire to hear these pieces performed live because there is something about their presentation on stage that cannot be re-created on a recording. This is the same with visual art, where seeing the original piece is almost always more powerful than seeing a copy or photograph. And theatre requires live performance or else you can call it film, for theatre is inherently a temporary art (as is dance for that matter).

Kronos, however, while innovation and intriguing to listen to, uses so many electronic elements, I don't know if the sound produced was any different or better than what I could hear on their recordings. While the lighting of the concert added some visual effect, and the performers moved around in the final two numbers, the overall performance was rather static, calling the audience to listen more than watch what was happening on stage.

I have not reached any consensus on whether or not electronic music necessitates live performance, but I can attest that without this live performance I would have never been exposed (knowingly) to the music of the Kronos quartet. So maybe they have something...