{"id":19943,"date":"2020-12-16T05:30:36","date_gmt":"2020-12-16T10:30:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/?p=19943"},"modified":"2020-10-26T15:59:35","modified_gmt":"2020-10-26T19:59:35","slug":"kronos-quartet-meets-the-music-of-pete-seeger","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/2020\/12\/16\/kronos-quartet-meets-the-music-of-pete-seeger\/","title":{"rendered":"Kronos Quartet Meets the Music of Pete Seeger"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"Ever since its inception in 1973, Kronos Quartet<\/a> has been pushing the boundaries of music. The San Francisco-based ensemble has made a mission of finding unexplored connections between seemingly disparate musical forms, bridging the gaps between genres, and redefining musical categories. One of Kronos\u2019 current projects is a new album celebrating the work and influence of another American musical icon, Pete Seeger. Long Time Passing: Kronos Quartet and Friends Celebrate Pete Seeger<\/i> pays tribute to the singer, folklorist and social activist.<\/p>\n

\u201cI grew up hearing Pete Seeger\u2019s performances and his music,\u201d says Kronos Quartet violinist and founder David Harrington. \u201cAs did John [Sherba, violin] and Hank [Dutt, viola].\u201d Harrington says that Kronos cellist Sunny Yang discovered Seeger\u2019s work much later. \u201cAnd now she has a 9-month-old child who has become a Pete Seeger fan!\u201d<\/p>\n

But the specific inspiration for the new album came about in an elementary school classroom, Harrington explains. \u201cIn May of 2018, we had just played a concert as part of our Kronos Festival,\u201d he recalls. That performance included a piece featuring the voice of Clarence Jones, Martin Luther King Jr.\u2019s speech writer, telling the story of the creation of the \u201cI Have a Dream\u201d speech. \u201cAnd the only thing I could think of as an [fitting] encore after that piece was \u2018We Shall Overcome,\u2019\u201d Harrington says.<\/p>\n

A day or two later, Kronos gave its annual performance at Francis Scott Key Elementary, where Harrington\u2019s daughter is a third grade teacher. Another class attended as well, and their teacher brought along his guitar. \u201cWe all did \u2018We Shall Overcome,\u2019\u201d Harrington says. \u201cAnd afterwards, Mark Rosenberg, the other teacher said, \u2018You know, tomorrow is Pete Seeger\u2019s 99th birthday!\u2019\u201d Immediately, Harrington knew that he wanted to record an entire album of songs written or popularized by Seeger. \u201cSo the idea for this album happened in Room 207 in the Sunset [District] of San Francisco, in my daughter\u2019s third grade classroom,\u201d he says.<\/p>\n

The original plan was to complete Long Time Passing<\/i> by May 2019, in time for the 100th<\/sup> anniversary of Seeger\u2019s birth. \u201cBut it took us longer than a year to do the album,\u201d Harrington says with a chuckle. \u201cA lot<\/i> longer.\u201d The resulting 15-song album \u2013 on which Kronos Quartet\u2019s instrumentation joins vocalists Sam Amidon, Maria Arnal, Brian Carpenter, Lee Knight, Aoife O\u2019Donovan and San Francisco-based singer Meklit \u2013 is a lively and musically varied tribute that justifies the time it took to finish.<\/p>\n

Working with vocalists is nothing new for Kronos Quartet. Over the years the group has collaborated with an eclectic variety of vocalists including Pran Nath, Tuvan throat singers, Dawn Upshaw, Laurie Anderson and others. They first recorded with Amidon \u2013 whose reading of \u201cIf I Had a Hammer\u201d is a highlight of the new album \u2013 on the 2017 release Folk Songs<\/i>.<\/p>\n

Harrington makes the point that the human voice is the first instrument. \u201cSingers carry their instruments within<\/i> them,\u201d he says. \u201cThe rest of us carry ours around with<\/i> us.\u201d And he emphasizes that many string players tend to listen to a lot of vocalists for inspiration. \u201cIt doesn\u2019t feel outside the group at all to have a fifth member who\u2019s a vocalist,\u201d he says. \u201cIn fact, it kind of allows us a larger palette in our own playing. I feel that we become larger as players, as musicians.\u201d<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

The traditional songs on Long <\/i>T<\/i>ime Passing<\/i> were originally written and played in the folk idiom. In Kronos Quartet\u2019s hands, the music is both true to the original spirit and breathtakingly new. \u201cWhen we were exploring the work of Seeger for this album, I listened to hundreds of songs and performances from all over the world,\u201d Harrington says. \u201cI felt re-inspired by his amazing reach, expressively and in terms of the material.\u201d<\/p>\n

And that inspiration gave Kronos Quartet and the vocal collaborators the freedom to interpret the music in their own ways. \u201cThe album was not the kind of thing where [we thought], \u2018Oh, we need to sound like Seeger\u2019 or anything like that,\u201d Harrington says. He considers Pete Seeger\u2019s version of \u201cWe Shall Overcome,\u201d from the 1963 album of that name recorded at Carnegie Hall, a personal favorite. \u201cBut as much as I wanted our [version] to be as thrilling and inspiring as we possibly could make it, we had to find our own way,\u201d he says. \u201cThe idea of having 100 third-grade kids joining us was the result of where the album started.\u201d<\/p>\n

Seeger\u2019s original songs \u2013 \u201cIf I Had a Hammer,\u201d \u201cWhere Have All the Flowers Gone?\u201d among them \u2013 are distinctive, says Harrington. \u201cAnd [Seeger] had a real gift for discovering iconic melodies from other places, too.\u201d He relates the story of a pile of 78 rpm discs destined for the trash bin at the Library of Congress. Folklorist Alan Lomax rescued those records and gave them to Seeger, who discovered a little-known recording called \u201cMbube.\u201d \u201cHe thought they were singing \u2018wimoweh.\u2019\u201d<\/p>\n

Harrington observes that it would be difficult to imagine our musical culture without that song. \u201cBut,\u201d he says, \u201cnot everyone has that ability, like Pete Seeger did, to hear a melody and think, \u2018That\u2019s it!\u2019\u201d Seeger did the same thing when he popularized \u201cRaghupati Raghav Raja Ram,\u201d a Hindu devotional song.<\/p>\n

The placement of \u201cRaghupati\u201d as the third track on Long Time Passing<\/i> is very intentional. Harrington says that it simply had to follow \u201cThe President Sang Amazing Grace,\u201d featuring Meklit. \u201cThe emotional impact of that song is such that [after hearing it,] an audience needs a place to just think and just be calm,\u201d he says. \u201cWe could\u2019ve done a whole album [solely] of music that Pete brought back into American music from other places,\u201d Harrington says. \u201cAnd it\u2019s tempting.\u201d<\/p>\n

Due to the pandemic, Kronos Quartet is not currently touring. But recently, Kronos recorded many of the songs from the new album live onstage with a large assemblage of vocalists (including Meklit, L.A.\u2019s Tonality chorus and others) at UCLA. The performance \u2013 part of the Tune In online festival \u2013 was broadcast from online.cap.ucla.edu<\/a> October 28.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Ever since its inception in 1973, Kronos Quartet has been pushing the boundaries of music. The San Francisco-based ensemble has made a mission of finding unexplored connections between seemingly disparate […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":19944,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_exactmetrics_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,30,41,49],"tags":[1265,1687],"class_list":["post-19943","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-classical","category-folk","category-interview","category-new-release","tag-kronos-quartet","tag-pete-seeger","cat-17-id","cat-30-id","cat-41-id","cat-49-id","has_thumb"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19943","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=19943"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19943\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":19951,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/19943\/revisions\/19951"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/19944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=19943"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=19943"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/blog.musoscribe.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=19943"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}