KRONOS presents a free library of fifty contemporary works designed to guide string quartets in developing and honing the skills required for the performance of 21st-century repertoire.
Tolo Midi
Mario Galeano Toro
Colombia
“Tolo Midi is a piece influenced by the rhythmic and melodic universe of Cumbia, a musical style born in the Colombian Caribbean as a result of the encounter between indigenous American, African and European people. It is a rhythmic piece that wants to give the interpreter an immersion into syncopation and the fundamental legacy of Africa in America, while exploring native melodic phrasing from the Tolo, one of the names of the indigenous flutes that provided the melodic identity for Cumbia."
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Daughters of Sol
Aftab Darvishi
Iran / Netherlands
“Daughters of Sol is inspired by a poem by contemporary Iranian poet Ahmad Shamloo. This piece contains gentle transitions and detailed changes, which leads to dissolving of different shades and colors. It is a constant evolution between shadows and lights. It is a journey about conveying gentle circular movements, which I think it resembles cycles of life. We evolve and dissolve in gentle and harsh conversions. We change colors, yet we tend to go back to our roots despite of our differences.”
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My Desert, My Rose
Aleksandra Vrebalov
Serbia / USA
“My Desert, My Rose consists of a series of patterns open in length, meter, tempo, and dynamics, different for each performer. The unfolding of the piece is almost entirely left to each performer’s sensibility and responsiveness to the parts of other members of the group, so the flow and length of the piece are unique to each performance. Imagine a journey of four characters that start in distinctly different places, who, after long searching and occasional, brief meeting points, end up in the same space, time, language."
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What would happen if we could, through our years of working with hundreds of composers from many places, make a body of incredibly interesting, fun music that could serve the next generation as a launching pad to a world of discovery?”
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David Harrington
Artistic Director, Kronos QuartetFeatured Technique
Yevgeniy Sharlat's pencil sketch
Learn how to pencil press, two-pencil bounce, pencil ricochet and more in Yevgeniy Sharlat's instructional video for his piece, pencil sketch.
The piece features a #2 wood-cased pencil with eraser to evoke an "intimate pencil-scraping-on-paper feel to it, that of trying to recapture a long-lost feeling with lines and dots and shading and hatching, before rendering it in full and vibrant color."
With each new piece, our tradition is to work with the composer to understand the work better and to get insight into how he or she has written the piece, and how to execute the ideas and characterizations behind it. Now, through 50 for the Future, we get to pass on that knowledge from the composer to the young groups that we coach. It's very exciting to see all this music come alive in the hands of young groups around the world."