Following your ears means you will often come across music and sounds that are not notated in a classical sense. Fifty for the Future composers Fodé Lassana Diabaté, Aruna Narayan, and Tanya Tagaq, for example, descend from long lines of oral traditions, inheriting their musical crafts from person to person sans written intermediates. Because the way musicians receive music necessarily shapes the way they impart creativity into their work, Kronos often asks composers “to sing for us so we hear their voices”—the quartet’s own practice of oral transmission. “We ask them to move to their own music so we see how their body responds to the rhythms and experiences they’ve made.”

A large part of Kronos’ work with living composers, then, is in itself an exercise in bridging the gap between the many oral traditions of the music world and the string quartet form, one that has existed almost exclusively as a written tradition. With the help of arrangers—essentially musical translators—like Jacob Garchik and Reena Esmail, we are working to make a small but valuable part of these traditions accessible around the world, propagating not only their fruits, but also the practice itself. In exploring a vast range of cultures that would otherwise never come into contact with the string quartet canon, Kronos hopes to encourage a constant movement of musical ideas, and through that movement, a wider-eyed curiosity about the world we share.