We're hitting the road again next week, and we'd love to see you this summer! We'll be performing in Australia in June, Europe and New York in July, plus two concerts at home in Northern California in August. Take a look at our summer tour schedule to see if we're performing near you!

Our summer starts off with a trip to Australia, where we'll perform at the Sydney Opera House on June 5 and Melbourne Recital Centre on June 6. Both performances include Jon Rose's Music from 4 Fences, in which Kronos puts down their violins and actually bows a fence!  View photos on Facebook and Flickr, and stay tuned for behind the scenes updates on Twitter and YouTube while we're preparing for the world premiere.

In July we'll be in Germany (July 5 - Duisburg, July 11 - Dalheim), France (July 7 - Lyon), Poland (July 9 - Szczecin), and Ireland (July 12 - Louth, July 14 - Galway). After that we're stopping in Brooklyn to play a free Celebrate Brooklyn! concert in Prospect Park on July 16.

Finally, in August we'll be closer to home - come see us in Gualala, CA for the Art in the Redwoods Festival on August 15, or join us in Nicasio, CA at Rancho Nicasio on August 16 to have some BBQ and listen to Kronos on the lawn in the sunshine.

Learn more & see a complete list of upcoming performances on our website.

We're excited to announce that our new album Floodplain is out now on Nonesuch Records. The album includes new works written for Kronos by Ramallah Underground and Aleksandra Vrebalov, traditional works from Lebanon, Turkey, and Iran, contemporary interpretations of classical music of Azerbaijan and India, and popular music from Egypt and Iraq. Listen to Floodplain (our website | Facebook | MySpace), and purchase (Amazon | iTunes.)

The title and concept of the album come from the idea that floodplains are fertile tracts of land that border rivers which are prone to devastating flooding. The album was inspired by the idea that floodplains experience new life after a catastrophe, just as cultures that undergo great difficulty will experience creative fertility.

Says David Harrington, Kronos' founder and artistic director - “Floodplain was imagined and recorded during one era in American politics, and then released during a very different one. Our work is a continuously evolving interaction with the world we are a part of, and we are always trying to find ways to reflect what it means to be musicians today.”

Listen to Floodplain (our website | Facebook | MySpace), and purchase (Amazon | iTunes).

When was the first time you heard Terry Riley’s In C, and what was the experience like? 

It was in the late 60s…the very late 60s. And I remember that I had never heard music like that before, and what was astonishing was the way nothing seemed to be happening, and yet everything was happening all at the same time, and it was just thoroughly exciting. It reminded me somewhat of hearing The Rite of Spring for the first time – it’s just this point in your life in which things don’t sound the same anymore because you’ve experienced something so powerfully. And several years later, when I heard Black Angels, I recognized that feeling again. 

How has In C influenced you as a musician?

Well, there’s no way I can imagine my life, or the music of Kronos without the music of Terry Riley, and I don’t think that Terry’s music would have been the same without In C. It’s so bound up together that it’s really hard to know at this point. 

It’s very interesting, I had the opportunity to introduce Henryk Gorecki to Terry Riley once, and I remember Gorecki telling Riley how when he first heard In C, it was an astonishing experience, and people were talking about it in Warsaw late into the night after hearing it for the first time. So to be there when these two masters were introduced, and talking about the experience of In C…it was a pretty great moment. 

You’ve curated this incredible group of musicians for this upcoming performance. How did you find these people? How did you decide who to include? It’s got a pretty interesting instrumentation, so how did you refine that? 

You ask all the difficult questions! The first thing I was thinking about was Terry himself, and his personality. Not that I know everything about his personality, but we’ve known each other for 30 years. One of the very first people I ever talked to was the Ullian pipes player, Aaron Shaw. And the reason I wanted to have uilleann pipes, was that around age 72 or something, all of a sudden, Terry Riley went to Ireland for the first time, and he discovered his “inner Irish”. In fact, he sent me an email after that, and he signed his email “Turlach O’Reilly,” spelled in a Celtic way or something. Anyway, he was really into that. So I thought, “we’ve gotta have uilleann pipes. We have to.” So it kind of started from there. 

The other thing is, I wanted to somehow express something about the history of In C, so it occurred to me, well, let’s be in touch with as many of the original In C-ers as possible. So there’s musicians there that were involved in the premiere, and others that were involved in the first recording. So, that became part of the thinking. 

Another thing I wanted to do was bring in some other quartets, other than Kronos. I had recently heard this marvelous recorder group from Germany called Quartet New Generation. So I just hoped they would be free, and they were able to join us. 

And a few years ago, when we were playing in Tokyo, this group came up to me after our concert and handed me a CD. The first track on the CD was music by Kevin Volans that we had commissioned. And I found out that Koto Vortex (the name of this quartet) had been to a concert of ours in New York, and had heard Volan’s piece White Man Sleeps, and decided to form a group. So their group is a result of music that we had commissioned, and I knew that Terry was a fan of Volans’ music, so that seemed natural. Plus we’ve never played with kotos before, and they’re a MARVELOUS group, so it kind of worked that way. 

It was really one instrument or one group at a time. So Percussion I remember years ago when they were students, they asked me to listen to them. Late one night they played this incredible John Cage piece and a David Lang piece by memory, and I was the audience! I just thought, “wow these guys are amazing, so they have to be a part of this.” So it just worked that way…it was very organic. 

I didn’t want it to be symphonic, and so I felt like “OK, Kronos will take care of mainly the bowed strings contingent”, so let’s bring in lots of other elements. And the idea that Mark Stewart might invent some instruments, and that Stuart Dempster might – who knows what kind of sound devices he’ll show up with. I wanted to create this community of people that had worked with Terry, people that had worked with us, or that maybe we hadn’t had a chance to work with yet, but wanted to in the future. 

Then I heard the Young People’s Chorus of New York. I heard them recently, and I was SO impressed with not only with their sound and music and all of that, but also with their conductor. I thought this guy is just an amazing person. I wanted that kind of energy. So I wanted kids! At a certain point it occurred to me, “what about Terry’s son Gyan?” I’ve known Gyan since he was about three. And then Loren Dempster, Stuart’s son – I think he’s part of Merce Cunningham’s group. It kind of began to develop like that. 

At a certain point it occurred to me, well, Judy Sherman has produced a lot of our CDs, and we’ve never performed with her. She has a very beautiful speaking voice, and I’ve heard she has a great singing voice as well – we’ll find out, won’t we! I thought that would be fun. She’s produced a number of our recordings we’ve done of Terry’s music. 

Then I thought, what about some composers that we’ve worked with and would be fun to play with? So I asked Osvaldo Golijov and Philip Glass. 

The idea that there will be this community of people, many who we’ve known for a very long time, and some that we have not had a chance to perform with, and some people have written for us….anyway, I wanted something that I knew would be fun, and also that the resulting sound would be unlike anything we’ve ever done, or maybe a grouping of instruments and musicians that have never done In C before. 

Who is performing that you’ve worked with before, and who are you looking forward to working with for the first time? 

Michael Hearst is someone I’m really looking forward to perform with. Dan Zanes we’ve worked with on a recording, and I’ve admired his group. His bassist, Saskia Lane, went to preschool with my daughter! And I’ve admired what Dan has done for years now. Elena Moon Park, the other musician in his group that is joining us – she’s a wonderful violinist, and she’s also a trumpet player! She’s probably the only person I’ve ever met who can play the violin AND the trumpet in a concert. She’s going to be playing the mandolin. Sounds like Dan is going to be playing the banjo. 

I mentioned Quartet New Generation…when I heard them, they were playing maybe 12 or 14 different recorders, each one of them! So there could be quite an assemblage of recorders that night. 

Who have you worked with before? 

We’ve worked with Wu Man, Joan La Barbara, Osvaldo…we’ve never PERFORMED with Osvaldo before. We’ve played his music for years and years. We’ve worked with Philip Glass. Jacob Garchik has been our arranger for years…he went to high school with my kids. Dennis Russell Davies conducted The Sands, which is a piece that Terry Riley wrote for us and chamber orchestra. 

Can you also describe Dennis Russell Davies role in this performance? 

Dennis will be the flight traffic coordinator. Terry came up with a great title for Dennis. I’m imagining that Dennis will be the outside ears that will be hearing the entire thing, and he’ll help us be sure that no one is playing too little or too much, or too loud or too soft. He’ll kind of keep track of the entire assemblage in a way that none of us will be able to. 

Who else have you played with?

Lenny Pickett wrote a piece for us, but we’ve never performed with him. Scott Johnson has written many pieces for Kronos, and we’ve never performed with him. Bryce Dessner has just written a fantastic new piece for us, and we’ve never performed with him either. Evan Ziporyn has written for Kronos. There’s a lot of connections here. Margaret Leng Tan – we’re going to be performing with her next year. Kathleen Supove is someone I’ve admired for years, and now we have a chance to perform with her. 

What should we expect?

Just be ready to be transported. That’s what I’m ready for! 

Learn more about Kronos Quartet here, and purchase tickets to the April 24 Carnegie Hall performance here. ..

When was the first time you heard Terry Riley's In C? What was that experience like?

I have to be honest: I remember hearing a lot *about* In C before actually hearing it! And I think that because of the simplicity of the title and what I understood to be the simplicity of the structure, I remember having developed certain preconceptions going in. So my main memory of being introduced to In C for real was surprise. I think I expected stasis, and instead found constant movement. I expected repetition, and heard constant change. I expected an hour of monolithic C major, and heard tonal shifts moving like clouds. I expected a precision machine, and heard a group of individual personalities working together. And there was a sense of familiarity about it. I didn't know how a piece of music could feel welcoming, but somehow In C was. Now that I've met Terry, I understand quite clearly where that sense of warmth comes from. And looking back, I know now that the sense of familiarity came from all of the music that I *had* heard up to that point that had taken inspiration from In C. Last night I revisited the SUNY Buffalo recording, and at one point I suddenly, unexpectedly, had a strong flashback to when I was 13, hanging out in my friend's basement, jumping around to Baba O'Riley. 

Have you played In C? When did you play it for the first time? 

This will be my first time performing In C, and it should be a blast! It seems a lot of instrumentalists encounter In C at one point or another in school or whatever, but it seems to cross singers' paths much less often. And since we have such a large group -- encompassing brass instruments, woodwind instruments, strummed & plucked instruments, bowed instruments, *and* singers -- one of the things I'm really looking forward to is hearing what happens within each of these subgroups, and how the subgroups interact with each other. What happens when adult singers get to toss around these patters with children singers? What changes when all these voices interact with a group of wind players? In a way, it will be like the First Time for everyone on stage, since this specific group of instruments has never been and will never be gathered together. 

How has In C influenced you as a musician? 

Since I'm also part of the staff of the Kronos Quartet/Kronos Performing Arts Association, I've been working on this event for around a year and a half now. And probably the most unexpected discovery as I've spent more and more time with In C was realizing that, hard-wired into the piece, is a whole philosophy of life. As we individually move through the patterns, we take responsibility for our individual selves. Yet we have to constantly watch out for others. We have individual voices and diverse skills, but we are always in a social context, and ultimately we are equals. Sometimes someone leads the way, and then someone else begins to take us in a different direction. Community-building is at its core: the piece falls apart completely if that group sense is missing. And yet the individual musician cannot relinquish responsibility to a leader or conductor. We all have our roles to fill at different points in the journey, yet no one can predict what they will be, or when the moments will emerge when we will either need to step up and lead, or step back and follow. And Terry achieved this by writing 53 fragments of music -- that's just jaw-droppingly amazing. 

How has music changed since In C first premiered in 1964? 

Last year I went to a book release event for The San Francisco Tape Music Center: 1960s Counterculture and the Avant-Garde. In C premiered in San Francisco at the Tape Music Center, and David W. Bernstein collected a number of writings about that time and conducted several in-depth interviews with a number of influential artists who worked there, including Terry. The release event was in the basement of a library in the Haight Ashbury district that held maybe 100 or seats. By the time the event began (with Stuart Dempster standing among us, playing the didjeridu), the room was so overcapacity -- with people of all ages -- that the fire marshal came in and threatened to close the whole place down if most of the people didn't leave the building. The result was that many people in their 20s and 30s went outside and sat on the ground, poking their heads through the windows to hear Morton Subotnick, Bill Maginnis, Ramon Sender, and Don Buchla recount how they and their colleagues did the work they did. Those folks sticking their heads through the windows are the testament to what's changed since 1964: they have been so influenced by In C and all the work that came out of the Tape Music Center that they demonstrated in the most concrete way their need to come out and give props. 

Tell me about the instrument(s) you'll be playing.

I'll be singing, using lyrics that Terry wrote specially for this performance. Mostly they're just phonemes, not actual words, but Terry's essence still comes through loud and clear! 

Is there anyone performing that you've worked with before? Anyone you're looking forward to meeting for the first time? 

I've worked with many of the musicians on that stage in some capacity or another, some for around 15 years, but this will be the first opportunity to share a stage with them. I look forward to the whole thing! 

Learn more about Sidney Chen here, and purchase tickets to the April 24 Carnegie Hall performance here.