The guitarist has composed an album for the celebrated string ensemble. He explains how the exciting project was inspired by his Russian grandmother
The conversation about pop and classical – the boundaries, the crossover, the people who move between them, is a really, really old one. There has always been an interesting transference of ideas between the two worlds. The economy of pop music can be useful to any composer – if you are writing a rock song, you want to make sure everything being heard is necessary and primary to the song. The same holds true for contemporary music, even if the rules and context are different.
One key difference, for me, though is the risk-taking you get in contemporary and classical music. All of the great masters – Beethoven, Debussy, Stravinsky, Schoenberg, to name but a few – were breaking new ground in their own way, and it's that tradition which is so exciting to me, a real excitement and openness about risk-taking that you don't find as much in popular music today.
My latest album is a string quartet composed for the Kronos Quartet. The Kronos have been a hugely influential group for musicians of my generation. I first met the string quartet five years ago when my brother Aaron and I were working on the Dark was the Night Aids charity compilation. We wanted the record to be a diverse musical statement, and included the Kronos on those we approached to contribute, asking them to cover the title track, Blind Willy Johnson's Dark was the Night.
Kronos have changed the landscape for young composers and ensembles in some of the same ways that REM did for alternative or indie bands in the 80s and 90s – opening up new territories. I've been listening to their recordings for years, little imagining one day I'd actually be writing for them.
Over a lunch in New York not long after we first met, David Harrington, Kronos's founding violinist, asked me to write a piece for them. He suggested a new string quartet to be premiered at Brooklyn's Prospect Park as part of an outdoor concert series. I had played there before with the National. It's a large outdoor venue for some 7,000 people; David duly suggested that I write something "not too subtle or quiet" – it needed to work in this venue!
The piece became Aheym, and now the title track of our new record, and it is a ferocious piece of music. During that first meeting David also asked me about my background. I told him the story of my grandmother, Sally, a Russian immigrant who came to New York in the 1920s and spent her adult life raising a family in Brooklyn and Queens. Her story of coming to America was always our primary connection to our family heritage and I decided I would write this piece for her. "Aheym" means "homeward" in Yiddish and is an abstract evocation of the idea of her journey and passage. David suggested we retrace, in reverse, Sally's original voyage by performing it a few months later in Lodz, Poland, one of the towns she passed through as a child on her way to America.
Reading on mobile? Listen to Aheym here
A second commission followed for the Kronos. Tenebre was commissioned by London's Barbican as part of Steve Reich's 75th-birthday celebrations, and the new album has four works, all written for the Kronos. People often ask me about the difference in writing for the National and writing classical music such as this. I am the same musician regardless of what I am working on. I use some of the same methods to generate ideas when I am writing songs or more formal compositions.
It's a daunting task, writing a string quartet. It is, after all, one of the great archetypes of the classical tradition, with so much amazing historical repertoire (Bartók – a particular favourite of mine – and Beethoven). But, for the very same reasons, it's been an exciting process. I love exploring the different timbral possibilities of the stringed instruments, and many of the pieces use specific techniques – col legno (playing with the wood of the bow), pizzicato, artificial harmonics, circular bowing patterns and so on.
Inevitably I sit at the piano or the guitar and improvise to find some of the elements which will make up the piece. The primary difference might be that when I am writing a string quartet or classical composition I am working from score to notate in detail everything that goes into the music, whereas a rock band does most everything by ear, and then in our case we often write in the recording studio. Then of course there's the formal differences – a pop song is usually four or five minutes, where the shortest composition on the new record is eight minutes (the longest 17). I can do a lot more ambitious things with this longer form and allow the music to really expand as much as it wants.
Aheym, by the Kronos Quartet / Bryce Dessner is out now on Anti.
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