Cross-cultural collaborations with the Kronos Quartet

By examining the creative and interactive processes that take place between members of the Kronos Quartet and musicians from non-Western traditions, the research in this chapter extends beyond the standard conventions of the classical string quartet repertoire to embrace unusual and unpredictable combinations of notated and improvised approaches to performance. Examples of Kronos rehearsing with singers and instrumentalists from Central Asia, and Ukrainian vocalist Mariana Sadovska, will illustrate how Western conventional roles of composer and performer become blurred when musicians work together across cultural boundaries. Ethnographic research based on observations of rehearsals and interviews with the musicians helps to answer questions regarding roles and responsibilities, the distribution of creativity in rehearsal, and the way composition, performance and improvisation are defined and re-defined in this context. The nature of the creative processes that take place before, during and after rehearsal is determined by the relationship between notation and sound which lies at the heart of each collaboration, and is different for each of the three cases considered