Thirty-three years ago, when the Kronos Quartet was created with the express purpose of performing new music, it brought a breath of fresh air to an up-tight, locked-down classical music scene.

At the time, composers maintained clearer distinctions between genres, and successful ensembles walked tightropes to hold the attention of their audiences, carefully padding token new works with familiar masterworks. Even as people admired the Kronos Quartet for their courage, they wondered if it would last.

No one's wondering now.

Kronos Quartet has been wildly successful, performing around the world, commissioning hundreds of works, and recording a wide variety of new music. In fact, their performance through the Honolulu Chamber Music Series at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa Music Department on Saturday was sold out. Crowds stood around the auditorium, hoping to snap up the tickets of no-shows.

On paper, Kronos looks like a traditional string quartet: two violins, played by founder David Harrington and John Sherba; viola by Hank Dutt and cello by relative newcomer Jeffrey Zeigler. On stage, they look a bit less traditional, surrounded by sound equipment and a smattering of extra instruments.

Then they start to play, their sound unique — passionate, edgy, intense, each piece played with utter conviction.

Even more exciting than their music, however, is what Kronos has done for concerts, reintroducing the excitement of coming out to hear what's new and shifting attention from "how" (quality of delivery) to "what" (quality of content).

The program traversed worlds: India and Iceland, folk and film, contemporary classical, commercial pop, minimalism, the Middle East, and composers old and young. Only one of the composers has been a regular at classical concerts: the American minimalist Steve Reich; the rest are from other traditions (Xploding Plastix, Rabul Dev Burman, Ram Narayan), other countries (Ranghiz Ali-Zadeh, Sigur Rós), or are young, up-and-coming (Derek Charke).

Tellingly, the audience was equally diverse — all ages, all backgrounds, fans of all kinds of music — and left with strong personal opinions, discussing with confidence what they did and did not like. That, in and of itself, made for a successful concert.

Some pieces were spell-binding, some pleasantly boring; others were irritating, finely crafted, or derivative. But they were all interesting, and that is the point of Kronos' mission to present only new music.

In spite of the program's diversity, there were also some remarkable similarities, which made me wonder whether an early 21st-century style is emerging, a style distinct from the 20th century's classical music and its obsession with innovation, a style marked by mixtures and integrations.

In almost every piece Kronos played, classical techniques were blended with folk traditions; styles were eclectic and combined within pieces; ostinatos (repeated melodies or rhythms) and drones were everywhere. Rhythms were prominent, catchy, and irregular, but also repetitive and built in four-beat measures within four-measure phrases; musical units were more often minimalist-type cells than motives or melodic phrases; and music progressed less through development than through mutation.

Most striking, the influence of popular genres was pervasive, something that would have shocked classical composers of 30 years ago.

Classical organizations still claim that programming new music is risky, but that was hard to believe Saturday night. The audience was likely not concerned with nuances of structure and style shifts, but it did know what it liked, and it gave Kronos several standing ovations.

The times, they are a-changing.

music review