In the first section of Kronos Quartet’s spirited performance of Three Bones, violinist, composer, and guest artist Laura Ortman, a member of the White Mountain Apache tribe, summons the spirits of land and sky as if the earth is singing its very existence.
Pay attention, the planet tells the audience through Ortman’s violin. Listen to who is speaking, and why.
Ortman, who also plays the Apache violin, is one of six Native American artists to contribute compositions to Ground, one of three works that comprise Three Bones, a multimedia, deeply felt invocation of peoples who have enriched American life and culture.
Three Bones, which was co-commissioned by the Hopkins Center for the Arts and had its premiere in April at Carnegie Hall in New York City, had its third performance on Oct. 23 in Spaulding Auditorium.
“Bringing extraordinary artists such as Kronos Quartet and their collaborators into conversation with our campus and our community is central to our vision for arts and their role in cross-cultural understanding,” said Mary Lou Aleskie, Howard Gilman ’44 Executive Director of the Hop.
The concert represents yet another facet of Dartmouth’s year-long celebration of the 250th anniversary of the United States, which has looked at the country’s history, politics, and art through a variety of lenses.
The second section of the Three Bones triptych, At the Sea Islands, performed with guest percussionist Quentin Baxter, commemorates the Gullah Geechee people living along the Atlantic coast of the southern United States.
The third section, Beyond the Golden Gate with guest artist Wu Man, a consummate performer on the pipa, a Chinese stringed instrument, recounts the history of Chinese immigration to California, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, and the issue of birthright citizenship.
Kronos Quartet, which was founded by David Harrington in 1973 with the goal of expanding the string quartet repertoire by playing only modern, often avant-garde work, has continually broken ground with its championing of experimental music and contemporary musicians. The quartet has received three Grammys, among numerous other awards, for its long record of invention.
“They have pulled off a remarkable feat, to continue to be at the forefront of musical innovation and discovery for 53 years,” said Theodore Levin, an ethnomusicologist and the Arthur R. Virgin Professor of Music.
In a video interview Harrington said that the seeds for Three Bones emerged in a conversation with the staff at Carnegie Hall “wanting to know what the Kronos Quartet would do for the 250th year of our country.”
Harrington said he’d already been thinking about it. “I want to do a triptych and bring to the stage three groups of Americans that basically have not been featured that often on that stage, in as much complexity and diversity and beauty as we could manage,” he said.
Three Bones draws its title from the three bones in human ears—hammer, anvil and stirrup—that translate sonic vibrations into comprehensible sounds and speech.
The aural and visual landscapes in Three Bones may not always be familiar to audiences, but the stories that Three Bones tells are deeply rooted in the magnificent variety of America’s people, terrain, and musical traditions. The piece also conveys the persistence of Indigenous and immigrant peoples in the face of governmental and societal oppression.
Bringing Three Bones to the stage required painstaking research that drew on books, films, scholars, poets, musicians, and archives at the Library of Congress and its American Folklife Center. “A lot of hands and a lot of minds have contributed to this piece,” Harrington said.
Dartmouth Libraries and the Hop collaborated on a roundtable discussion about arts and research that included Harrington and Andrea Decker, a guest librarian from the Library of Congress. In Baker Library’s East Reading Room, they discussed the intersection of archives, research, teaching, and artistic creation.
Violinist Gabriela Díaz, who joined Kronos in 2024, said that “over the course of these last two years, bringing the project into focus has been a huge bonding experience for us as a quartet. It was David’s brainchild and it lived in his brain for a long time.”
To turn Harrington’s idea into the far-reaching triptych that is Three Bones was an exacting process. “We worked very, very hard to make sure that the stories we were telling were told in the most beautiful and honest way,” Díaz said.
The quartet also discussed the creation process with a group of 50 students, faculty, and staff gathered in School House professor Abigail Neely’s living room for a dinner and preview of the performance earlier in the week.
Each section of the triptych is augmented by arresting background visuals: abstract, brilliantly-colored pulsating imagery by artist Jeffrey Gibson in Ground; historic photographs and films documenting the lives of the Gullah Geechee in At the Sea Islands; and pictures of early 20th century Chinese immigrants who fought for legal status, against the backdrop of San Francisco’s Chinatown.
The depth of the visuals are matched by the sonorities of the music.
“The sound was burnished and it was polished and very, very fine,” Levin said.
During the Kronos residency, its musicians also visited more than a half-dozen classes offered by the Department of Music, including Levin’s Global Sounds. For Sarah Slowikowski ’27, it “was clear that all four members were extremely passionate about their careers and thoroughly enjoyed learning how to play and adapt to new ways of playing their instruments by collaborating with artists from other cultures.”
Blaine Boxwell ’27, another student in the class, found that listening to the members of the quartet talk about the evolution of the piece was invaluable.
“Understanding how Kronos uses music as a platform to address social issues was also important to a new listener like me as it directs them in terms of what songs they choose to play/cover,” Boxwell said.
Three Bones arrives at a significant moment in American history, when the ideas and principles that buttressed the country’s founding are being tested; and deep divisions about who gets to call themselves American have emerged in frequently ugly ways.
By engaging in a spirit of generosity with these questions, Three Bones “responds to what’s going on around us now. It shows how art can reflect that and beam it back to us in a form that will have an impact on our awareness and our consciousness,” Levin said.
Slowikowski said that “the most compelling part of Three Bones was its ability to communicate history through more than words, making the performance educational and emotionally powerful. I entered expecting a traditional string quartet performance, but left with a greater appreciation for how music can preserve and communicate cultural histories.”
