Kronos Quartet’s Vision for the Future of Contemporary Music: Composers, Compositional Approaches, and Pedagogical Opportunities in the 50 for the Future Corpus

This article considers the legacy of Kronos Quartet’s 50 for the Future (50FTF), an educational commissioning project undertaken in 2015–2021. The project united two long-standing practices of the Quartet, performance of contemporary classical music and collaboration with non-classical or non-Western artists, by commissioning a diverse pool of musicians to write new scored pieces, which are now publicly available on Kronos’s 50FTF website. It thus provides an extraordinary resource not only for string quartets but also for instructors of music theory, composition, and history. Moreover, it has the potential to create a lasting impact on who and what is included in classical music performance and education. I examine the vision of contemporary music represented by the 50FTF corpus in two ways, taking a systematic and comprehensive approach. First, I offer details on the identities, musical backgrounds, and career trajectories of the fifty commissioned composers. Second, I describe the kinds of compositional techniques featured in the commissioned pieces, including approaches to pitch organisation, rhythm, texture, improvisation, and other features. Examination of the musical materials suggests various ways they might be incorporated into existing classroom topics, as well as new areas for pedagogical focus. This section includes comprehensive tables that instructors may consult for further examples. I conclude with a special consideration of the role of arrangements in the corpus, bolstered by interviews with the three primary arrangers.