Kronos in Bogotá: Cosmopolitan Multiculturalism in the Global Contemporary Classical Music Scene

This article examines the Kronos Quartet’s first visit to Bogotá, Colombia, in 2013 and explores the local-global dialectics that sustain Kronos’s mobility and globality. Rather than treating Kronos’s reputation as a boundary-crossing, globe-trotting ensemble as the product of their agency alone, we study how Kronos’s mobility, as well as its performance of ‘worldliness’, are enabled or constrained by individuals, organisations, and policies. Drawing on Howard Becker’s concept of art worlds and Gerard Delanty’s cosmopolitan multiculturalism, we demonstrate that Kronos’s global public image was negotiated and culturally translated to fit Bogotá’s self-fashioning as a global city shaped by the multiculturalist policies mandated by the 1991 Colombian Constitution. The essay builds on archival research conducted at the Library of Congress as well as interviews with David Harrington, Colombian art administrators Sandra Meluk and Mauricio Peña, and violinist Liz Ángela Garcia from the Colombian string quartet, Cuarteto Q-Arte. The essay argues that Kronos’s worldliness emerged through asymmetrical interactions between global artistic networks and local cultural actors.