NYT: A Daughter of Kronos Revisits Quartet's Fold

[Frank Forman]

A Daughter of Kronos Revisits Quartet's Fold
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/26/arts/music/a-daughter-of-kronos-revisits-quartets-fold.html

By JOHN ROCKWELL

IT'S still hard to picture the ubiquitous Kronos Quartet without
Joan Jeanrenaud. For 20 years there they were: three hip-nerdy guys
and one willowy, glamorous woman.

Then, in what seemed eerie emulation of an early role model, the
British cellist Jacqueline du Pré, Ms. Jeanrenaud was diagnosed with
multiple sclerosis. She took a long-term leave, starting in 1999,
that morphed into retirement from the quartet and its arduous six
months of annual touring.

Since then not much news about Ms. Jeanrenaud has seeped out beyond
her base in the San Francisco Bay Area. The Kronos still tours and
plays in New York regularly, now with its young, excellent and
seemingly permanent (or as permanent as such things can be) cellist,
Jeffrey Zeigler.

On Tuesday evening, however, for the first time in 14 years, Ms.
Jeanrenaud, 56, will play in New York again with the Kronos, this
time as second cellist in a quintet composed for the group by the
Russian Vladimir Martynov called "Schubert-Quintet [Unfinished]."
The concert, with three other composers also reinterpreting music
first heard in other contexts, is in Zankel Hall.

Mr. Martynov, a Russian much influenced by Orthodox Church chant,
takes ideas from Schubert's only string quintet, in C (D. 956) and
spins them out, slowly and rapturously, in what might be called
typical Eastern European mystical Minimalist style. The work has
been recorded on a Martynov-Kronos CD from Nonesuch.

But the news here is Ms. Jeanrenaud. How has she been handling her
enforced retirement, and what has she been up to? The answer to the
second question is, a lot.

Not that a diagnosis of multiple sclerosis could ever be called
opportune, but for Ms. Jeanrenaud the disease came at a time when,
at 42, she had been more or less on the road for her entire
maturity. She had been thinking of refocusing her energies, staying
closer to home, exploring new musical avenues.

She has been aided in such explorations by the fact that the impact
of the illness has, in her case, been relatively benign. Ms.
Jeanrenaud's condition affects her legs. Du Pré's began with a loss
of sensitivity in her fingers, disastrous for any instrumentalist.
Her illness was formally diagnosed in 1973, and she died in 1987.

Multiple sclerosis can wax and wane, with episodes of greater
severity. Ms. Jeanrenaud checks in with a doctor every few months
but avoids the injectable drugs commonly used to control symptoms.
Instead she relies on a Tibetan doctor who analyzes her condition
through her pulse and prescribes herbs as treatment. She also stays
away from alcohol and caffeine.

"I feel I'm very stable at this point," she said recently by
telephone from her home in the Bernal Heights district of San
Francisco. "I don't feel I've really had any episodes for quite some
time. So I'm very lucky. I have no issues with fatigue as a lot of
people do, but maybe that's because I don't take the drugs. And my
upper body is fine: I've never had any trouble playing."

About the parallels with Ms. du Pré, she added: "When I was a kid
and first started playing the cello, she was always a huge
influence. You see this tall, beautiful woman who just played
amazingly. It gave me inspiration. But her case was more severe. I
play well, but I'm no Jacqueline du Pré. So my M.S. is smaller too."

Beyond her frank humor Ms. Jeanrenaud seems proud of not hiding her
disability. The booklet accompanying the new Martynov CD has a photo
of her standing with her cane.

Born Joan Dutcher in 1956 and raised on a small farm near Memphis,
Ms. Jeanrenaud still speaks with a hearty Southern accent. She
received her bachelor's degree from Indiana University, noted for
its large school of music, where she helped found its Contemporary
Music Ensemble. She auditioned for the cellist job in the Kronos
Quartet, then unknown, at the suggestion of her friend Hank Dutt,
Kronos's violist. The group had just been formed by David
Harrington, still the leader and first violinist, and the cellist
Walter Grey, who had quit to raise a family when Kronos's future was
as yet unimagined.

Over the next 20 years Kronos became the world's best known, most
innovative contemporary-music quartet, moving rapidly from a
new-music-inflected but otherwise general repertory to a purely
contemporary one, then to its current format of works composed
exclusively for it. To recite the list of those who have written for
the group is to name nearly all the leading composers of the late
20th and early 21st centuries. And Kronos played a crucial role in
broadening the very notion of classical music to embrace world music
and popular music in all its varieties.

The married name Jeanrenaud comes from a youthful liaison; Ms.
Jeanrenaud was later married to Patrick Gleeson, the jazz and film
composer, performer and producer. In her solo career since 1999 she
has evolved from performance art and solo improvisation to actual
composition. In addition to du Pré she cites the avant-garde cellist
and performance artist Charlotte Moorman as a major influence and
has several times refashioned a Moorman piece, "Ice Music for
London," into "Ice Cello," which involves "playing" an ice replica
of her 1750 Deconet cello with "bows" made of saws, barbed wire and
sandpaper. They accelerate the melting and help break up the ice, a
process that takes about four hours.

Ms. Jeanrenaud studied both improvisation and composition at
Indiana, and her own music has evolved from the first to the second.
She cites Morton Feldman and Alvin Lucier as compositional models
and now sees herself gradually withdrawing from live performance to
devote herself to writing music.

Most of her early solo work centered on her cello, extended by all
manner of electronic looping and multitracking. For that she has
relied on computerized assistance like Pro Tools and the Sibelius
notation software. But she also writes down her music in
conventional pencil-to-paper form and has produced a string quartet
for the Del Sol Quartet in the Bay Area.

An evocative movement from that quartet, in slightly altered form,
appears as a track called "Dive" on her latest CD, the lively
"Pop-Pop," done in collaboration with the producer and percussionist
P. C. Muñoz. Her previous CD, "Strange Toys," is particularly
haunting and compelling and was nominated for a Grammy. Ms.
Jeanrenaud has also appeared collaboratively, live and recorded,
with diverse, mostly Bay Area musicians, dancers and performance
artists, and it was in one of those collaborative ventures that she
last appeared in New York, in 2005. She is scheduled to perform in a
San Francisco concert on May 26 as part of the celebrations of the
75th anniversary of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Since her retirement from Kronos, you have to wonder how Ms.
Jeanrenaud is faring financially. The answer to that question is,
pretty well. She teaches at Mills College, a women's institution
across the bay in Oakland with a decades-long tradition of fostering
avant-garde music. It is there that she has encountered several
recent collaborators, including the composer Annie Gosfield and the
guitarist Fred Frith. At Mills she gives private lessons and
coordinates a shifting array of student performing groups. She also
teaches a couple of students at home, one 5 and one 62.

Her CDs break even, and she wins a steady stream of residencies and
commissions. Among those who have composed for her are Terry Riley,
Hamza El Din, Paul Dresher, Anthony Davis, Alvin Curran and Pamela
Z. Her first solo album, "Metamorphosis," consisted of pieces
written for her, apart from one she wrote herself.

"I own my own house," Ms. Jeanrenaud said. It is adjacent to one
owned by her former longtime partner, Alessandro Moruzzi. She also
gets a "small annual dividend," she added, from a family business,
Security Signals, in Cordova, Tenn. "I really don't need that much,"
she concluded.

Ms. Jeanrenaud maintains warm relations with the Kronos Quartet,
very much including Mr. Zeigler. She recently resigned from the
Kronos board, feeling that it was time to cut the cord formally. But
she looks on the four men now--and on her two decades with the
group and its managing director, Janet Cowperthwaite--with
undimmed affection: an affection rekindled by the Martynov San
Francisco concert and subsequent recording session.

"I love those guys," she said. "They're like family to me."