Kronos Quartet Create a Haunting Interpretation of War and Loss » PopMatters

As a first-generation Armenian-American whose family was directly affected by the Lebanese Civil War and Armenian Genocide, composer, documentarian, and Pulitzer Prize finalist Mary Kouyoumdjian is eminently qualified to use her skills to create an artistic portrait of the horrors of violent conflict. Likewise, the legendary San Francisco-based Kronos Quartet have used their considerable compositional and performing brilliance to a variety of genres and subject matter. So, it’s practically inevitable that their new collaboration, WITNESS, is a stunning and profoundly moving tribute to the victims of war and genocide.

Kouyoumdjian splices together recordings of survivors of the Armenian Genocide and the Lebanese Civil War and pairs them with the Kronos Quartet’s stringed harmonies to provide an audio landscape that wisely adds the human element of these atrocities. WITNESS begins, however, with an instrumental piece, as the Kronos Quartet interprets an instrumental version of “Groung (Crane)”, an Armenian folk song.

Following this introduction, the extended three-part suite “Bombs of Beirut” introduces the interview segments, often implemented in fragments. “I always fantasize about Lebanon before the Civil War,” a voice repeats repeatedly, as the string quartet play with sadness and urgency underneath. Instead of more conventional, long-form narratives, the interview segments are sometimes clipped and somewhat disembodied, almost like a fever dream. As recollections of the conflict continue, the music and narration become more intense, mirroring the horrors of war, including sounds of explosions, through the suite’s three parts: “before the war”, “the war”, and “after the war”.

“I Haven’t the Words” presents the Kronos Quartet once again without narration or effects, a stately, mournful bridge to the final four-part segment that essentially makes up the album’s second half. “Silent Cranes” begins with the section “slave to your voice”, as the strings are matched with recordings of what is likely native singing from the region, keeping the voices of those war victims alive as they collaborate with present-day musical performances.

The second part, “you did not answer”, includes interview segments with people speaking of the conflict (told in chilling, brutal detail) placed within the music’s empathetic context. The third part, “with blood-soaked feathers”, combines the native singing with the narration, and as Kronos Quartet gradually join in, they soon overpower the performance with thunderous, deafening atonality.

WITNESS concludes with the final part of “Silent Cranes”, as “you flew away” combines more of these interviews, sublime vocalizations, and strings, but with a closing narration that offers something approaching hope: “Let us play again in our gardens and fields and glory in the beauty of the flowers forever. A century is a long time. It is and it isn’t. Why do I feel it is important to talk about the Armenian Genocide 100 years later? It’s important to complete the poems and eat the last pieces of lavash and bastegh. Our grandparents are singing, let’s finish their songs.”

WITNESS is a stunning, incredibly moving piece of art presented beautifully and eloquently, while chronicling the horrors of war and how it tears apart people and families. Through Kouyoumdjian’s ancestral connection and the pure magic of the Kronos Quartet, the record humanizes the effects of war and is both a tribute and a cautionary tale.

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