SAN FRANCISCO - David Harrington, a 48-year old violinist with the serious, sleep-deprived look and conversational urgency a late-blooming adolescent, is the founder and designated visionary of the Kronos Quartet, but that's not exactly how he describes himself.

"I'm a collector of musical experiences," he says, making his career sound like a hobby. Talking over a midnight pizza a few blocks from the Kronos office, Harrington is dressed in the grunge costume of his native Seattle - T-shirt, open flannel shirt, black jeans and tattered Converse All-Stars - and his hair is a shag of graying bristles.

Enthusiasm is the principal tool of his trade, along with his fiddle. The Kronos Quartet is 25 years old this season, an anniversary that must come as a shock to the flocks of fans who still consider the group radical and fresh, and which the string quartet itself is celebrating without much retrospection.

True, the record company Nonesuch has just released a 10-CD anthology of the group's career, but there always is something fresh and forthcoming to add to a repertoire of more than 400 works written for the group. "I can't wait to play this piece" is Harrington's frequent refrain.

The Kronos Quartet has irritated many purists with its multicolored stage clothes and defiant shades, the glum-rocker attitudes they've struck for publicity photos, and their use of lighting, plunging audiences into darkness and illuminating only their own tight huddle. But even critics concede that the group deserves credit for cajoling a generation or two of composers into believing that the venerable string quartet was not a worn-out genre.

The members of Kronos have wired their instruments for electronics, played tangos and music from African villages, made string quartet arrangements of Jimi Hendrix's "Purple Haze" and of such orchestral monuments as Stravinsky's "Rite of Spring," and taken a Swedish nyckelharpa, the throat singers of Tuva and a gospel choir into the recording studio with them.

In the 1970s, when the quartet was in residence at Mills College in Oakland, Harrington badgered the ur-minimalist Terry Riley for a piece, even though the composer, who was absorbed in the improvisational tradition of North Indian classical music, was reluctant even to notate his ideas.

Rather than the juicy, throbbing vibrato all string players are raised on, Riley asked for paler shades of sound, different brushstrokes made by using less (or no) vibrato in the left hand and varying the speed and pressure with which the bow slips across the string. It is this direct contact with the imagination behind the notes that energizes Harrington and his colleagues.

The result is that while many quartets try to develop an acoustic fingerprint, Kronos has developed a malleable sound, able to absorb the technical vocabularies of disparate cultures. "I want to be involved in a sound that is the right one for whatever note we happen to be playing," Harrington says.

A couple of days later, Harrington and the rest of the quartet - second violinist John Sherba, violist Hank Dutt and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud - drive over the Golden Gate Bridge, out of the gloomy fog of San Francisco into Marin County and up miles of switchbacks to Skywalker Ranch, a sort of entertainment monastery owned by film producer George Lucas. For a couple of weeks nearly every August, the Kronos Quartet retires to this vast estate and records whatever music they have ready.

On the agenda for this morning is "Mario, Dreaming," by the Seattle composer Ken Benshoof. It's a relatively light morning, but the session is freighted with history and emotion. Not only is this brief, delicate and melancholy piece a memorial for Jeanrenaud's child, Mario, who was stillborn in 1994, but Benshoof is, in a sense, Kronos' musical godfather. He was the first composer to write a piece for the quartet - "Traveling Music," included on the Nonesuch set - and, years before that, the first living composer whose music Harrington ever played.

At 16, Harrington attached himself to Benshoof, and the two would spend long evenings talking about music. Curiously for a pair of musicians immersed in contemporary music, their joint ideal was a violinist who composed short, alluring encores full of tenderness and Central European charm: Fritz Kreisler.

"There's a kind of magic in Kreisler's music," Benshoof muses. "The surface is very elegant, very transparent, but just beneath it is a sense of reaching into something deeper. You can hear that in the composers David's chosen to work with."

It's true that the bulk of the Kronos repertoire aspires to clarity and the rhythmic definition that marks a waltz, and much of it is as redolent of its place of origin as Kreisler's compositions are with the piney scent of the Vienna Woods. "Tan Dun's Ghost Opera" makes use of Chinese instruments and Beijing Opera techniques, while "John's Book of Alleged Dances" is a suite of urban hoe-downs and other rough-hewn American dances by John Adams. "What makes [Kronos] unique as a group is that they're the first string quartet to have a world view," says Riley. "It's caused them to work with folk musicians from around the world."

Harrington received much of his musical education during his high school years in the listening booths at Seattle's Standard Records and Hi-Fi, where a patient staff allowed him to plow undisturbed through Bartok, Stravinsky, Thelonious Monk and John Coltrane. The Budapest Quartet recording of Beethoven's Op. 127 staggered him - "I fell in love with that sound and those amazing E flat major chords," he remembers, "and I decided that I had to do that and make those sounds myself, if possible."

By 1973, though, Harrington was still neither a student nor a professional, but just an aimless artist-type with a vague sense of having something important to express - until late one night, when an epiphany arrived by radio. "You have to remember Vietnam and the feeling of hopelessness," he says. "Suddenly on the radio there was this music that didn't sound like anything I had grown up with, and it felt so right."

The piece was George Crumb's 1970 "Black Angels" for electric string quartet, a gloomy, gritty, even nihilistic work full of furious sounds: Microphones attached to each instrument magnify every note and scrape, tremolos scurry everywhere, bows are drawn across gongs and the rims of crystal wine glasses filled with water. Crumb's music is hallucinatory and pessimistic, but it is also gripping, theatrical and emotionally transparent, and Harrington immediately formed a quartet to play it, which he named after the Greek god of time.

Suddenly, Harrington had a mission, and he began frantically drumming up concerts - in nursing homes, schools, churches and wherever anyone was willing to listen. Four years later, when the group had moved to San Francisco after a stint as quartet in residence at the State University of New York in Genesee, membership in the Kronos Quartet could still hardly have been called a job.

"We played in restaurants, at weddings, outdoors in Ghirardelli Square," recalls Dutt, who had just become the group's violist. "We earned very little money, but we rehearsed seven hours a day. It was total dedication."

But the penury and intensity of the Kronos lifestyle took its toll. A few hours before a concert, the second violinist and the cellist, who were married to each other, announced that to save their marriage, they were moving back to Seattle. In an instant, that evening's concert, a prospective residency at Mills College in Oakland, all prospects of income, and the quartet itself all seemed to vaporize. The quartet regrouped in a hurry, hiring Sherba and Jeanrenaud, both barely out of conservatory. So 1998 marks the 20th anniversary of this Kronos Quartet - four people who have been professionally soldered together virtually their entire adult and professional lives.

As the quartet grew in stature, so did its distance from the conventions of music-making that still grip the classical music establishment, and so, too, did the criticism that accused the group of gimmickry. Reviews that concentrated on the music were generally enthusiastic, but many still dwelled on the musicians' designer outfits and variety-show lighting. The Kronos members are firm, though, that their image is not a marketing device, but something that grew out of the music they play.

What began as a seat-of-the-pants collective has formalized into a business with a board of directors, a $1.6 million budget, a $250,000 annual commissioning fund, and a remarkable history of record sales: The quartet has finished every one of the last 10 years with a CD on Billboard magazine's Top 10 classical chart.

But as the Kronos Quartet has accumulated experience, it has guarded its most important resources: the childlike eagerness to move on to the next new thing and to claim the whole world as its own.

"What I'm continually reminded of is how much we haven't done," Harrington says. "Music is a huge place."

Pub date 10/18/98