Kronos Quartet

In this concert you'll be putting aside your violin to play the world premiere of 'Music from 4 Fences' by Australian composer Jon Rose. What's its history? Jon is the inventor of the musical fence; we learned how to play it with him on a previous visit to Australia. The time I first came in contact with the idea of a barbed wire fence becoming a musical instrument was about the time the Bush administration was contemplating creating a fence between Mexico and the United States. The idea of musicians turning these objects of violence and confinement and suffering into musical instruments is something I had to do; I don't feel I have much choice.

You actually play on barbed wire? Have you ever been injured? Does your insurance cover this? There's been a little blood once in a while, but that's an occupational hazard.

So you're going to build a fence inside the Sydney Opera House? Yes. I had to figure out how to actually bring fences into a concert hall. Additionally we felt there should be a visual component, and Willie Williams [stage designer for U2] has produced some amazing effects for us.

Jon Rose is an advocate of music with "socio-political intent". That's something you have in common isn't it? Yes. I started Kronos in 1973 in order to play 'Black Angels' by George Crumb, which is the string quartet to come out of the Vietnam War.

And many of your more recent works have come out of the Iraq Wars. Yes, ever since 2003 I have been listening to as much Iraqi music as I could. I wanted Kronos to create a kind of counterbalance to Bush and Rice and Cheney and CNN and Fox. Around 2004 I came across this album from the 70s and 80s, with one track that translated as "Oh Mother, the Handsome Man Tortures Me." It was a love song from the 80s by an unknown Iraqi composer. I could imagine it coming out of transistor radios all over Baghdad. The drum part sounds like machine guns.

You're playing your arrangement of that in Sydney, and it's also on your new album Floodplain. What other works are in both? There's a lullaby from Iran and 'Ramallah Underground', both arranged by Jacob Garchik, and Aleksandra Vrebalov's '...hold me, neighbor, in this storm...'.

Whose music will you open with? Actually an Australian composer who now lives in Brooklyn: James Thirlwell. We've been opening concerts with a work of his called 'Nomatophobis' for years, and it's a gripping way of starting. But it's never been performed in Australia before, so we had to do it.

Kronos Quartet play at the Concert Hall in Sydney Opera House on Fri 5 Jun.

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