TIME IS NOW FOR KRONOS : QUARTET'S ECLECTIC REPERTOIRE BUSTS CLASSICAL CONVENTIONS.

Byline: Reed Johnson Daily News Staff Writer

The irony isn't lost on David Harrington. Here he is, the leader of one of the planet's most progressive, multicultural musical acts - and he still can't find his way around the World Wide Web.

``We have it here at our office, but I don't really know how to use it yet,'' says the co-founder and first violinist of the Kronos Quartet, speaking by phone from San Francisco.

``Occasionally I've needed some information about different things, and somebody'll get it for me. For instance, I recently needed to get some information about Buckminster Fuller and the Mobius strip.''

Never mind asking why Harrington craved factoids about a legendary American inventor and an obscure geometric configuration. It's apparently part of his nature.

Since 1973, Harrington and his Bay Area-based colleagues have made a career out of collecting musical oddities, scouring the globe for sounds that lie well outside the traditional classical music repertoire.

Without turning their backs on Bach, Barber or Bartok, Kronos has reimagined traditional string arrangements, freeing familiar pieces from narrow conventions of harmony and tempo. At the same time, it has aggressively championed the work of 20th-century composers, everyone from Philip Glass, Steve Reich and other minimalist masters to Argentine tango king Astor Piazzolla, jazz revolutionary Ornette Coleman and Zimbabwean percussion virtuoso Dumisani Maraire. A queasy, deconstructed version of Jimi Hendrix's ``Purple Haze'' is one of the quartet's signatures.

With their spiky haircuts and spandex outfits, the Kronos Quartet isn't most people's idea of a typical chamber ensemble. Nor is its music the stuff usually played for geriatric audiences by men in black tie.

What makes Kronos notable, though, isn't its hip media image or bohemian attire, but its polished craftsmanship and radical programming choices.

Frequent visitors to the Los Angeles area, Kronos will perform Friday at the Alex Theatre in Glendale. Then they'll hook up with noted musician/educator Dr. Craig Woodson for an unusual Saturday afternoon concert in which area school children will perform with Kronos on instruments they've built themselves.

Woodson, a former Los Angeles resident (he holds a doctorate in ethnomusicology from UCLA), has hosted similar concerts around the country, teaching kids how to coax sounds from low-tech and no-tech materials such as drinking straws, Styrofoam fast-food trays, fishing line and recycled newspapers.

He shares a philosophy with Kronos that music-making should embrace the experimental and the non-European with a passion.

``We have the same kind of general flow of pushing at the envelope, if you will,'' he says.

That's putting it gently.

Assembled with fever-dream logic, a Kronos concert may lead off with Michael Daughterty's ``Elvis Everywhere,'' in which a taped trio of Elvis impersonators supplies counterpoint to frenetic swatches of violin, cello and viola.

The quartet then may swing over to one of Howlin' Wolf's electric Chicago blues ballads, followed up with a piece by Chinese neo-classical composer Tan Dun or the exquisitely bleak atonalities of Henryk Gorecki.

Rather than recycling classical standards, Kronos has assembled a huge library of new, commissioned pieces. Currently, the group has more than 50 commissioned works in various stages of development on every continent save Antarctica.

Given the quartet's resemblance to a sonic United Nations, it's tough to say exactly what makes a particular piece into Kronos material. Harrington says his criteria is simply that a work ``grabs me and attracts my sense of life.''

``I think that for me, the last 23 years, it's been a daily way of life trying to find the next piece,'' he elaborates. ``For me, there are certain pieces of music, certain composers that I gravitate instinctively toward. And fortunately, everyone in Kronos trusts my judgment a lot. And I spend a lot of time every day listening to new pieces. The world of music is huge, and it's getting larger all the time.''

When Harrington and violist Hank Dutt first joined forces, the boundaries of that world were nearly as rigid as the Iron Curtain. ``World music'' barely existed as a concept, let alone as a marketing category.

When Kronos first took up residence outside Rochester, N.Y., rock-ribbed chamber music enthusiasts didn't know what to make of these arty renegades. They would come to hear Haydn, and instead get an earful of something closer to ``Dinner Music for a Pack of Hungry Cannibals'' by Raymond Scott, who wrote much of his music for cartoons.

Seeking greener creative pastures, Harrington and Dutt - soon to be joined by violinist John Sherba and cellist Joan Jeanrenaud - relocated Kronos to San Francisco in 1977. The move paid off. By the mid-1980s, the quartet was attracting critical acclaim and a new generation of listeners, some of whom never had set foot inside a concert hall before.

After signing an exclusive recording contract with Elektra/Nonesuch, Kronos rapidly rose to become top-selling crossover artists. In 1992, their euphoric compilation, ``Pieces of Africa,'' went to No. 1 on the Billboard Classical Albums chart while holding the same position in the Top Adult Alternative category - a record-industry first. Two more recordings due out in March will bring the group's total discography to a remarkable 26 releases and counting.

Kronos plays more than 100 dates a year, jetting off to the Sydney Opera House, La Scala or the Montreux Jazz Festival, and its success has helped begat flocks of similar avant-garde string quartets.

Even so, it may be a while before the group with the entire world for its canvas can be easily found on your local FM dial.

``We live in a certain world, and I think that it's not easy for people to hear our music, a lot of the times,'' Harrington says.

``I mean, is it accurate to turn on the radio, and a week goes by or a month goes by, and there's no music that we've recorded? I'd love to have our music played on radio stations 24 hours a day, worldwide.''

THE FACTS

What: Kronos Quartet.

Where: 8 p.m. Friday at the Alex Theatre, 216 N. Brand Blvd., Glendale; and 2 p.m. Saturday with Dr. Craig Woodson at the Veterans Wadsworth Theater, Wilshire Boulevard just west of the San Diego Freeway (405).

Tickets: For the Alex, $22.50 and $29.50; call [phone]. For the Wadsworth, $22 to $25, $9 for UCLA students with valid ID; call [phone].

CAPTION(S):

2 Photos

Photo: (1) The Bay Area-based Kronos Quartet - Hank Dutt, left, Joan Jeanrenaud, David Harrington and John Sherba - has provided a showcase for 20th-century music since its formation in 1973.

(2) Craig Woodson will help children make instruments to play along with the Kronos Quartet on Saturday.