The longtime violist of the Kronos Quartet, Hank Dutt has been a major figure in expanding the role of the viola in chamber music of the 20th and 21st centuries. With Kronos, he was part of a massive commissioning scheme, which, by the mid-2020s, numbered more than 1,100 new works and arrangements, with many of these written to showcase Dutt in particular. Dutt was born in Muscatine, Iowa, on November 4, 1952, and grew up in Quincy, Illinois. He began playing the violin at age ten and became enthralled with chamber music, attending several summer music camps a year. He was swayed to consider the viola when one camp was out of violin openings and was told he could get a scholarship to the camp if he played that instrument. Learning violin at Quincy Senior High School, he made the switch to viola when the school got a new instrument. After briefly attending Kansas State University, Dutt moved to Indiana University, where he studied with David Dawson, earning bachelor's and master's degrees. His other teachers at the university included János Starker and Josef Gingold. Among his collaborators at school was future Kronos Quartet cellist Joan Jeanrenaud. In 1977, shortly after finishing his master's, Dutt was invited to audition for the Kronos Quartet by founders David Harrington and cellist Walter Gray, joining the roster that year. The following year, he was joined by Jeanrenaud. The first of Dutt's many recordings with Kronos came in 1979, featuring string quartets by Dane Rudhyar. Among the group's numerous collaborators is composer Terry Riley, who began working with them in the late '70s. Among Kronos' recordings of Riley's music are 1985's Cadenza on the Night Plain, 2015's Sunrise of the Planetary Dream Collector, and 2019's Sun Rings, which earned a Grammy Award for Best Engineered Album, Classical. In 1993, the group recorded Bob Ostertag's All the Rage. Written in response to anti-gay violence and the AIDS epidemic, the score is for string quartet, narration, and sound recorded by Ostertag from the 1991 AB101 Veto Riot. Dutt lost his partner during this time and instigated the recording of the work with the proceeds donated to AIDS research. In 2013, Dutt married Greg Dubinsky, who has contributed program notes for the Kronos Quartet. Other composers who have been featured on the group's recordings include such notable 20th and 21st century composers as Harry Partch, Philip Glass, and Steve Reich, but go well beyond that sphere with music by the likes of Jimi Hendrix, Thelonious Monk, and Pete Seeger. The 2023-2024 season marked the 50th anniversary of the Kronos Quartet, which featured celebratory events and several releases, including a recording of music by Moondog, the blind New York City street performer also known as the Viking of 6th Avenue, with the Ghost Train Orchestra. Since its founding, the Kronos Quartet has focused on the creation of new music, and as of the mid-2020s, the number of commissioned works and arrangements exceeded 1,100. Along these lines, the Kronos Quartet established the "50 for the Future" project to develop a free library of 50 new works for string quartet. Following that season, Dutt retired from the Kronos Quartet and was succeeded by Ayane Kozasa. ~ Keith Finke, Rovi