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For the last few weeks I’ve been meaning to check out the music of the young and provocative German composer Johannes Kreidler, who makes a rare U.S. appearance tonight at the Cultural Center’s Claudia Cassidy Theater at 7:30 PM, where Ensemble Dal Niente will play a selection of his works. I did look around for some commercially available recordings of his music, but I had no luck. Yesterday afternoon, however, I fell down a rabbit hole watching a bunch of his video work, which masterfully demonstrates the conceptual chutzpah and humor in his technology-driven work.
His humor comes through when he applies this technique to a performance of Cage’s 4’33”, which suggests that 16 snatches of silence are just as silent as one. Kreidler is obviously posing questions about fair use and cultural appropriation, a theme that arrives front and center with his controversial piece “Product Placements” (2008), which uses 70, 200 samples in one 33-second piece. He turned the work in a bit of performance art when he drove to the offices of GEMA—the German body that handles performance rights—in a truck carrying forms for each of those 70, 200 samples. A documentary about the work will screened as part of tonight’s program.