CLASSICAL | Peter Margasak
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Composer and Aperiodic director Nomi Epstein says she didn’t realize how underappreciated Cage was in the States till she attended Germany’s Darmstadt festival in 2010. “I was shocked that nearly every lecture given by the list of European notables mentioned Cage,” she says. “It was an enlightening experience for me to consider Cage’s influence was so strong and so alive in European circles of academia, when in America his works are often presented briefly on the day in class that graphic scores and 4’33” are discussed.”
“I think there is a misconception that a lot of this work is ‘easy’ to perform based on a glance at the score, but I believe it requires a real commitment,” says Epstein. Most ambitious are the two rare performances of the monumental 1965 multimedia work Variations V, both at Collaboraction on Sat 4/14. Photocells triggered by dancers send signals to TV and VGA monitors, and audio and video of the performance is fed back into the electronics—suffice it to say, it’s complicated.
What’s so special about an eighth birthday? Justin Schwier of Underground Communique Records admits that there’s no real reason his punk label is throwing an anniversary party on Sat 3/31 at Township, as opposed to doing it some other year. The label didn’t pat itself on the back when it turned five, and it probably won’t when it turns ten—why now?
On Saturday, Schwier will be hawking crisp new T-shirts and copies of the hot-off-the-presses debut seven-inch from the first band, Eastland Disaster; the rest of the bill, headliner first, is Shot Baker, Vacation Bible School, and Infected.
