You Nakai is a composer and a scholar who is currently researching the music of David Tudor for his doctoral dissertation at New York University. His writings have been published in journals such as Perspectives of New Music and TACET: Experimental Music Review, and his research has been supported by a Fulbright scholarship. He makes music and dance as part of No Collective (nocollective.com), which was recently featured in Leonardo Music Journal (24) as one of the musical groups doing interesting things with technology. Their recent works include Concertos No.4 (2012, National Museum of Modern Art, Tokyo), where professional blind athletes played soccer with ball-shaped loudspeakers in a completely darkened 16,000-square-foot performance space filled with 300 audience members, and Vesna’s Fall (2014, Judson Church/Black Mountain College), a dance piece made in collaboration with Lindsey Drury, in which each dancer, enwrapped in a 13-foot movable curtained stage, danced to the audible counts from other dancers while she herself counted for others she could not see. Nakai also runs the publisher “Already Not Yet,” which has recently released C. Covito: Works After Weather (2014), the first comprehensive catalogue of the work by the maverick Argentinian composer.
John Cage and David Tudor visited Japan in October 1962 at the invitation of the Sogetsu Art Center (SAC). Over the course of the month they gave seven concerts in Tokyo, Kyoto, Osaka, and Sapporo, causing a sensation that would become known as “the John Cage shock.”
