This event will also be livestreamed on Youtube. You will be able to watch this event live, or at any time after broadcast.

Bodies Electric is an electric guitar quartet founded by John Chang, who assembled a group of players devoted to experimentation and improvisation. Charles Wuorinen's Electric Quartet (2015) was written for Chang and Bodies Electric, a psychedelic electronic medium with pungent rock overtones. Among the composers whose work they have performed: Frank Zappa.

In addition to Varèse and Zappa, featured composers in tonight’s concert include David Claman, Kanghee Choi, Frank Brickle, Terry Champlin, David Loeb , Kyle Miller, Paula Matthusen, Gillian Welch, John Chang and William Anderson.

Zappa was a self-taught composer whose work embraced rock, pop, jazz, chamber, orchestral, fusion, and musique concrète. He first heard about Edgard Varèse, the father of electronic music, in a Look magazine article and began to seek out his music, eventually spotting The Complete Works of Edgard Varèse, Volume One in a sale bin – it had been used, unsuccessfully, to demonstrate hi-fi. On his fifteenth birthday, Zappa used $5 from his mother to call the composer: “I figured Mr Varèse lived in New York because the record was made in New York (and because he was so weird, he would live in Greenwich Village). I got New York Information, and sure enough, he was in the phone book.” Zappa never did meet the man he described as “my idol” and treasured a letter he received from him in 1957, written in “very tiny scientific-looking script”.

Varèse died in 1965 and his house at 188 Sullivan Street is marked by a plaque. Not long after, Frank Zappa and the Mothers of Invention began a residency at the Garrick Theater, 152 Bleecker Street, above the Café au Go-Go… opened to rival the Bitter End.