A musical notation can either describe an event that has already happened or prescribe an event to be performed by the reader. No Collective's (You Nakai. et al.) Concertos, the second book in the Emergency Playscript Series, uses both description and prescription to notate a musical performance. The original Concertos premiered in 2008 in Tokyo, performed by four musicians, a dog, a bird, and several guests. The playscript evokes the original piece while embedding the experience of reading the playscript into any subsequent performances of the piece.

No Collective (You Nakai, et al.) makes music performances which explore and problematize both the conceptual and material infrastructures of music and performance.

Central to their endeavor is the generally unquestioned notion of people sharing "one" space and time at a music performance. In an attempt to dismantle this pseudo-truism, No Collective employ various strategies which extend from the tweaking of concert flyers (giving different starting time for each flyer, making three different flyers with different titles and designs but with the same date and place, etc), contrivances to make each person a “solo” audience (dragging each audience’s seat to different parts of the venue, controlling the sound volume in relation to the distance to a specific person, etc), to the pluralization of the framing of performance (packing all equipments during performance leaving only portable equipments carried by performers which continues to play as they head home with friends, etc). The basic objective of these temporal constructs is theoretical–ontological in that it examines what time is and the different ways it may be systematized, and practical-political in that it criticizes a singular ground to which all differences can be reduced, by foregrounding several incommensurate grounds.

ISBN: 978-1-933254-75-3
Trade Paperback
Perfect-bound. 50 pp, 5 x 8 in
Publication Date: April 14 2011
Distribution: SPD
Series: Emergency Playscripts