New and new new music

Ever wonder what avant garde rock performance groups do
on Sunday afternoons before a gig?
They go to Target.
I ran into members of Sleepytime Gorilla Museum, playing in Five Points tonight, at the Target near Lexington. One of the road crew was very excited about the choices of footballs available.
The group has been around since 1999 (considerably longer than than Target and the Highway 378 sprawl over former farmlands that it is part of) and uses traditional and homemade instruments, such as the Sledgehammer Dulcimer. The show starts around 9 at Sudsworks, right on Devine Street.

If that's all too much, I'd suggest going to hear slightly less new music.
The USC Graduate String Quartet plays works by Bela Barton (that's him with the cig), Dmitri Shostakovich and Antonin Dvorak at 7:30 p.m. Monday.
Bartok's Third String Quartet, from 1926, is a short but demanding work that squeezes a great deal from a minimal amount of thematic material. It's one of his best shorter works.
Much better known is Dvorak's "American" Quartet, which he wrote in 1893 while spending a summer in Iowa, and shares characteristics with his "New World Symphony" written around the same time.
It's all rounded out with a polka by Shostakovich. And if you want to know what that's like you'll just have to go and hear it.

Come back this week for:
Morihiko and Mahler and the S.C. Philharmonic.
Chamber music master Charles Wadsworth, leaves the building.