As a percussionist, Jonathan Bernard is used to keeping an eye on the time;but he's recently found that it can also pay to be late. Such was the case when he turned up tardy to a Vancouver New Music;presented concert of John Cage's music last November.

"I didn't want to go into the hall in between pieces," he explains on the line from his East Vancouver home. While he was waiting for the intermission, he started chatting with representatives from Editions Peters, the New York City publishing house that holds the rights to Cage's scores. That casual contact has since led to an artistic coup: the North American premiere of Dance Music for Elfrid Ide , a long-lost score from the late master of the avant-garde.

"They told me about this newly unearthed score of a 1941 percussion sextet that had been found in the Mills College archives," says Bernard, referring to the Bay Area institute where Cage once taught. "They were in the process of publishing it, and I just said, 'Hey, why don't we do the premiere here in Vancouver?' And because they'd been in Vancouver for a couple of days and were probably enamoured of the scene here, they quickly said, 'Sure, that makes sense!'"

Bolstered by guests Marguerite Witvoet and Vern Griffiths, Bernard and his fellow Fringe Group percussionists will give two performances of Cage's three-movement piece at the Vancouver Art Gallery next Friday (June 22), as part of the FUSE series's first dusk-to-dawn event. For more information on FUSE and its other featured performers, which include Radix Theatre and Battery Opera, visit www.vanartgallery.bc.ca/events_and_programs/fuse.html .