David Tudor

David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music. After playing the U.S. premiere of the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Pierre Boulez in 1950, he premiered works by American composers including Morton Feldman and especially John Cage written for him; Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated a work to him. He turned to composing, including many projects for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. He set up India's first electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad in 1969. After Cage's death in 1992, he succeeded him as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.

Tudor was born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, on January 20, 1926.^[1][2] Tudor began his career as an organist,^[1] first in 1943 at Trinity Church in Swarthmore, Pennsylvania, then also at Swarthmore College from 1945 to 1947. He began piano studies with Irma Wolpe at the College, later composition studies with her husband, Stefan Wolpe.^[2] After World War II, he attended, like many other Americans interest in new culture, the summer schools at Black Mountain College, North Carolina. Artists meeting there included Josef Albers, John Cage, Remy Charlip, Merce Cunningham, Buckminster Fuller, Willem and Elaine de Kooning and Robert Rauschenberg. The dance theatre of Cage and Cunningham formed there in the early 1950s, with aesthetics including live dance and live music, with Tudor as the musical part.^[1]

Tudor became known as one of the leading performers of avant-garde piano music. He gave the first American performance of the Piano Sonata No. 2 by Pierre Boulez in 1950,^[1][2] and a European tour in 1954 greatly enhanced his reputation. Karlheinz Stockhausen dedicated his Klavierstück VI (1955) to Tudor. Tudor also gave early performances of works by Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Christian Wolff and La Monte Young.^[2] The composer particularly associated with Tudor was Cage;^[1] he gave the premiere of Cage's Music of Changes, Concert For Piano and Orchestra and the notorious 4' 33". Cage said that many of his pieces were written either specifically for Tudor to perform or with him in mind,^[1] once stating "what you had to do was to make a situation that would interest him. That was the role he played."^[3] The two worked closely together on many of Cage's pieces, both works for piano and electronic pieces, including for the Smithsonian Folkways album: Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music (1959). Tudor also performs on several recordings of Cage's music, including the Mainstream record of Cartridge Music, the recording on Columbia Records of Variations II, and the two Everest records of Variations IV. Tudor performed in the premiere of the Concert For Piano and Orchestra.^[3]

Tudor taught at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse from 1956 to 1961.^[2] He began to wind up his activities as a pianist to concentrate on composing. He wrote mostly electronic works, many commissioned for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. His homemade musical circuits are considered landmarks in live electronic music and electrical instrument building as a form of composition. One piece, Reunion (1968), written jointly with Lowell Cross, features a chess game where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and Marcel Duchamp. Reunion is erroneously attributed to Cage in James Pritchett's book The Music Of John Cage. Rain Forest is a sound installation created from constructed sculpture and everyday objects such as a metal barrel, a vintage computer disk, and plastic tubing which served as a musical accompaniment. (David Tudor and Composers Inside Electronics Inc.: Rain forest V (variation 1))

In 1969, Tudor set up India's first electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.^[4]

Upon Cage's death in 1992, Tudor took over as music director of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company.^[2] He received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award in 1992.^[5] Among works created for the company, Tudor composed Soundings: Ocean Diary (1994), the electronic component of Ocean, which was conceived by Cage and Cunningham, with choreography by Cunningham, orchestral music by Andrew Culver and design by Marsha Skinner.^[2]

Tudor died after a series of strokes in Tomkins Cove, New York, at the age of 70.^[1][6]

From 1951 until the late 1960s, Tudor (mainly as pianist) regularly performed the indeterminate work of John Cage. Throughout this time, "all of the music [Cage] composed", John Holzaepfel contends, "was written with one person in mind", and this person was Tudor.^[7] The culmination of this period were works that required a significant imprint of Tudor in performance. Winter Music (1957), for example, comprises a score of twenty pages, that each contain from one to 61 cluster-chords per page, with the performer deciding which of these to play.^[8] In his realisations of these scores, Tudor "pin[ned] them down like butterflies", making the indeterminate determined, such that each performance of these works was consistent with the last. He chose to 'fix' his interpretation, such that he never improvised from the score, and rather each performance of Winter Music by Tudor was consistent across time.^[9] As Martin Iddon explains: "Tudor's practice was, broadly, to create a single realisation and then to use that version of the piece in all subsequent recordings".^[8]

Despite the significant role Tudor had in the creative act, "during his years as a pianist, Tudor never considered himself as a composer, or even a co-composer, of the music he played".^[7]

However, Benjamin Piekut argues differently, drawing from the work of Bruno Latour. These fixed realisations are examples of 'distributed authorship' where "the conception, meaning and sound-world of a given composition is shared across multiple subjectivities".^[10] The conception and meaning of the work for Cage is always created with Tudor in mind, and thus shared across the subjectivities of these two actors. Similarly, the output 'sound-world' is shared in that Tudor's function in realising the score is decision making based on Cage's stimuli (score), and Cage's stimuli does not present a coherent sound-world on its own. Piekut goes on to align this creative-distribution with Cage's Buddhist anti-ego worldview.^[10]

Tudor was the composer for the 1983 video installation Sea Tails with video artist Molly Davies and artist Jackie Matisse.^[11] Matisse created four various kites, Davies filmed them being 'flown' underwater (drug behind a boat in the Bahamas near Nassau) for eight days, and Tudor simultaneously recorded sound below and above deck, later layered, mixed, and rerecorded the sounds onto three separate tapes. The combined work was first presented at the Pompidou Center in 1983 and later exhibited at the Getty Center in 2004.^[11]

• Nakai, You (2021). Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-068676-5.

• Official website
• Finding Aid for David Tudor papers, Getty Research Institute
  • The Art of David Tudor: Audio and Video
• Lovely Music Biographies: David Tudor
• Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music Album Details at Smithsonian Folkways
• Duffie, Bruce: David Tudor (interview), April 7, 1986