David Tudor - Biography
The career of David Tudor is generally partitioned into two phases; that of his early work as the premier interpreter and performer of new music and of his later focus on composing his own electronic based pieces. These two career chapters are linked together by the pioneering spirit of Tudor’s approach to music. It was this spirit that led to his intrepid interpretations of new compositions by the likes of John Cage, Earle Brown, Morton Feldman, Karlheinz Stockhausen, La Monte Young, Christian Wolff, Stephan Wolpe and many other leaders of new experimental music in the mid-20th century. This same forward thinking approach fostered Tudor’s love of working with electronics and the new sounds that could be achieved with them. It is in composing his own music, in essence merging the indeterminate compositional techniques of the composers he interpreted in the late 1950’s and early 60’s with the live electronics he developed in the years directly after, that his most important work emerged.
David Eugene Tudor was born January 20, 1926 in Philadelphia, PA. Tudor’s first professional work was as the organist at St. Mark’s Church in Philadelphia from 1944 to 1948. He later studied composition under Stephan Wolpe and piano under Irma Wolpe. A few short years later in New York Tudor performed the American debut of Pierre Boulez’s Second Piano Sonata. It was only the second performance of the work anywhere in the world and it thrust Tudor to the forefront of the experimental music scene.
Tudor began his creative partnership with American experimental composer John Cage in the early 1950’s and it is to Cage’s work that Tudor remains most closely associated. The two began working around the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and Tudor would go on to give the premiers of some of Cage’s most important pieces such as 'Music of Changes' and 'Concerto for Piano.' Tudor also infamously debuted Cage’s ode to silence, '4’33”' in which Tudor positioned himself at the piano, took a deep breath, closed the keyboard lid and sat there for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. It is a well-known fact that Tudor’s ability to interpret and perform these conceptual and sometimes difficult pieces was so insightful many of these composers wrote specifically for him. Some have gone so far as to say that Tudor’s interpretation essentially shaped the compositions, as in Stockhausen’s 'Klavierstuck VI' from 1955, which is dedicated to Tudor. John Cage has stated that the majority of his work composed between the mid-1950’s until around 1970 was written for Tudor or for his consideration.
During the mid to late 1950’s, Tudor acted as instructor and pianist-in-residence at Black Mountain College in North Carolina and at the Internationale Ferienkurse fur Neue Musik at Darmstadt. It was also at this time that he began to experiment with the electronic modification of sound sources. Tudor worked on his earliest experiments with John Cage for his Project of Music for Magnetic Tape. The duo also produced Indeterminacy (1959 Folkways Records), a record on which John Cage reads 90 stories to Tudor’s accompaniment on piano and manipulated tape. This record can be seen as a major stepping-stone to Tudor’s later compositions for live electronics and is of course a classic of indeterminate composition.
Several years later Cage and Tudor would record a version of Cage’s 'Cartridge Music' that appeared on the album John Cage / Christian Wolff (1962 Mainstream). Conceived in 1960, 'Cartridge Music' was a breakthrough in utilizing electronics in live performance. Cage and Tudor attached contact microphones and cartridges from phonographs to an assortment of everyday objects. They used furniture, trash cans, pencils, buckets, ladders and the needles of the phonograph cartridges were replaced with matches, wire, feathers and so on. The objects are then picked up, touched, rubbed, dropped and handled in various ways. The resulting music is a kind of indeterminate musique concrete, very spontaneous and very live. By freeing the electronic sound sources from their fixed positions on pre-recorded tape, Cage and Tudor combined the unspecified structures of Cage’s compositions with improvisation and musique concrete. This was definitely something new.
An incredible version of 'Cartridge Music' was recorded in 1988, performed by David Tudor, Michael Pugliese and legendary Japanese experimental musician Takehisa Kosugi. It was released along with Cage’s 'Five Stone Wind', another piece featuring Tudor on live electronics, under the title Music For Merce Cunningham (1991 Mode Records).
Influenced by his work with John Cage, the beginning of the 1960’s saw Tudor start to move fully away from taped sound sources, instead finding inspiration in what we now call live electronics. At the time, almost all electronic music was performed with pre-recorded tape as the sound source. Don Buchla and Bob Moog had not yet invented their revolutionary synthesizers, meaning that Tudor was left to create his own devices. He designed and manufactured his own instruments and equipment capable of more flexible use in live performance than what could be achieved using only pre-recorded tape. As the 60’s drew to a close, Tudor had gradually ceased his activities as a pianist in order to concentrate on composition and his work with live electronics.
One of the first major pieces of its kind, 1968’s 'Rainforest' is a stunning work. Layers and layers of complex moving parts submerge the listener in a massive amount of gloriously minute detail. Tudor realized his idea of running electronic output through an object rather than a traditional loudspeaker. Using these various objects as audio conduits, Tudor suspended them from the ceiling down to head level. The objects buzz, click and hum with vibration, filling the performance space. Contact microphones allow Tudor to pick up any object’s output and send it back into his system of controls for additional processing and manipulation. He would then send that manipulated sound back out again to other objects or to loudspeakers, resulting in a super rich and amazingly detailed field of textures. 'Rainforest' is not just a performance piece employing live electronics, but a spatially diverse and masterfully alive indeterminate electronic composition. A sonic sculpture, if you will. Many versions of the work have been recorded, one of which is Rainforest IV (1981 Cramps Records), but arguably the definitive version was released in 1998 as Rainforest (1998 Mode Records).
In 1970, acting as one of the artistic directors of the Experiments in Art and Technology Project at the Pepsi Pavilion at Expo ’70 in Osaka, Japan, Tudor composed and performed several major new pieces. Among these was the groundbreaking 'Microphone,' now seen as a seminal piece of live electronic performance. A version of the piece performed at the Center for Contemporary Music at Mills College in 1973 was recorded and later released as Microphone (1978 Cramps Records, reissued 1996).
Throughout the 1970’s and 80’s, Tudor continued to focus sharply on electronic composition and performance, employing his self-built electronic devices to execute his singular music. He also continued his association with the Merce Cunningham Dance Company and this collaboration yielded many of his most important pieces such as 'Toneburst' in 1975, 'Pulsers' and 'Forest Speech' in 1976, 'Weatherings' in 1978, 'Phonemes' in 1981, 'Fragments' in 1984, 'Webwork' in 1987, 'Five Stone' in 1988 and 'Virtual Focus' in 1990. Several of these pieces can be found on the CDs Three Works For Live Electronics (1996 Lovely Music) and Live Electronic Music (2004 Electronic Music Foundation). Tudor integrated video, light projections and other multi-media into the performance of many of these pieces. On the passing of his old friend and collaborator John Cage, Tudor assumed the role of music director for the Merce Cunningham Dance Company in 1992.
One of the last major works by Tudor was Neural Synthesis Nos. 6-9 (1995 Lovely Music) written from 1992 to 1994. The piece was made on a synthesizer designed for Tudor with sixty-four non-linear amplifiers. These metaphorical neurons have thousands of interconnections, mimicking cells in the brain and capable of processing many analog signals. Armed with fourteen channels of audio output during performance, Tudor also uses his self-built processors to further manipulate the sound. On this recorded version of the piece he uses a binaural technique for spatially localizing the sound, moving it around the listener. It’s a wonderful work, artistically employing technology to create engaging music.
The legacy of Tudor’s work in creating a live version of musique concrete in which electronic sounds happen with spontaneous freedom, as opposed to being fixed on tape, has practitioners still today. Many of the musicians around the Metamkine and Erstwhile labels, including Jerome Noetinger, Lionel Marchetti, Gunter Muller and Gert-Jan Prins, employ techniques directly developed by Tudor in the 1960’s and 70’s. Live sound processing via laptop computers owe much to Tudor as well.
David Tudor was an imaginative pianist and interpreter of some of the most difficult and progressive music of the 20th century, as well as a consummate conceptualist and innovative composer. He delivered the premier performances of many of the most important compositions of his time. He almost single handedly defined the field of live electronics, designing his own equipment along the way as well as pioneering the use of multi-media settings in performance, ushering in a brave new era of sound. David Tudor passed away in 1996 at his home in Tomkins Cove, NY.