David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of

experimental music Experimental music is a general label for any music or music genre that pushes existing boundaries and genre definitions. Experimental compositional practice is defined broadly by exploratory sensibilities radically opposed to, and questioning of, ...

Life and career

Tudor was born in

Philadelphia, Pennsylvania Philadelphia, often called Philly, is the largest city in the Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, the sixth-largest city in the U.S., the second-largest city in both the Northeast megalopolis and Mid-Atlantic regions after New York City. Since ...

. He studied piano with

Irma Wolpe Irma Wolpe Rademacher (March 15, 1902 – January 6, 1984), née Schoenberg, was a Romanian-born American pianist and teacher. Life and career She was born in 1902 in Galați, Western Moldavia, Romania, into a bourgeois Jewish family, the thir ...

and composition with

Stefan Wolpe Stefan Wolpe (25 August 1902, Berlin – 4 April 1972, New York City) was a German-Jewish-American composer. He was associated with interdisciplinary modernism, with affiliations ranging from the Bauhaus, Berlin agitprop theater and the kibbutz mo ...

and 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 Pierre Louis Joseph Boulez (; 26 March 1925 – 5 January 2016) was a French composer, conductor and writer, and the founder of several musical institutions. He was one of the dominant figures of post-war Western classical music. Born in Mo ...

in 1950, and a European tour in 1954 greatly enhanced his reputation.

Karlheinz Stockhausen Karlheinz Stockhausen (; 22 August 1928 – 5 December 2007) was a German composer, widely acknowledged by critics as one of the most important but also controversial composers of the 20th and early 21st centuries. He is known for his groundb ...

dedicated his ''Klavierstück VI'' (1955) to Tudor. Tudor also gave early performances of works by Morton Feldman,

Earle Brown Earle Brown (December 26, 1926 – July 2, 2002) was an American composer who established his own formal and notational systems. Brown was the creator of "open form," a style of musical construction that has influenced many composers since� ...

, Christian Wolff and

La Monte Young La Monte Thornton Young (born October 14, 1935) is an American composer, musician, and performance artist recognized as one of the first American minimalist composers and a central figure in Fluxus and post-war avant-garde music. He is best k ...

. The composer with whom Tudor is particularly associated is

John Cage John Milton Cage Jr. (September 5, 1912 – August 12, 1992) was an American composer and music theorist. A pioneer of indeterminacy in music, electroacoustic music, and non-standard use of musical instruments, Cage was one of the leading f ...

; 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, once stating "what you had to do was to make a situation that would interest ''him''. That was the role he played."Holzaepfel, John
"David Tudor and Gordon Mumma"
Liner note essay. New World Records. The two worked closely together on many of Cage's pieces, both works for piano and electronic pieces, including for the

Smithsonian Folkways Smithsonian Folkways is the nonprofit record label of the Smithsonian Institution. It is a part of the Smithsonian's Smithsonian Center for Folklife and Cultural Heritage, located at Capital Gallery in downtown Washington, D.C. The label was fo ...

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 selected the works to be performed for the 25th Anniversary Retrospective Concert of the music of John Cage (May 16, 1958), and performed in the premiere of the ''Concert For Piano and Orchestra'' given as the closing work for that concert. Moreover, Tudor received a Foundation for Contemporary Arts John Cage Award (1992). After a stint teaching at

Darmstadt Darmstadt () is a city in the state of Hesse in Germany, located in the southern part of the Rhine-Main-Area (Frankfurt Metropolitan Region). Darmstadt has around 160,000 inhabitants, making it the fourth largest city in the state of Hesse ...

from 1956 to 1961, Tudor began to wind up his activities as a pianist to concentrate on composing. He wrote mostly electronic works, many commissioned by Cage's partner, choreographer

Merce Cunningham Mercier Philip "Merce" Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009) was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years. He frequently collaborated with artists of other discipl ...

. 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 Chess is a board game for two players, called White and Black, each controlling an army of chess pieces in their color, with the objective to checkmate the opponent's king. It is sometimes called international chess or Western chess to dist ...

game, where each move triggers a lighting effect or projection. At the premiere, the game was played between John Cage and

Marcel Duchamp Henri-Robert-Marcel Duchamp (, , ; 28 July 1887 – 2 October 1968) was a French painter, sculptor, chess player, and writer whose work is associated with Cubism, Dada, and conceptual art. Duchamp is commonly regarded, along with Pablo Picasso ...

. ''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 The National Institutes of Design (NIDs) are a group of autonomous public design universities in India, with the primary institute, founded in 1961, in Ahmedabad, with extension campuses in Gandhinagar and Bengaluru. The other NIDs are loc ...

in Ahmedabad. Upon Cage's death in 1992, Tudor took over as music director of the

Merce Cunningham Dance Company Mercier Philip "Merce" Cunningham (April 16, 1919 – July 26, 2009) was an American dancer and choreographer who was at the forefront of American modern dance for more than 50 years. He frequently collaborated with artists of other discipl ...

. Among many works created for the company, Tudor composed ''Soundings: Ocean Diary'' (1994), the electronic component of ''Ocean'', which was conceived by John Cage and Merce Cunningham, with

choreography Choreography is the art or practice of designing sequences of movements of physical bodies (or their depictions) in which motion or form or both are specified. ''Choreography'' may also refer to the design itself. A choreographer is one who cr ...

by Merce Cunningham, orchestral music by Andrew Culver and design by Marsha Skinner. Tudor died after a series of strokes in

Tomkins Cove, New York Tomkins Cove is a hamlet in the Town of Stony Point, Rockland County, New York, United States, located north of Stony Point; east of Harriman State Park; south of Doodletown and west of the Hudson River. It is located north-northwest of New Y ...

at the age of 70.

Piano Realisations

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 agecomposed", John Holzaepfel contends, "was written with one person in mind", and this person was Tudor.Holzapfel, J. (2002). 'Cage and Tudor'. In D. Nichols (Ed.), ''The Cambridge Companion to Cage'' (pp. 169–185). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 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.Iddon, M. (2013). ''John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. In his realisations of these scores, Tudor "pin edthem 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 Improvisation is the activity of making or doing something not planned beforehand, using whatever can be found. Improvisation in the performing arts is a very spontaneous performance without specific or scripted preparation. The skills of impr ...

from the score, and rather each performance of ''Winter Music'' by Tudor was consistent across time. 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". 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". However, Ben Piekut argues differently, drawing from the work of

Bruno Latour Bruno Latour (; 22 June 1947 – 9 October 2022) was a French philosopher, anthropologist and sociologist.Wheeler, Will. ''Bruno Latour: Documenting Human and Nonhuman Associations'' Critical Theory for Library and Information Science. Libraries ...

. These fixed realisations are examples of 'distributed authorship' where "the conception, meaning and sound-world of a given composition is shared across multiple subjectivities".Piekut, B. (2011). ''Experimentalism Otherwise''. Berkeley: University of California Press. 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.

References

External links

Tudor Website
* Finding Aid for David Tudor papers, Getty Research Institute *
The Art of David Tudor: Audio and Video

''Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music'' Album Details
at

David Tudor interview
April 7, 1986 {{DEFAULTSORT:Tudor, David 1926 births 1996 deaths 20th-century classical composers 20th-century classical pianists 20th-century American composers 20th-century American pianists 20th-century American male musicians American classical composers American male classical composers American classical pianists American male pianists Avant-garde pianists Contemporary classical music performers Experimental composers Experiments in Art and Technology collaborating artists Male classical pianists Black Mountain College faculty Classical musicians from Pennsylvania Musicians from Philadelphia Designers at National Institute of Design

Life and career

Piano Realisations

See also

References

Further reading

External links