David Tudor
David Tudor | |
---|---|
Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, U.S. | |
Died | August 13, 1996 Tomkins Cove, New York, U.S. | (aged 70)
Occupation(s) | Musician, composer |
Instrument(s) | Piano, electronics, bandoneon |
David Eugene Tudor (January 20, 1926 – August 13, 1996) was an American pianist and composer of experimental music.
Life and career
Tudor was born in
The composer with whom Tudor is particularly associated is
After a stint teaching at
In 1969, Tudor set up India's first electronic music studio at the National Institute of Design in Ahmedabad.[3]
Upon Cage's death in 1992, Tudor took over as music director of the
Tudor died after a series of strokes in Tomkins Cove, New York at the age of 70.[4]
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 [Cage] composed", John Holzaepfel contends, "was written with one person in mind", and this person was Tudor.[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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".[6]
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".[5]
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".[8] 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.
See also
- Avant-garde music
- Indeterminacy (music)
- Joan La Barbara
- 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering
- Sea Tails
References
- ^ Holzaepfel, John. "David Tudor and Gordon Mumma". Liner note essay. New World Records.
- ^ "David Tudor :: Foundation for Contemporary Arts". www.foundationforcontemporaryarts.org. Retrieved April 5, 2018.
- ^ Keefe, Alexander. "Subcontinental Synth: David Tudor and the First Moog in India". East of Borneo. Retrieved May 20, 2013.
- ^ Kozinn, Allan (August 15, 1996). "David Tudor, 70, Electronic Composer, Dies". The New York Times. Retrieved July 1, 2019.
- ^ a b Holzapfel, J. (2002). 'Cage and Tudor'. In D. Nichols (Ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Cage (pp. 169–185). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ^ a b Iddon, M. (2013). John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
- ^ Rogalsky, M. (2010). '"Nature" as an organising principle: Approaches to chance and the natural in the work of John Cage, David Tudor and Alvin Lucier'. Organised Sound, 15(2), 133–136. https://doi.org/10.1017/S1355771810000129
- ^ Piekut, B. (2011). Experimentalism Otherwise. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Further reading
- Nakai, You (2021). Reminded by the Instruments: David Tudor's Music. Oxford University Press. ISBN 978-0-19-068676-5.
External links
- Tudor Website
- Finding Aid for David Tudor papers, Getty Research Institute
- Lovely Music Biographies: David Tudor
- Indeterminacy: New Aspect of Form in Instrumental and Electronic Music Album Details at Smithsonian Folkways
- David Tudor interview, April 7, 1986