Bandoneon!

Bandoneon! (a combine), performed in October 1966 as part of the 9 Evenings: Theatre and Engineering, has been regarded as Tudor’s first work as a composer. However, the conception of this piece was not only directly influenced by two other amplified bandoneon pieces he realized in the same year, Gordon Mumma’s Mesa and Lowell Cross’s Musica Instrumentalis, but had also started off as a realization of a “Mobius-Strip” composition by Mauricio Kagel. Moreover, most of the modular electronics in his setup were also used in other realizations around the same period. The true difference lies in how these common materials were used and to what ends. What the self-proclaimed effort to make a “giant white noise generator” from scratch brings to the fore is a synecdochical relationship between the modular instruments used and the larger instrumental complex they compose. The investigation of this coordination between the parts and the whole reveals a strange disappearance of an entire group of instruments considered central to the performance, a mystery that highlights the peculiar nature of Tudor’s “composition.”