Tudor claimed that in his seminal work Untitled, electronic components were discovered as “natural objects” as they were patched in a feedback loop creating a giant oscillator which generated sounds without exterior input. But his description of the piece as “part of a never-ending series of discovered works” calls into question its very status as a standalone “work.” Turning to its performance history appears to only complicate the puzzle. Despite his aim to perform everything live, the proliferation of modular instruments forced Tudor to record the output of his setup in advance and use this recording as input source in subsequent performances. He would later create Toneburst, which realized the no-input principle without the aid of pre-recorded sources. Shortly before his death, Tudor revived Toneburst for other musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company to perform. A close examination of recordings reveals that the same three source tapes were used not only in all performances of Untitled, but also in all performances of Toneburst after its revival. This surprising discovery, along with Tudor’s use of the linguistic indeterminacy inherent in the title of Untitled to solve a conundrum he faced in the revival, is used to depict the complex oscillation between work and performance in Tudor’s live-electronic music.
The dynamics of synchronization of two-stage van der Pol generator