Amplified Piano

The introduction of electronic amplification to the piano, which began as an innocent bluff by a teenage composer living in the Arctic Circle, had a devastating consequence for Tudor’s virtuosity on the keyboard instrument: it dissolved his control of escapement mechanism, opening up instead the world of feedback where a sound once activated could potentially never end. A detailed examination of Tudor’s idiosyncratic realization of John Cage’s Variations II in 1962 shows what previous scholars, as well as the composer himself, have failed to see: the specific nature of the amplified piano that was altogether a different instrument from the piano. What the new instrument presented was not simply more complexity and indeterminacy but a specific kind of complexity and indeterminacy which is reflected in how Tudor actually performed the music.

Reflections

The music Tudor made in the 1980s is difficult to understand. On the surface, it appears that he returned to the use of amplified physical objects, particularly through his partnership with Jackie Monnier. Beneath the positive appearance, however, he was pursuing an almost inaudible “negative music” based on virtually silent noises included in his past recordings extracted by using a noise gate in reverse mode. These two parallel courses intertwine in his subsequent collaboration with Monnier using radars and ultrasonic transceivers to detect the movement of kite-like volatiles reflecting the otherwise invisible movement of wind, initially conceived as an attempt to simulate the unfinished island project. These endeavors show Tudor exploring the virtual nature of silence through technology, which brings back to mind Cage’s infamous 4'33" that Tudor premiered more than thirty years before, as well as Antonin Artaud’s conception of “Virtual Reality” which first entered the English language through Tudor’s involvement. What appears at the intersection of these parallel meandering channels is the status of the actual body which processes the distinction between the virtual and the actual, a fragile instrument that at the time was beginning to fail on Tudor’s end.

Out

Tudor’s final work was a series of visual art made in collaboration with Sophia Ogielska. Using his old diagram of Untitled as material, Tudor aimed to make a tablature-like map detailing the actual way he performed the 1972 no-input piece. Ogielska remembers a silent concert Tudor performed using the diagram printed on transparencies and projected in human scale onto the wall of his room. At the end, they ran out of time, and Tudor had already lost his eyesight when the Maps were finally completed. However, Tudor’s insistence on specific colors on the transparencies that would cast colorful shadows, a concern that appears to have been rooted in his synesthesia, resulted in the use of special paint that, as a byproduct, enabled the blinded Tudor to touch the surface of the small-scale prototypes that Ogielska had made with his fingertips and sense the work through auxiliary channels. This fact triggers a reflection, for this entire study, which began through an accidental encounter with Tudor’s materials, has similarly been a product of countless by-products which were neither intended nor entirely fortuitous, but rather influenced from afar through many seeds planted in advance.

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.”

In

David Tudor has long been known as an influential yet enigmatic character who lived in many anecdotes and spoke only in riddles on the few occasions he did so. The beginning of this research was an accidental encounter with Tudor’s materials at the Getty Research Center, which revealed the possibility of actually examining what he left behind. I gradually began to realize that the endeavor might be best seen as a complex puzzle that Tudor had composed for posterity to solve. In order to cope with the many obstacles on the way, both technical as well as conceptual, I developed a circular method of approaching Tudor’s materials from the way Tudor approached his materials, a sort of reverse musicology which accumulates its tools and theories from the very object of research. Along the way there were some influences from critical organology or microhistory, but the most important discipline in solving Tudor’s puzzle was keeping the focus on the level of specificity without quickly resorting to generalizations.

Sound Systems

The story of Tudor’s transition from performer to composer is undermined by the observation of archival material which reveals he continued to realize other composers’ works even after he supposedly became a composer. A list of ten realizations Tudor retrospectively selected in the early 1970s provides a preliminary guide to reflect on the complex trajectory of his musical activity in the 1960s which departed from the traditional format of score and its performance, giving birth to “sound systems” as a tentative coordination of modular instruments in which the composer’s material served as a mere pre-text or a point of departure. In order to understand the nature of Tudor’s realization of this period it is necessary to also delve into the technical specificity of equipment. A case study of Fontana Mix, a material composed by John Cage, which Tudor realized as late as 1968 is presented, triggering a discussion on the complex entanglement between the acts of realization and composition.

Natural Objects

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.

Neural Syntheses

One of Tudor’s last projects used an instrument custom-made for him using the neural network chip that had just been developed. The Neural Synthesizer began as an attempt to build a universal instrument that would synthesize the proliferation of his modular devices. But the actual mechanism of the analog chip, which happened to be an extensive array of amplifiers, shifted the nature of the endeavor, causing a return to the no-input works from the 1970s. In this way, the neural network instrument, used against its usual purpose of extracting patterns from past examples, nonetheless found a strange connection with reminiscences of Tudor’s own past. The analyses of Neural Syntheses and Neural Network Plus, two series of works Tudor made using his new synthesizer, further brings up the issue of memory concerning the performance of his music, which is different every time yet open to revivals, something he tried to capture by setting a number to each performance. This also connects to the problem of how Tudor thought of passing his music on to others so that they could be performed in his absence, a natural concern in the last years of his life, but also something that reflected his lifelong interest in the role of memory and reminiscence in music.

Island Eye Island Ear

For more than ten years since 1974, Tudor collaborated with Fujiko Nakaya and Jackie Monnier on a grand-scale project to convert an entire island into a musical instrument. His plan was to play back recordings of sounds recorded at various locations on an island via parabolic antenna loudspeakers installed throughout the same island, which created sound beams modulated by wind that visitors would hear only when they crossed paths with them. Although Tudor spoke of the aim of Island Eye Island Ear as an attempt to examine the maximum scale of feedback, neither electronic nor acoustic feedback appears in the plan. This puzzle can only be solved by accounting for the experience of the visitors who walk around the island-instrument hearing one sound and reflecting on another heard before, something Tudor was exploring in other works from the same period such as Rainforest. The fact that the island project was met by criticisms of environmental destruction and remained unfinished points to the idiosyncratic nature of Tudor’s conception of “nature” derived from the teachings of Rudolf Steiner, and hints at the possible limit of his conceptual and physical enhancement of what musical instruments can be.

Pepsi Pavilion

In 1970, Tudor composed the sound system of an entire pavilion at the Osaka World Expo as a “musical instrument.” When taken at face value, this statement implies an uncanny image of “instrument” that is more difficult to grasp than the ordinary use of the term in electronic music to address modular components. For if the Pepsi Pavilion is itself an instrument, then the instrument is larger than a human being, thus placing the performer, along with the audience, “inside” the instrument. The presence of the Pepsi Modifier that Gordon Mumma designed and installed inside the pavilion, in addition to the fact that Tudor made nine or ten “programs” to be performed there, further complicates the simple equation between instrument and composition that has been associated with Tudor’s music. The investigation of what really happened at the Pepsi Pavilion led to the puzzle of just how many instruments were involved, which triggers a reflection on the topological binary of “inside” and “outside” that Tudor used to make sense of his approach.