READER: RAINFOREST IV

DAVID TUDOR (1926–1996)

David Tudor stands as one of the central figures in the postwar American and international music scene. The prolific artist, who passed away in 1996, gained recognition during his lifetime for his contributions as an interpreter, composer, and performer as well as a pioneer in the field of live electronics. Until recently, however, this recognition has remained largely confined to the world of experimental music itself – unlike his friend and colleague John Cage.

For almost two decades, from the 1950s onward, Tudor, a virtuoso pianist, was virtually the only musician to devote himself exclusively to interpreting and performing new and experimental music. He premiered works by the likes of Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Mauricio Kagel, Christian Wolff, and – time and again – John Cage. Beyond his skill as a pianist, he was also capable of interpreting scores that challenged the performer to employ chance practices and take interpretive liberties. It was almost inevitable then that this would lead Tudor himself to take up composition, which he did, starting in the 1960s. It was his self-built electronic instruments that made his name. As early as the 1950s, he had begun to experiment with electronic sound generators and sound modulation devices. Unlike many of his peers in this era, who for the most part composed in the studio and recorded electronic music on audiotape, Tudor conceived and built his sound generators and modulators largely on his own, for use in live performance. The oftentimes small and modular devices could be flexibly deployed and easily combined into hardware clusters. For this reason, Tudor is today considered the progenitor of “live electronics” – a term that can be traced back to Tudor’s on-stage experiments and that does indeed describe something explicitly new in the performance setting that only increased in popularity from the mid-1960s onward. These performances were complex events that promised more than just music. It seemed the traditional concert setting had been ­overcome. Works like Rainforest IV (1973) – consisting of an array of resonating objects, fitted with transducers and installed throughout a given space – broke with familiar performance conventions. They were conceived as performative installations.

From the beginning, Tudor collaborated with artists working in other disciplines to establish a new mode of collaborative composition and performance. Among these, above all, are his many collaborations with choreographer Merce Cunningham, who commissioned Tudor to compose and perform pieces for his dance company (as its musical director), as well as collaborative projects with visual artists such as Robert Rauschenberg, Marcel Duchamp, Jackie Matisse, Molly Davies, Fujiko Nakaya, and Sophia Ogielska. Tudor also played a crucial role in founding both E.A.T. (Experiments in Art and Technology) and the Composers Inside Electronics collective that, as of 1973, has been bringing musicians together with visual artists.