Reminded by the Instruments
David Tudor’s Music
You Nakai
Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and certain other countries.
Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America.
© Oxford University Press 2021
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by license, or under terms agreed with the appropriate reproduction rights organization. Inquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above.
You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer.
Library of Congress Control Number: 2020942225
ISBN 978–0–19–068676–5
1 3 5 7 9 8 6 4 2
Printed by Sheridan Books, Inc., United States of America
This volume is published with the generous support of the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
All photographs of instruments from the David Tudor Collection at Wesleyan University by You Nakai
All sonograms created using EAnalysis by You Nakai
All matrix map diagrams created by You Nakai
Color version of matrix map diagrams and instrument photographs are available at: remindedbytheinstruments.info
for Aevi, for all the time it took
Suppose everyone had a box with something in it: we call it a “beetle.” No one can look into anyone else’s box, and everyone says he knows what a beetle is only by looking at his beetle.—Here it would be quite possible for everyone to have something different in his box. One might even imagine such a thing constantly changing.—But suppose the word “beetle” had a use in these people’s language?—If so it would not be used as the name of a thing. The thing in the box has no place in the language-game at all; not even as a something: for the box might even be empty.—No, one can “divide through” by the thing in the box; it cancels out, whatever it is.
—Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, Section 293 (posthumous manuscript, April 1951)
As children we all had a box which we kept hidden; it contained a butterfly wing, a beetle, a lucky penny. For each, that box was private, intimate and secret; and yet we all (most of us) had it. Communication of art is between those boxes, between subjectives, the secret that we all share, each privately.
Maya Deren, “New Directions in Film Art” (lecture at the Cleveland Museum of Art, April 1951)
Abbreviations
Institutions/Archives
CIE Composers Inside Electronics
DTP David Tudor Papers (GRI)
DTC David Tudor Collection (Wesleyan University)
E.A.T. Experiments in Art and Technology
GRI Getty Research Institute
IRCAM Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/ Musique
MCDC Merce Cunningham Dance Company
STEIM Studio for Electro-Instrumental Music
TEEM Theatre Electronic Environmental Modular System
Electronics
AM Amplitude Modulation
E.E.G. Electroencephalography
EQ Equalizer
FM Frequency Modulation
L Line Level
MA Microphone Level
PC Polarity Control
PR Preamplifier
Instruments
If the instrument is found in the David Tudor Collection at Wesleyan University its Rogalsky number (from a list compiled by Matt Rogalsky) is attached after its name; “(no #)” for the extant ones without a number.
8Ø Multioutput Phase Shifter (Instrument 0007)
90 90-degree Phase Splitter (Instrument 0037)
150 Sony ECM-150 Electret Condenser Microphone (Instrument 0141)
180 180-degree Phase Splitter (instrument 0018) or 180-degree Phase Shifter (Instrument 0006)
800 Sharp RT-W800 Cassette Deck (Instrument 0446)
AD Electro-Harmonix Attack Decay Tape Reverse Simulator (no #)
AF Ibanez Auto Filter
B E/L
Guyatone PS-020 Bass Exciter/Limiter (no #)
B EQ Bass EQ
BFO or B.F. OSC
Beat Frequency Oscillator (Instrument 0021)
CH/FL
t.c. electronic Stereo Chorus + Flanger (no #)
CLIP Clipper (Instrument 0027)
D6
Sony Walkman WM-D6
DF Boss FT-2 Dynamic Filter
DG Drawmer DS-201 Dual Gate
D/G
Lead/Lag Complementary Phase Shifter (Instrument 0460)
D.SYN Drum Synthesizer
EMU or ENV.MOD.
BNB Kit Envelope Modification Unit (Instrument 0267)
EX or EC Electronic Crossover
FOG or FH
Olson Fog Horn (Instrument 0461)
FP Ibanez FP-777 Flying Pan Phaser
H.GEN Harmonic Generator (Instrument 0173)
IBN Ibanez PQ-9 Parametric EQ (no #)
INF Infinity Intimate Walkman (Instrument 0354)
K Touch Sensitive Photocell Key (Instrument 0252/ 0253)
LB EQ
Loco Box G#-6 6-Band Graphic Equalizer (Instrument 0303)
LEN or L.MOD or LENKURT Lenkurt Modulator (Instrument 0116/0174)
M1/M2 or mike P.A.
Olson Microphone Preamplifier TR-86 (Instrument 0022)
MB Shin-ei Mute Box Envelope Filter (Instrument 0472)
MG D&R Electronics Multigate
M.SYN
Minisynth (no #)
MT Mu-tron III Envelope Filter
NEXT Next SE-100 Signal Gate (Instrument 0275)
OCT or OM
OP or O.Pa or PM or MP
OSC
Electro-Harmonix Octave Multiplexer (Instrument 0300)
Olson RA-637 Preampfier Mixer (Instrument 0237/ 0238)
Oscillating Amplifier
PC Proportional Control System
P.C. PUSH BUTT. Photocell—Push Button Unit
P/F
Phaser/Flanger (Instrument 0039)
PL or PLS Pulse Generator (Instrument 0474)
PL. BUS
BOSS Headphone Amp HA-5 Play Bus (Instrument 0473)
PP Electro-Harmonix Polyphase
PLL Phase-Locked Loop
P.SYN
Forrest M. Mims Percussion Synthesizer (Instrument 0025)
QM Four Quadrant Multiplier (no #)
R1/R2 Maplin RTX3 Radar Doppler Intruder Detector (no #)
RF GEN
Radio Frequency Generator
RMC or M
RST or ST
Abbreviations
Realistic Stereo Mixing Console (Instrument 0514)
Realistic 4-Channel Stereo Mixer (Instrument 0147)
SAE Scientific Audio Electronics 5000A Impulse Noise Reduction System (Instrument 0333)
SD E&MM String Damper (Instrument 0469)
SPEC. ANLZ or SPEC
SPK.GEN
SPL or OS
Fujitsu Ten Biyo QI-200SD Spectrum Analyzer (Instrument 0293)
Spike Generator (Instrument 0173)
Cybersonic Output Splitter (Instrument 0002/0000)
SR Polyfusion QP-1 Sound-A-Round (no #)
ST or SPEC. TRANS Cybersonic Spectrum Transfer (Instrument 0450)
SYN PAiA Synthespin (Instrument 0265/0511)
TA Tunable Amplifier
TB or T-Box Tube Box (Instrument 0448)
TB Toneburst Generator (Instrument 0118)
TC Tone Controls
TC PH
t.c. electronic XII B/K Programmable Phaser
TP Electro-Harmonix Talking Pedal Speech Synthesizer (no #)
TP Triggered Pulser
US1/US2 Maplin Ultrasonic Intruder Detector (no #)
VCDR Vocoder
VCO Voltage-Controlled Oscillator
VF C/G
Vesta Fire CG-1 Compressor/Gate (Instrument 0320)
VO Variable Oscillator
VOX or VX
WN or W.N.GEN or WH. NOISE
Z1/Z2
Vox Repeat Percussion (Instrument 0257)
White Noise Generator (Instrument 0493)
Z-amp (Instrument 0175/0176)
The Other Side (A Likely Story)
1
On November 8, 2007, I visited the Getty Research Institute (GRI) in Los Angeles, California. The research center of one of the richest art institutions in the world had then recently added a new acquisition to their archive of twentieth-century avantgarde: the materials of Yvonne Rainer, who choreographed thoughtful dances in the 1960s before switching her focus in the early 1970s to directing very thoughtful films. I admired Rainer’s work, especially her films where language and moving images (and to a lesser extent, sound) shared a complex of strategies to bring down what she called “the tyranny of narrative.”1 So together with theater director Yelena Gluzman, I had begun working on the reconstruction of one pseudo-theater piece Rainer had created in 1972 called Grand Union Dreams. It was the last major performance the choreographer had made before she turned herself into a filmmaker, and I was interested in the strangeness of this work which was both dance and theater yet also neither, for it appeared to reflect the nature of the transformation she was going through at the time. Our revival was taking place at the Yotsuya Art Studium, an alternative art school in central Tokyo I had helped set up three years earlier. Yelena and I co-taught a peculiar “English” class there, where we could teach whatever we wanted as long as it was in English. Since language plays a significant role in Rainer’s films, using them as material for our class seemed like a good idea.
That early November in 2007, I happened to be in San Diego to attend the International Conference on Intelligent Robots and Systems (IROS) with Kenjiro Okazaki, the director of Yotsuya Art Studium. We were co-presenting a paper on Kenjiro’s work with the choreographer Trisha Brown (who happened to be a dear friend of Yvonne Rainer and who had appeared in the original production of
1 Yvonne Rainer, “A Likely Story (1976),” in A Woman Who: Essays, Interviews, Scripts (Baltimore, MD, and London, UK: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 138. Rainer explains, “let me insert here that my own involvement with narrative forms has not always been either happy or wholehearted, rather more often a dalliance than a commitment. The reason lies partly in the predominating form of narrative film. The tyranny of a form that creates the expectation of a continuous answer to ‘what will happen next?’ fanatically pursuing an inexorable resolution in which all things find their just or correct placement in space and time; such a tyranny, having already attained its epiphany in the movies (I think of Gertrud, Senso, Balthazar, Contempt, Lulu) such a form has inevitably seemed more ripe for resistance, or at least evasion, than for emulation” (ibid.).
Reminded by the Instruments. You Nakai, Oxford University Press (2021). © Oxford University Press. DOI: 10.1093/oso/9780190686765.001.0001.
Grand Union Dreams). The very fact that we had been invited to IROS was a strange side effect of this collaboration. Kenjiro’s team had created what we called “poltergeist robots” to dance along with Trisha and her dancers, and although I had joined the project in the capacity of a translator, I found myself being transformed into a poltergeist-robot operator when it became clear that somebody had to tour with these ghostly machines to control their movement from afar.
After our tightly scheduled presentation in San Diego, I had a moment to sit back and relax, and realized I had one free day before I flew back to Tokyo. I then recalled hearing from Yvonne that the Getty Research Institute had recently purchased her papers. So I quickly sent an email to GRI to see if I could arrange a visit, just two days in advance. Fortunately, I managed to reserve a spot in the special collections room. Unfortunately, however, I learned that the materials related to Grand Union Dreams could not be viewed because they were still being processed. The only materials that I could see were several DVDs. But since I had already made my reservation, I decided to check what other things they might have.
After a quick internet search, I discovered there was something called the “David Tudor Papers” in their collection. Having written my master’s thesis on the music of John Cage, I obviously knew the name of David Tudor. In fact, I had always been fascinated by his performances that I could listen to in the few recordings that were available, which always presented an uncanny mix of wild liveliness and cool detachment no matter what he played. Yet, it never occurred to me that David Tudor’s music—especially the electronic ones—could be studied. All the stories I had been hearing about him back in Japan had told me that this legendary pianist of experimental music and well-known pioneer of live-electronic music seldom spoke about what he was doing, never wrote down how he was doing them, and had passed away eleven years earlier without revealing anything to anyone. So I had not even bothered to check if any archive of his materials existed somewhere. But as soon as I started looking through the online inventory of his papers at GRI, I was surprised by the number of boxes they had which was more than 200. Still, my ignorance was to such an extent that I sent an email to Ms. Lois White of GRI the very morning of my visit with the titles of Rainer’s DVDs I wanted to see, adding casually that I also wished to see, if possible, the entire “Series III. Electronics (1950s–1990s)” section of the David Tudor Papers. Taking the train from San Diego, I was arriving at the Getty Center around one in the afternoon, yet I somehow thought I could go through all the Rainer footages plus the sixteen Tudor boxes in the four hours before the special collections room closed. I must have imagined that the boxes were rather small.
But when I got to the special collections room, I gasped at the sheer amount of stuff my auxiliary request had summoned from the depths of the archive. As I began going through them, I quickly realized that it was a huge assortment of miscellaneous materials: scribbled notes, sketches of schematics, list of components, calculations, clippings of articles from popular electronics magazines, product brochures, and so on. And in spite of the serious effort by hard-working archivists to organize things chronologically, I could see that many related materials were scattered across
many different folders in many different boxes. To make things worse, I knew next to nothing about analog electronics at the time, which is to say that most of the papers I laid my eyes on were written in a language I could not read, let alone understand. But there was one thing I did learn by just staring at them: all the stories I had been hearing were wrong. There was more than enough material here—the “Electronics” section was just one category among eleven—that if enough time was spent going through it all, there must be something one could discover about Tudor’s music. As I rode the Pacific Surfliner back to San Diego that evening, I made the quick decision to take on that task myself. Among other things, that meant I would have to move to the United States and become a musicologist for a while.2
2
David Tudor had always appeared to me as a giant puzzle in the history of twentiethcentury music. Born in Philadelphia on January 20, 1926, he was usually remembered as an extraordinary pianist who was instrumental to the music of many American and European composers in the 1950s, influential to many more. It was often said that his virtuosity—as a pianist as well as a thinker—had inspired composers around him in New York to experiment with how they wrote their scores, which led to the development of so-called graphic notation—a form of musical score which requires the performer to be involved in the process of creating the performance score. Starting in the mid-1950s, Tudor’s activities in Europe were known to have triggered the dissemination of American experimental music abroad and its many consequences. At the same time, Tudor was often mentioned alongside John Cage as being one of the founding figures of “live-electronic music,” a form of electronic music that was not simply a playback of something composed in a studio but was performed live on stage. People talked about how he had turned away from the piano in the 1960s and started composing his own music using modular electronics of his own design. He had apparently focused on this kind of music for the rest of his life, performing most often as a musician of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC), until he passed away on August 13, 1996.
These were well-known stories because more eloquent and famous composers around him had told them on behalf of Tudor, who did not. In fact, one of the things they often spoke about was the fact that Tudor did not speak much. And since Tudor himself remained silent, people who didn’t know him only repeated what his friends
2 I eventually translated Yvonne Rainer’s “A Quasi Survey of Some Minimalist Tendencies in the Quantitatively Minimal Dance Activity Midst the Plethora, or an Analysis of Trio A” into Japanese, and also wrote an accompanying essay on her works, both of which were published in 2009 (Jutsu: Journal of the International Center for Human Sciences, Kinki University, No. 3). The English version of that essay can be read here: “Seeing the Difficulty of Seeing: An Analysis of Yvonne Rainer’s Analysis of Trio A,” academia. edu, accessed December 15, 2018: https://www.academia.edu/9479852/Seeing_the_Difficulty_of_Seeing_ An_Analysis_of_Yvonne_Rainer_s_Analysis_of_Trio_A_
and acquaintances had said. Thus, whenever the name “David Tudor” appeared in publications, it usually appeared in the periphery of accounts about other people. He was a dweller of anecdotes and hearsays, somehow everywhere and nowhere at once. But what was strange was not only how people talked about Tudor; it was also how Tudor talked to people whenever he did so inside the stories that circulated. For example, the one Cage began telling circa 1958 went like this:
One day down at Black Mountain College, David Tudor was eating his lunch. A student came over to his table and began asking him questions. David Tudor went on eating his lunch. The student went on asking him questions. Finally, David Tudor looked at him and said, “If you don’t know, why do you ask?”3
Christian Wolff told another story of a similarly incredible exchange which took place at the Internationale Ferienkurse für Neue Musik (International Summer Courses for New Music) in Darmstadt in 1961:
Adorno [was] somehow trying to latch onto something that he could make an idea out of and an idea which would fit—which somehow could be derived from, needn’t repeat but could be derived from—the European intellectual heritage, in his case, primarily Hegelian and Marxist. And David Tudor was constantly sort of evading or, as it were, thwarting every effort on Adorno’s part to do this. I mean, they discussed the score and everything like that, and finally Adorno thought he had it and made this rather long disquisition, a very complicated, abstruse—you know, interesting in some respects as far as I remember it, but complicated. And at the end of it—it was a good long thing, a fifteen-minute lecture perhaps, and when he was finished, David Tudor turned to him and said: “You haven’t understood a thing.”4
The two composers did not just report Tudor’s puzzling responses. By repeatedly addressing their dear friend in full name, they also presented “David Tudor” as a puzzling character, especially for those who had not known the actual person. All these stories, and the way they were told, served to establish “David Tudor” as a mythological figure, a walking enigma who rarely spoke and spoke in riddles when he did. But this mystification was not simply something that others did to Tudor. It was apparently a character cultivated by Tudor himself, even when he interacted with people more kindred to him than inquisitive students and abstract philosophers.5
3 John Cage, “Indeterminacy,” in Silence: Lectures & Writings (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press), 266.
4 Christian Wolff, “Interview with Ev Grimes (undated),” Oral History of American Music (New Haven, CT: Yale University); also quoted in Amy C. Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006), 127.
5 Talking to Teddy Hultberg in mid-May 1988, Tudor offered a slightly different reminiscence of his encounter with Adorno: “I enjoyed talking to him very much, he was like a familiar spirit to me, for he had been a great friend of my teacher Stefan Wolpe and I have experience with different musical worlds,
Merce Cunningham, who worked with Tudor for more than forty years since the early 1950s, reflected during his collaborator’s memorial service on August 27, 1996: “As a person he was private, almost secret.”6 Around the same time, Frederic Rzewski, who had known Tudor since the early 1960s, described a similar impression in more detail:
Most people have both public + private lives. In David’s life these two dimensions seemed to merge mysteriously. Just as in his piano playing there were no nonessential gestures, but every movement was somehow functional, so too in his daily life— or in that part of it which I could observe—there seemed little that was spontaneous, none of those little windows that open momentarily and unexpectedly to reveal a person’s soul. Everything seemed methodical, part of a plan. [ . . . ] He was basically inscrutable.7
John Driscoll, who regularly performed with Tudor since the mid-1970s and even became his next-door neighbor for a couple of years in Stony Point, New York, simply looked back on his friend as “the most complicated person I’ve ever known.”8 So perhaps mystical periphery was where David Tudor wished and chose to live. And yet, in spite of the enigma of whatever was happening inside him, the influence of what Tudor did in the outside world was profound. His virtuosic ability as a pianist had led composers around him to change the way they composed; when he turned to electronics, his distinct approach inspired younger musicians to start composing music in a similar manner. As Alvin Lucier, another friend and collaborator, recalled in March 1997: “Even those of us who didn’t design our own circuits, couldn’t help being influenced by Tudor.”9 So all this influence was emanating from an inscrutable source whose workings could not be understood from the outside. To study what David Tudor did, it seemed necessary to somehow open this black box and examine how it worked from the inside.
so I understood Adorno. I admired his books for as far as he was willing to go. At the same time I understood why he couldn’t accept the ideas Cage and the American school were bringing that were really going to change the face of music because either you can live with it or you can’t, but that didn’t change my admiration for him at all” (David Tudor, “ ‘I smile when the sound is singing through the space,’ Interview by Teddy Hultberg,” Dusseldorf, May 17–18, 1988, davidtudor.org, accessed December 15, 2018: https:// davidtudor.org/Articles/hultberg.html).
6 Merce Cunningham, “Statement delivered at David Tudor’s Memorial Service (August 27, 1996),” Box 67, Folder 6, David Tudor Papers, GRI.
7 Frederic Rzewski, “Fax to MusikTexte (April 8, 1997),” Box 67, Folder 6, David Tudor Papers, GRI.
8 Driscoll used the same expression several times during many private conversations I had with him between 2011 and 2018.
9 Alvin Lucier, “Remembering David Tudor (March 23, 1997),” Box 67, Folder 6, David Tudor Papers, GRI. On another occasion, Lucier detailed: “Tudor made all his devices with inexpensive electronic components, everything he used was home-made. That was very inspiring. The development of experimental music in the United States, that phase of it anyway, started with David Tudor’s table of electronics”
I was obviously not the first person to realize this. As I started my research I quickly discovered a small number of well-researched papers and books written on various aspects of Tudor’s life. Starting from his 1994 doctoral dissertation, John Holzaepfel had conducted a series of meticulous studies on how Tudor realized other composers’ scores when he was a pianist in the 1950s.10 Amy C. Beal, in her 1999 doctoral dissertation as well as the book which followed, had tracked down Tudor’s activities in postwar Europe playing the role of the “ambassador of American experimental music,” focusing on one particular location, the International Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, where Wolff had witnessed that blunt exchange with Adorno.11 Tudor’s death in the summer of 1996 had also triggered a series of publications dedicated to his life: a special issue of MusikTexte: Zeitschrift für Neue Musik in April 1997 collecting reminiscences from friends and collaborators;12 four consecutive issues of Musicworks containing articles about his work and personality;13 and a special issue of Leonardo Music Journal that came out in 2004, with various papers first presented three years earlier at the conference “The Art of David Tudor: Indeterminacy and Performance in Postwar Culture” held at GRI in 2001.14
(Lucier, “Thoughts on Installations,” kunstradio.at, accessed December 15, 2018: http://kunstradio.at/ ZEITGLEICH/CATALOG/ENGLISH/lucier-e.html).
10 These included: Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959,” PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1994; “David Tudor and the Solo for Piano,” in David W. Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, eds., Writings through John Cage’s Music, Poetry, and Art (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 137–156; “Painting by Numbers: The Intersection of Morton Feldman and David Tudor,” in Steven Johnson, ed., The New York Schools of Music and Visual Arts (London, UK: Routledge, 2002), 159–172; “Cage and Tudor,” in David Nicholls, ed., The Cambridge Companion to John Cage (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 169–185; “Tudor Performs Cage,” in Julia H. Schröder and Volker Straebel, eds., Cage & Consequences (Hofheim, Germany: Wolke Verlag, 2012), 111–124.
11 Beal, New Music, New Allies: American Experimental Music in West Germany from the Zero Hour to Reunification (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2006)
12 MusikTexte: Zeitschrift Für Neue Musik 69/70 (April 1997). Many of the original manuscripts in English are archived in Box 67, Folder 6, David Tudor Papers, GRI.
13 The articles included: John D. S. Adams, “Giant Oscillations: The Birth of Toneburst,” Musicworks 69 (Fall 1997), 14–17; D’Arcy Philip Gray, “The Art of the Impossible,” Musicworks 69 (Fall 1997), 18–21; John D. S. Adams and Erin Donovan, “Still Listening: Pauline Oliveros Reflects on the Life and Music of David Tudor,” Musicworks 70 (Spring 1998), 34–37; David Behrman, “Private Person, Public Figure: David Tudor in the ’60s and ’70s,” Musicworks 71 (Summer 1998), 44–46; Peter Zaparinuk, “David Tudor’s Performance Composition,” Musicworks 71 (Summer 1998), 47–51; Stuart Dempster, “Working with David Tudor and the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,” Musicworks 73 (Spring 1999), 14–19; Matt Rogalsky, “David Tudor’s Virtual Focus,” Musicworks 73 (Spring 1999), 20–23; Adam Barker-Mill, “David Tudor’s Sound Table,” Musicworks 73 (Spring 1999), 24–25; Austin Clarkson, “Composing the Performer: David Tudor Remembers Stefan Wolpe,” Musicworks 73 (Spring 1999), 26–32; Austin Clarkson, “A Creative Collaboration: Stefan Wolpe’s and David Tudor’s Battle Piece,” Musicworks 73 (Spring 1999), 32–35.
14 “Composers Inside Electronics: Music after David Tudor,” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004). Ron Kuivila described the technical nature of Tudor’s electronic music in detail for the first time, with a particular focus on the no-input feedback piece Untitled (“Open Sources: Words, Circuits, and the Notation–Realization Relation in the Music of David Tudor,” 17–23); Nancy Perloff wrote an insightful analysis of Sea
In 2003, Eric Smigel had written a doctoral dissertation on Tudor’s esoteric concerns, with a special focus on the influence of Antonin Artaud’s theater of cruelty.15 Two years later, Eric Nedelman had submitted another doctoral dissertation which examined how Tudor performed Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke.16 Then, in 2006, Matt Rogalsky had tracked the development of Rainforest, a rare breed among Tudor’s output for having been passed on successfully to a younger generation of musicians with whom he formed a collective called Composers Inside Electronics (CIE).17
But in spite of all this coverage and eventually some more,18 it struck me that something always escaped the focus. Each study had revealed particulars, but their wellfocused nature made me wonder all the more about how these particulars could be coordinated. The character of “David Tudor” was now much more varied and detailed, yet what lay behind the multiplicity of fragments still remained a mystery. The main problem appeared to revolve around the issue of transition: of how and why Tudor went from being a performer of other people’s music to being a composer of his own. “We know David Tudor in two different guises,” James Pritchett summarized in 2004. “The first was as a performer of avant-garde music in the 1950s and 1960s; the second as a composer of music using live electronics.”19 But although this mystery of the two guises was almost always mentioned in writings about Tudor, there was surprisingly little in previous scholarship that hinted at how one should think about or around it. The mystery was thus a bit like David Tudor himself—always there, but always out of focus. I had to find a different route.
Tails (“Hearing Spaces: David Tudor’s Collaboration on Sea Tails,” 31–39); and James Pritchett explored how Tudor realized the material of Variations II by Cage (“David Tudor as Composer/Performer in Cage’s Variations II,” 11–16). Austin Clarkson wrote a marvelous study on the relationship between young Tudor and his teacher Stefan Wolpe in the late 1940s (“David Tudor’s Apprenticeship: The Years with Irma and Stefan Wolpe,” 5–10). Musicians who had collaborated with Tudor also wrote about the music they knew best: Driscoll from “Composers Inside Electronics” co-wrote with Rogalsky an essential essay on Rainforest, a work he had performed with Tudor since 1973 (“David Tudor’s Rainforest: An Evolving Exploration of Resonance,” 25–30). Bill Viola, another member of CIE, wrote a sensitive reminiscence (“David Tudor: The Delicate Art of Falling,” 49–56). D’Arcy Philip Gray, who worked with Tudor as part of MCDC in the early 1990s, wrote an informative report about his little-known works from the 1980s (“David Tudor in the Late 1980s: Understanding a Secret Voice,” 41–47). Some documentation of the symposium can be viewed at getty.edu, “David Tudor Symposium,” accessed December 15, 2018: http://www.getty.edu/research/exhibitions_events/events/david_tudor_symposium/index.html
15 Eric Smigel, “Alchemy of the Avant-garde: David Tudor and the New Music of the 1950s,” PhD dissertation, University of Southern California, 2003.
16 Eric Nedelman, “Performance Analysis of David Tudor’s Interpretations of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Klavierstücke,” PhD dissertation, University of California, Santa Barbara, 2005.
17 Rogalsky, “Idea and Community: The Growth of David Tudor’s Rainforest, 1965–2006,” PhD dissertation, City University London, 2006. Matt also began researching Tudor much earlier for his MA thesis: “Live Electronic Music Practice and Musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company,” MA thesis, Wesleyan University, 1995. I learned later that he was also involved in bringing Tudor’s instruments to Wesleyan University.
18 Back in 2007, neither Martin Iddon’s patient tracking of the correspondence between Cage and Tudor (Iddon, John Cage and David Tudor: Correspondence on Interpretation and Performance [Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013]), nor Jonathan Goldman’s brilliant study of Tudor’s involvement with the bandoneon (Goldman, “The Buttons on Pandora’s Box: David Tudor and the Bandoneon,” American Music 30, no. 1 [Spring 2012], 30–60) had appeared yet.
19 Pritchett, “David Tudor as Composer/Performer in Cage’s Variations II,” Leonardo Music Journal 14 (2004), 11.
As I had discovered on my first visit to GRI, it was not that resources were lacking. Most of the vast amount of materials Tudor left behind had been archived—more or less according to their respective formats—in four major locations, one on the West Coast, two on the East, and one online:20
(a) David Tudor Papers at GRI in Los Angeles, California, archives 177.5 linear feet of mostly paper materials—scores, sketches, notes, magazine article clippings, correspondence, receipts, reviews, recipes, program notes—in addition to photographs, many audio recordings, and a few videos—that Tudor owned.
(b) David Tudor Collection, which forms a part of the World Instrument Collection of Wesleyan University in Middletown, Connecticut, houses around 500 instruments that were in Tudor’s possession when he passed away. Among these, some 150 were built by him. The rest are commercial and noncommercial devices made by somebody else which Tudor either purchased or received as a gift.21
(c) Merce Cunningham Dance Foundation, Inc., Records at the New York Public Library (NYPL) holds many videos and audio recordings of works Tudor was involved as the musician of MCDC since its inception in 1952.
(d) davidtudor.org collects articles, discography, images, chronology of works, and six resourceful interviews with Tudor by different people. It has been maintained since 1997 by John D. S. Adams and D’arcy Philip Gray, who assisted Tudor in many of his later projects as the sound engineer and musician of MCDC, respectively.22
Aside from these physical and non-physical materials, Tudor had also been survived by friends who knew and worked with him. When I first met Gordon Mumma, one of Tudor’s long-time collaborators, and told him about the endeavor I was embarking on, Gordon immediately blessed me, saying I was “just at the right time since many of us are still here!”23 And indeed they were, most of them very generous and happy
20 In addition, there are several collaborators who own personal archives containing a variety of Tudorrelated material. They include Gordon Mumma, Julie Martin, Fujiko Nakaya, John D. S. Adams, John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein, Sophia Ogielska and Andy Ogielski.
21 The state of preservation differs greatly from one instrument to another: some are still operational, others no longer. Rogalsky painstakingly put together a comprehensive list of these extant instruments in 1999. This essential document numbers the instruments—“Rogalsky numbers”—and describes, whenever possible, the presumed function, designer, related composition, date, and a description for each entry. For several relatively simple instruments, Rogalsky also wrote down their interior circuitry. However, as with the paper material, most of the custom-built devices had remained largely unexamined.
22 Lowell Cross, who worked with Tudor from the mid-1960s onward, has also maintained his very informative website lowellcross.com which includes a series of detailed memoirs about his collaborator.
23 Gordon Mumma, “Conversation with You Nakai,” Roulette, New York, NY, March 20, 2011.
to talk about their old friend (and indeed some have sadly passed away in the time since).24 At least when I started, the shortage of research could not be blamed on the shortage of resources. The problem lay elsewhere.
5
Through my preliminary readings, I realized that there was a series of problems that stood in the way of a more comprehensive investigation of Tudor’s music. Working alone or together, these problems appeared to bias people to always think about what Tudor did from a more or less fixed standpoint, preventing other possible approaches. They could be grouped into four categories:
(a) The Problem of Diversity: As if to confirm the “low threshold of boredom”25 friends observed in him, Tudor’s focus constantly moved from one thing to another—from the organ to the piano, to the amplified piano, to the bandoneon, and to electronics. This made it difficult to establish a central point of focus to view the entirety of his trajectory (other than his mystical character, which served to occult the problem rather than address it).
(b) The Problem of Concept: These diverse activities were difficult to grasp because they were difficult to categorize using the traditional polarities used to conceptualize music: “composer/performer,” “score/instrument,” “composition/improvisation,” and so on. Rather than orienting the study, these concepts often lead the researcher astray, lost in the details without being able to coordinate the fragments.
(c) The Problem of Text: The first two problems may not have mattered if Tudor had written and/or talked about what he was doing. But he almost never did such a thing, at least not on record. Nor did he write scores in the traditional sense. So in addition to the lack of concept, there was an absence of authorial texts, the material that scholars depend on when traditional concepts fail. What could be studied instead of these “musical texts” were instruments and documents related to instruments that could not be read in the same way as letters on a page.26
(d) The Problem of Literacy: Musicologists, unfortunately, are usually not trained to trace circuits, understand schematics, or discuss the working of transformers and capacitors. This made them blind to the majority of material Tudor left
24 The people who have passed away include Pauline Oliveros, Jean Rigg, and Takehisa Kosugi. Also, Jackie Monnier, Tudor’s most important collaborator during the 1980s, was unfortunately no longer available for an interview due to health issues by the time I contacted her.
25 Earle Brown, in John Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959,” PhD dissertation, City University of New York, 1994, 45.
26 Stanley Boorman, “The Musical Text,” in Rethinking Music (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1999), 403–23.
behind. But people more well-versed in electronics usually had the opposite problem in coordinating what they understand with all the non-electronic things Tudor did. There was no universal language to process the entirety of his output.
In short, the nature of Tudor’s music went against traditional concepts, while the nature of materials documenting his music went against traditional literacy. Yet it appeared to me that these two issues could be dealt with separately. The problems of Literacy and Text were technical problems that demanded more work. The problems of Diversity and Concept, on the other hand, demanded not more work but a different way of working.
6
Other than revealing the common problems that people faced, my preliminary readings made me realize that there was at least one piece of common knowledge on which people agreed about this puzzling character: David Tudor loved puzzles. As usual, the primary author of this story was Cage, who had described to Holzaepfel in 1988: “He’s a great solver of puzzles [ . . . ] His interest in puzzles invited the whole thing of indeterminacy.”27 But the composer had also added in the ellipsis above: “—and producer of them.” That addendum stuck in my mind. I began playing around with an idea that appeared to emerge quite naturally from this peripheral remark: perhaps the puzzle of David Tudor was a puzzle David Tudor made. In which case, everything he left behind could be seen as pieces of the puzzle waiting to be put together in one way or another.
In fact, there was something very unusual about the materials he left: there were too many. Tudor preserved not only papers and objects related to his work, but also receipts dating back to the 1940s, crumpled notes with just a single component name, scribbles on the back of envelopes, empty packages of electronic components, letters from strangers, train or bus tickets from here and there. These were things that would not have survived unless somebody made a deliberate and serious effort to preserve them. As Holzaepfel later phrased it nicely in an email to me, Tudor appears to have saved “virtually every other scrap of paper that passed his way.”28 And he did so without telling anyone. One way to quickly explain this behavior is to say that Tudor was a hoarder. But the very desire to compulsively collect objects and the inability to throw them away still reveal his feelings about these materials: that they were valuable
27 Holzaepfel, “David Tudor and the Performance of American Experimental Music, 1950–1959,” vii, also 59.
28 Holzaepfel, “Email to You Nakai,” November 19, 2014. Holzaepfel, who was instrumental in the process of archiving Tudor’s material, had made this observation years before.
in spite of what others may think. And as long as hoarding is an act of preservation, the fact that he did so without telling people around him does imply that he believed in—or at least imagined—a time in the future where the potential value of these objects would be realized.
Even if the idea was absurd, the thought that Tudor had composed a giant puzzle at least gave me the necessary hope that it could be solved. And it was not just a matter of hope, for it also gave me a better understanding of what I had set out to do. I was to follow the materials to recover a past that was not only absent but may have been deliberately hidden. My endeavor thus began to resemble the work of a detective. One thing I happened to remember from my childhood love of mystery novels was that detectives solved cases not only by studying physical materials, but also by simulating the mindset and habits of the criminal. That often taught them how materials should be read or even which materials should be read in the first place. It occurred to me that if David Tudor had left a puzzle behind, the best way to solve it was to approach it as David Tudor would have.
Fortunately, Holzaepfel and others had painstakingly revealed how Tudor solved the puzzle-like scores that other composers wrote for him during his pianist days in the 1950s. The pattern of his mind could be learned and fed back to the study of Tudor. Instead of using the musicological tools I had learned in books and classrooms, I would obtain the necessary instruments to probe Tudor’s output from that same output—a sort of reverse-musicology that gradually forms its methods, concepts, vocabularies, and goals as it proceeds.
When I re-read the extant scholarship with this new mindset, I was struck by an unexpected parallel: my method of deriving the best approach to the material from the material itself was how Tudor approached his materials. In the 1950s, he had made specific templates and rulers that matched the scale of the particular graphic score he needed to measure; in the 1960s, he had described his first composition as something that composed itself out of its own instrumental nature; and in the 1970s, he had taught younger composers that sound source should match the character of each individual loudspeaker which is never neutral.29 In every case, David Tudor appeared to let the specific nature of a given material determine the necessary methods and tools. In other words, my method of simulation was already a simulation.30
29 “Instead of what we consider to be electronic music at present, you would then make your music geared to what the particular loudspeaker can produce, and the whole input becomes simple instead of complex” (David Tudor and Victor Schonfield, “From Piano to Electronics,” Music and Musicians 20 (August 1972), 26).
30 This was something that Holzaepfel had already done by approximating the scale of precision with which he read Tudor’s materials to how Tudor read the materials of others. In other words, what had produced the first substantial scholarship of Tudor’s music was in my view a simulation of Tudor’s own patience and meticulousness. I simply expanded the same method to the entirety of Tudor’s output.
Eventually, through my perusal, I began to realize that there was indeed a general pattern in how Tudor solved his puzzle-like scores for each performance. The procedure could be broken down into a two-step recipe of sorts:
(1) Observe the given material thoroughly in an unbiased way until it reveals its own “nature.”
(2) Bias the subsequent approach to the material based on this nature.31
This recipe told me what to do: the first was to observe as many materials as possible without setting any particular focus in advance.32 Exposure was more important than interpretation at this point. The fact that I did not understand electronics thus turned out to be a blessing. So I began frequenting Middletown, Connecticut, to open up the 500 or so instruments archived at Wesleyan University, drawing their circuits without understanding much of what my hand was doing; I began flying across the country to Los Angeles, California, to take thousands of photographs of nearly every single material in the special collections room of GRI without looking for or at anything specific; and back in New York, I began transcribing recordings of Tudor’s interviews and panel discussions that I could find at NYPL without giving much thought to what was being said.
I had decided early on that I would take whatever Tudor said to the letter. When something did not make sense to me—which was quite often—I simply registered his riddle-like remarks in the back of my mind without trying to force sense out of them, as I did the circuits at Wesleyan and the schematics at GRI that similarly lay beyond my understanding. In the same spirit, I immersed myself into the literature of occult philosophy to learn what Tudor had learned without questioning their validity.
That exposure to mysticism may have been consequential, however, for a series of fortunate happenstances began to occur. To begin with, as I mindlessly scanned through the thousands of photographs I took at GRI, I realized that Tudor’s own
31 I found out much later that Tudor had already formulated the same procedure in a letter he wrote to Earle Brown on April 15, 1957: “my view is that accuracy of observation has to be considered first; accuracy of representation will follow (in the case where representation’s involved)” (David Tudor, “Letter to Earle Brown (April 15, 1957),” Folder 5-39, Earle Brown Music Foundation; partially quoted in Rebecca Y. Kim, “Four Musicians at Work and Earle Brown’s Indices,” in Beyond Notation: The Music of Earle Brown (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2017), 129). I thank Kim for showing me a copy of this letter.
32 This is actually a standard way detectives work in mystery novels, as Robin Winks summarizes neatly: “As with history, the discrete fact counts; initially all facts must be presumed to count equally; in time a pattern emerges by which one may place priorities of significance upon facts as they relate to cause and effect. In time one discovers the modus operandi. One cannot discover it, in history, in detective fiction, or in life, by deliberately preselecting, skimming, omitting as irrelevant an experience. Perhaps detective fiction is for those of us who have never learned to read without moving our lips, for the lip will tell the brain what the eye alone cannot” (Robin W. Winks, Modus Operandi: An Excursion into Detective Fiction [Boston, MA: David R. Godine, 1982], 13).
process of learning electronics was traceable from the clippings of popular electronic magazine articles he collected, as well as the notes he took from his readings. He had begun delving into the world of resistors, capacitors, breadboards, and soldering irons at the end of the 1950s when he was already in his early thirties, and never appeared to have grown fully comfortable with the subject matter. In fact, he was still confessing difficulties even as late as September 1989: “I am a person who is terrified of electricity. I knew nothing at all about it. And Gordon [Mumma] helped me get over that. Now I have a lot of experience related to that but I’m still terrified, you know. In a way, it’s always going to terrify me. But it doesn’t deter me from working at it.”33 Sharing that fear completely, I decided the best way to teach myself electronics was by tracing Tudor’s own steps closely.34
It was also around the same time in early 2011 that I attended the release party of Music for Merce CD box set, where I ran into the very person who had been instrumental for Tudor to get over his fear of electronics: Gordon Mumma.35 Several months later, as I prepared a paper on John Cage for the annual meeting of the American Musicological Society in San Francisco, I was astonished to find out that the chair of my session was going to be none other than Cage’s long-time friend and collaborator, Gordon Mumma. Even though I was not sure what I wanted to find out, I could not miss this chance to interview him about his other good friend. So after delivering my paper, I sat down with Gordon for three hours asking him questions I didn’t quite know why I was asking.
I decided to use this serendipity as a trigger to start conducting interviews with other friends and collaborators regardless of my lack of preparation. The first one happened a week after my return to New York from San Francisco, when I spent an afternoon in Long Island with John Driscoll and Phil Edelstein from CIE, the group that had formed around Tudor in the mid-1970s. One of the things I found out that day was that the early repertoire of Penumbra Raincoast, a group that preceded the formation of CIE, included, in addition to works of electronic music, a dance named Chairs/Pillows choreographed by Yvonne Rainer.
Two years later, in September 2013,36 I was back in San Francisco, giving a talk on Tudor’s Pepscillator at the Exploratorium.37 In the audience that day were John
33 Charles Amirkhanian, John Cage, Takehisa Kosugi, Gordon Mumma, Michael Pugliese, and David Tudor, “A Kind of Anarchy: Merce Cunningham and Music (September 19, 1989) [videorecording],” MGZIDVD 5-469, Merce Cunningham archives, New York Public Library.
34 The paper I gave that day was later published as: You Nakai, “How to Imitate Nature in Her Manner of Operation: Between What He Did and What He Said He Did,” Perspectives of New Music 52, no. 3 (Autumn 2014), 141–160).
35 Various, Music for Merce (1952–2009), New World Records (80712), 2010, 10 CDs.
36 I had taken a year-long break from everything since I suddenly became a single parent and decided that the best way to take care of my 18-month-old son Aevi was to travel the world with him following the letter of the places: Tokyo-Osaka-Kashiba-Bali-Lisbon-New York-Killens Pond-DouthatTroutdale- Enka- Asheville- Ellijay- Yorkville- Eutaw- Whynot- Tallulah- Hideaway- Yantis- Sulphur Springs-Sherman-Nazareth-House-Estancia-Alburquerque-Questa-Taos-Santa Fe-Elmo-Moab-BallardDinosaur-Ruleton-New Cambria-Alma-Mark Twain-New York.
37 “Interspatial: E.A.T., Cybernetic Serendipity, and the Future of Creative Collaboration,” Exploratorium, September 21, 2013.
and Phil, who had happened to stop by the Bay Area on their way to GRI. Partially inspired by the resurgence of interest in Tudor’s music among younger people like myself, they had started doing a research project of their own with the hopes of putting together an exhibition. This re-encounter led to two invitations: first, to join CIE to perform Tudor’s music;38 and second, to join a group expedition to Wesleyan University to examine Tudor’s instruments.
I had already drawn out almost all the circuits at Wesleyan by that time, but decided to tag along anyway. This trip, which took place in December of that year, turned out to be pivotal. Joining us from Pittsburgh was Michael Johnsen, an extraordinary musician and instrument builder with a deep understanding of analog electronics, who also happened to be interested in Tudor’s instruments. We began to work together almost immediately. Meeting Michael determined the scope of my research more than anything else since he very generously played the role of “Gordon Mumma” for my own fear of electronics.
8
Even after I began working with Michael, my inability to understand many of the things I laid my eyes on turned out to be useful, for I tended to worry about seemingly insignificant details that a more learned eye would quickly dismiss—and these often turned out to be significant. My ignorance also forced me to remember the shape of circuits and names of components by rote, and this way of remembering things turned out to be critical for the task of coordinating thousands of materials across distant archives. It was an effective way to bypass the web of preconceptions about what related to what.
Gradually, the pieces of the puzzle began fitting one another: a receipt in one folder at GRI would connect to a component list found in another folder, which would connect to one of the many instruments at Wesleyan, which would connect to a photograph of some performance, which would connect to some recording at NYPL, and so on. Most circuits I had drawn blindly turned out to have corresponding schematics that I had photographed blindly, thereby revealing their source as well as function. In many cases, such coordination of materials also led to deciphering the enigmatic acronyms and abbreviations Tudor used to address instruments in his diagrams. Receipts, source articles, letters, and other materials could then date when a specific instrument was composed or purchased.
Staring at the complex picture that emerged from connecting the puzzle pieces together, it slowly dawned onto me that there was one constant focus that Tudor
38 I performed Rainforest I and Microphone on June 21, 2014, at the Summer Solstice Celebration at Socrates Sculpture Park in Queens, New York; and Rainforest IV on July 20, 2014, at the Sonic Delights Festival at the Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts, New York.
maintained across his otherwise ever-changing activities: his coordination with specific instruments. This realization, as simple as it may sound, was instrumental in solving the problems of Diversity and Concept. For if this was the case, I could just ignore the question of whether David Tudor was a performer or a composer, or when and how he made the transition from one to the other. Instead, I could think of him as an instrumentalist who always produced music from his engagement with what he called the “nature” of each specific instrument. If there was a transition, it was never from performer to composer. As Tudor himself had revealed in the title of one of the very few interviews published during his lifetime, it was “From Piano to Electronics”39 a change of instrumentation, not of profession.
Seeing Tudor’s nature as an instrumentalist also matched the circular method I took to arrive at that realization. In another well-known story, Tudor’s virtuosity at the piano and his unique ability to realize extraordinary performances from any sort of material had inspired a peculiar idea in the minds of composers around him—that David Tudor was a “musical instrument.” Tudor appears to have been delighted at this thought, probably because it reminded him about the teachings of his favorite author, the occult philosopher Rudolf Steiner. True to the long tradition of esoteric thought, Steiner had preached that each human being was composed as a musical instrument. Tudor’s concern about the physical nature of materials was in this way coordinated with a metaphysical concern about his own nature. And if others considered him to be a musical instrument and Tudor happily agreed, approaching Tudor as he did his instruments seemed to be the right way to go. In any case, I had now discovered the nature of my material, so it was time to bias my reading accordingly.
9
It was only on rare occasions that Tudor used language to describe his approach to instruments. One of the very few instances on record happened on September 19, 1989, during a panel discussion titled “A Kind of Anarchy” held at UC Berkeley, which brought together the musicians of MCDC—John Cage, Takehisa Kosugi, Gordon Mumma, Michael Pugliese, and David Tudor. They were there to talk about the role of music in Cunningham’s dance. Toward the end of the event, which included Tudor’s revelation about his never-ending fear of electronics, the moderator Charles Amirkhanian asked a rather general question: given all the things that are possible in music now, “how does one commit to restrictions so that you can get on with your work?”40 This triggered an unusually long answer from Tudor:
39 Tudor, “From Piano to Electronics.”
40 “A Kind of Anarchy: Merce Cunningham and Music (September 19, 1989),” Merce Cunningham archives, New York Public Library.
I usually attack those problems from the other end. I mean I don’t ever start out from the premise of dealing with what’s available and trying to find out what part of it I want to use. I always come from the other side. I’m interested in very specific principles which exist, and I hate the fact that things like synthesizers and reverb devices and all that offer so much possibility. I mean in that case one has to make some choices, otherwise, all the music that everyone makes is going to sound the same. So if you start from the other side there’s quite a different way of working, and interestingly enough, it leads to the discovery of things that are not in those synthesizers. Okay, it’s a different bargain.41
It was a rare moment. Tudor was revealing how he approached instruments: he did not start from “what’s available” but from “very specific principles which exist.” Amirkhanian, however, suspected faulty reasoning on the instrumentalist’s part since his answer appeared to imply that the product could be reduced to the means of its production:
CA: By that reasoning though, everybody who writes a string quartet will end up writing something that sounds the same.
DT: How so?
CA: Because you are using the same instruments, like the same Lexicon, Casio. 42
But there were two slippages in this exchange. First, what Tudor said explicitly was quite the opposite of what Amirkhanian had understood: music that sounds the same is produced not by an instrument being the same but by there being too many possibilities. The problem was not in the specific principles of material but in their apparent lack.43 Second, what Tudor said implicitly went directly against what Amirkhanian had assumed: an instrument does not immediately reveal its specific principles to everybody. In other words, there was no such thing as “the same instrument,” as Tudor stressed in his response:
No, no, no. We are not speaking of instruments. We are not speaking of instruments. No, we are speaking of ideas. I mean look at people who have written string quartets. Look at John Cage who’s written a string quartet. Look at Michael von Biel who’s written a string quartet. Look at Benjamin Franklin who’s written a string quartet. You can see immediately that the concept of the instrument is different. I mean an instrument is not just an instrument which everybody uses in the same way.44
41 Ibid.
42 Ibid.
43 The premise of this reasoning is that with an instrument that offers too many possibilities, specificity would have to be derived from somewhere other than the instrument itself—a common resource of shared habits (often generalized under the name of culture) that in Tudor’s view tended to produce similar results.
44 “A Kind of Anarchy: Merce Cunningham and Music (September 19, 1989),” Merce Cunningham archives, New York Public Library.”
The difference between instruments with specific principles and those that offer too many possibilities was not in the instruments, but in the “ideas” about instruments— by which Tudor meant, as he clarified, how one conceptualized and used them.45 Everything depended on the nature of particular coordination between an instrument and its user which was based on one idea or another. Starting “from the other side” simply meant that this idea would be derived from the instruments themselves. Tudor had already followed the same circular reasoning thirteen years earlier in 1976, when he wrote the only manifesto-like text he ever authored in his life, with a title that described a specific perspective: “The View from Inside.” The short summary of how he did things called for a close observation of materials without imposing exterior concepts:
Electronic components and circuitry, observed as individuals and unique rather than as servo-mechanisms, more and more reveal their personalities, directly related to the particular musician involved with them. The deeper this process of observation, the more the components seem to require and suggest their own musical ideas, arriving at that point of discovery, always incredible, where music is revealed from “inside,” rather than from “outside.”46
This act of observation, however, was not as passive as Tudor made it sound. Instead, it involved an active manipulation of materials that sometimes even appeared to go against their given nature. “David Tudor would often use inputs as an output. Outputs would also be used as inputs,” Driscoll recalled in 1996. “It rarely mattered to David what the original intention of the circuit was as long as it produced a range of unpredictable sounds.”47 This unconcern for the “intention” of the maker appears throughout Tudor’s activities, as if he thought materials should speak for themselves. Their “musical ideas” were never given in the form of instruction manuals—they had to be discovered through actual use.
Because of this, the view from inside could also turn into a practical method to deal with instruments that appeared to offer too many possibilities. Tudor recalled one such case to John David Fullemann on September 3, 1984: “I had to make a piece, and the only thing available was this synthesizer. So I put all my gain stages into a single
45 This is a common way of thinking in systems theory: “The real world gives the subset of what is; the product space represents the uncertainty of the observer. The product space may therefore change if the observer changes; and two observers may legitimately use different product spaces within which to record the same subset of actual events in some actual thing. The ‘constraint’ is thus a relation between observer and thing; the properties of any particular constraint will depend on both the real thing and on the observer. It follows that a substantial part of the theory of organization will be concerned with properties that are not intrinsic to the thing but are relational between observer and thing” (W. Ross Ashby, “Principles of the SelfOrganizing System,” in Principles of Self-Organization: Transactions of the University of Illinois Symposium on Self-Organization edited by Heinz von Foerster [New York, NY: Pergamon Press, 1962], 258).
46 Tudor, “The View from Inside (1976),” Box 19, Folder 12, David Tudor Papers, GRI.
47 John Driscoll, “Electronics & Cooking (In Memoriam David Tudor) (1996),” Box 67, Folder 7, David Tudor Papers, GRI.
