Sounding the Peripheries

Oxford University Press, 2021

David Tudor is remembered today in two guises: as an extraordinary pianist of post-war avant-garde music who worked closely with composers like John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen, and as a founding figure of live-electronic music. His early realization of indeterminate graphic scores and his later performances using homemade modular instruments both inspired a whole generation of musicians. But his notorious reticence, his esoteric approaches, and the diversity of his creative output—which began with the organ and ended with visual art—have kept Tudor a puzzle, strangely befitting for a figure who was known for his deep love of puzzles. Reminded by the Instruments sets out to solve the puzzle of David Tudor by applying Tudor’s own methods for approaching the materials of others to the vast archive of materials that he himself left behind. You Nakai deftly coordinates instruments, electronic circuits, sketches, diagrams, recordings, letters, receipts, customs declaration forms, and testimonies like modular pieces of a giant puzzle to reveal the long-hidden nature of Tudor’s creative process. Rejecting the established narrative of Tudor as a performer-turned-composer, this book presents a lively portrait of an artist whose activity always merged both of these roles. In simulating Tudor’s distinct focus on what he called “the specific principles which exist inside each material,” Nakai undermines discourses on sound and illuminates our understanding of the instruments behind the sounds in post-war experimental music.

Getty Research Institute Symposium, 2001

John Cage's music-philosophical goal of breaking down the hierarchical relationship between composer and performer is well understood; the role of the performer generally-and of David Tudor in particular-is less theorized. Cage's Zen-inspired conception of the indeterminate score abandons a conception of the musical work as a determinate configuration of sounds with respect to succession and simultaneity and replaces it with a system of procedures for a performer-based determination. In indeterminate works, the performer makes many of the determinations of musical sound that had been made by the composer, thus breaking down hard distinctions between composer and performer. The blurring of creative and re-creative role boundaries has provoked scant scrutiny in music studies, because these studies typically rest on models of a composer's creative agency. Here I will demonstrate the particular role that David Tudor played in Cage's indeterminate works and I will make three arguments, two specific and one overall: First, Tudor played as significant a role as John Cage in mapping out a sounding aesthetic of musical indeterminacy in the 1950s and early 60s and that this aesthetic is more properly attributable to a group of people, not to a single, creative agent. Second, the aesthetic of musical indeterminacy is more than a set of compositional/performance procedures and instead constitutes an "experimental sound ideal." Overall, I argue that the "experimental sound ideal" had as its banner an aesthetic of liberation and that such liberation was won by control over the musical parameters through procedures of quantification. Different kinds of evidence from the David Tudor Papers at the Getty Research Institute provide a basis for my arguments in this paper. First, letters to Tudor from Cage, Feldman, Brown, and others indicate that the undefined relation between composer and sounding result in the indeterminate works was nonetheless accompanied by aesthetic criteria that would allow a "correct" performance. Such sounding criteria suggest that a "sound ideal" operated within this group of musicians, including primarily but not exclusively Cage, Tudor, Wolff, Feldman, Brown, Young, and Cardew. The letters also suggest that Tudor played a central role in defining this "experimental sound ideal" through his performances and his performance practice. Evidence for the functioning of such a framework takes two forms. First, there are statements made by members of the experimental group which suggest that a "correct" performance of the indeterminate work exists. Second, the Controlling Liberation: David Tudor and the "Experimental" Sound Ideal

In 1972, David Tudor composed Untitled, a seminal work of live-electronic music in which modular electronic components are hooked up to form feedback loops in order to generate sounds without exterior input. Tudor’s innovative approach has exercised a wide influence on the later development of noise music, and has been hailed as the precursor of the current trend of “no-input feedback” in electronic music. However, the nature of Untitled is shrouded in enigma. The configuration diagram of components employs peculiar symbols of Tudor’s own design, obstructing a straightforward identification of instruments. More critically, Tudor’s description of the piece as “part of a never-ending series of discovered works” calls into question the very delineation of Untitled as a standalone “work.” A subsequent remark that “all versions are performed live,” furthers the mystery—is Untitled a part of a series, or a series in itself? Resorting to its performance history only adds more layers of confusion. Despite his aim to perform everything live, the proliferation of components forced Tudor to record the output of an initial set-up in advance and use this as input source to a simplified configuration in performance. In 1975, Tudor created Toneburst, set to Merce Cunningham’s Sounddance, which used the same no-input principle without resorting to recorded sources. Shortly before his death, Tudor revived Toneburst for other musicians of the Cunningham company to perform, while expressing reservations for Untitled to be performed by others. Again, a mereological-ontological question ensues: is Toneburst a “version” of Untitled? Or is it yet another “part of a neverending series”? This paper presents a genealogical inquiry into the Untitled/Toneburst complex through detailed examination of extant sketches, instruments, and recordings. By decoding Tudor’s symbols, the components of Untitled and Toneburst have been fully identified. The analysis of recordings has further revealed 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. These revelations offer a key to articulate the idiosyncratic status of “work” in Tudor’s live-electronic music, and its connection to his distinct approach to composition and performance.

2021

A profitable work conducted by John Cage is greatly demonstrating how nowadays a thorough focus on what is defined as musical harmony intends both noises and sounds to be experimented and elaborated, specifically in two of his works titled 4' 33' and Water Walk: these are two pieces which struck a very strong impact on the innovations that were happening at the age. The involved scandalous approaches revealed something that was deeper and pedagogical intended and includes three main points of reference: a collaboration between composer, performer and audience, but also a mingling in one of these three roles. The research was meant to be led primarily on a recognition of the socio-cultural context which these novelties came from, secondly on an experimental study-case conducted and observed on different experiments performed by a specific study group, and thirdly on the resonance invested today on the legacy left by John Cage.

communication +1: Vol. 3, 2014

In David Tudor’s electronic music, home-brew modular devices were carefully connected together to form complex feedback networks wherein all components—including the composer/performer himself—could only partially ‘influence’ one another. Once activated, the very instability of mismatched connections between the components triggered a cascade of signals and signal modulations, so that the work “composed itself,” and took “a life of its own.” Due to this self-producing, perpetuating nature of his works, Tudor insisted on what he called “the view from inside,” focusing more on the internal observation of his devices and sound than in materials external to the immanence of performance. When Tudor passed away in 1996, it became apparent that the sheer lack of resources outside the work—scores, instructions, recordings, texts—had made many of his music impossible to perform in his absence. The works that took a life of their own could not survive their composer’s death partially because of his utter reliance on them to do their work. By connecting often mismatched resources obtained from extended research on Tudor, this paper presents modular observations that seem to offer certain perspectives on the issue of life and death surrounding Tudor’s music. A comparison with developments in systems theory, most notably autopoiesis, outlines a mechanism for the endless life of sounds that compose themselves. Moving out of this theoretical reflection, a fieldwork report of an ongoing attempt to ‘revive’ some of Tudor's works is offered. This report demonstrates the observer shifting from one ‘inside’ to another—from an electronic circuitry inside a particular device, to a network composed of several devices, and further into the activation of a composite instrument. Meandering away from the archives, the composer’s “view from inside” of his electronic devices is set side by side with recent insights of object oriented ontology. A certain portion of this observation then feeds itself back to the perspective of autopoiesis, while others proceed to extract a distinct notion of ‘life’ out of object-orientation, this time in programming: an indeterminate ‘waiting’ time inherent in each ‘object’ that cannot be computed within a singular universal time. This latency embedded in objects that await activation correlates to the trajectory of the observer who is always in a transit from one ‘inside’ to another, finding different objects on each level of observation, and for whom, therefore, the delineation between life and death is always indeterminate. This view provides further explanation to the operative mechanism of Tudor’s music, wherein mismatched components sought to activate and influence one another, constituting an ‘electronic ecology’ endowed with a life of its own, but filled with partial deaths. The paper thus observes ultimately a parallel between the composer’s trajectory within his performances and that within his life, while attempting to reenact the complex nature of these said trajectories through the meandering manner of its own delivery.

Architectural Theory Review, 2012

This paper is an attempt to construct a spatial acoustic theory on the manner of operations within John Cage’s 1963 musical composition titled Variations IV. In constructing such a theory I introduce Barry Blesser and Linda-Ruth Salter’s notion of aural architecture, reflect on a number of details and references in Cage’s score, and apply the visualisation methodology of semiotician A. J. Greimas. I also examine Cage’s realisation directives as a system of emergence, primarily through the work’s notation and its inherent spatial proclivities. In applying the semiotic square visualisation technique of Greimas I further derive the deep-level concepts of site, scale, landscape, and architecture, and discuss their relevance to the manner in which an emergent aural architecture is constructed by the work. A final diagram maps the listener experience of Variations IV as one predicated on the merging between interior and exterior acoustic spaces through the fluctuating interrelation between local and distant sound events and the architectural form.

Leonardo Music Journal, 2004

Actions | Remarks: John Cage's Variations and the expansion of the score, sonic materials, space, and the environment., 2024

This is an edited book of articles about the eight ‘Variations’ compositions by John Cage, reflecting the most productive years of his compositional life — from Variation I in 1958 to Variation VIII in 1976. They show the evolution of some of the earliest aleatoric, multimedia and spatial approaches to contemporary live music performance. This book brings together new and existing perspectives, experiences and backgrounds to these remarkable works, explored by leading International Cage scholars and practitioners. The writings are complemented with a CD recording of Decibel’s Complete John Cage Variations Project, an hour long performance program featuring the Variations I – VIII. The works are performed using annotated digital scores created within the ensemble, automating many of the manual processes that resulting in new, accurate versions that align with Cage’s artistic aims. Traditional acoustic instruments and period electronics are featured alongside photocells, Arduino boards, online messaging services and calls, noise bass guitar, shortwave radio and custom DIY circuitry. Rare composer notes and missing parts were sourced from the John Cage Trust, New York Public Library and Langlois Foundation. Published in conjunction with Cage’s publisher Peters Edition, the scores developed for the project are available via the Apple store. The book comes with a CD recording of the Complete Variations by Decibel new music ensemble

2001

The key word in the title of this article is "evolving." As we survey David Tudor's electronic music career, it is important to bear in mind that the specific instances that we call his "pieces" or "works" could just as well, and perhaps more correctly, be viewed as points in a continuum. Certainly this is the case for the works in his Rainforest series, which stretches for a decade over four "versions" and in which I include, as an experimental prelude, his 1966 Bandoneon!, and as a kind of postlude, Forest Speech (1976-1979). The most convincing arguments for approaching Tudor's work from this perspective are the recurring comments I have heard in interviews and discussions with his colleagues: that his performance practice was based on experimentation and constant change; that it was a rarity for a piece to be assembled in exactly the same way twice; and that Tudor's score diagrams, while giving some idea of the principles at work in his compositions, are definitely not to be mistaken for blueprints that might define an "authentic" performance setup. Observing the stream of the works' development as particles rather than as waves, we can clearly hear that the compositions that Tudor named-these points along a continuum-do have quite specific sonic identities. Moreover, the existence of Rainforest IV implies that there must be Rainforests I, II and III. But identifying these versions has not been a clear-cut process and has brought me to a more holistic perspective. As Tudor said in a 1988 interview, "My preference is to use modular materials which can change from piece to piece. And also it enables me to expand a piece by adding components to it which were not in the original formation" [1]. In my half of this article, I wish to look at the development of the small-scale versions of Rainforest between 1966 and 1972, prior to the 1973 workshop in New Hampshire that led to the creation of the large-scale group version, Rainforest IV. "Small-scale" refers to the scale of the loudspeaker objects; for versions I-III, this meant of a size that permitted packing in a suitcase for ease in touring. The first version of Rainforest was commissioned by the Merce Cunningham Dance Company (MCDC) in 1968 for an initial fee of $500 plus $25 per performance [2]. The piece has its origins, however, in Bandoneon!, the work Tudor created for the show 9 Evenings of Theatre and Engineering in October 1966. We could look even further back than this: Tudor's interest in the resonance of physical objects probably has its origins in the experience of performing such works as John Cage's Cartridge Music (1960), which depends on the basic idea of revealing the sonic characteristics of everyday objects. The work that Tudor identifies as his own first composition, Fluorescent Sound (1964), is a creative extension of the Cartridge Music principle: the amplification of small sounds.

2013

This thesis examines the ways in which John Cage negotiates the space between musical and literary compositions. It identifies and analyses the various tensions that a transposition between music and text engenders in Cage's work, from his turn to language in the verbal score for 4' 33'' (1952/1961), his use of performed and performative language in the literary text "Lecture on Nothing" (1949/1959), and his attempt to "musicate" language in the later text "Empty Words" . The thesis demonstrates the importance of the tensions that occur between music and literature in Cage's paradoxical attempts to make works of "silence," "nothing," and "empty words," and through an examination of these tensions, I argue that our experience of Cage's work is varied and manifold. Through close attention to several performances of Cage's workby both himself and others-I elucidate how he mines language for its sonic possibilities, pushing it to the edge of semantic meaning, and how he turns from systems of representation in language to systems of exemplification. By attending to the structures of expectation generated by both music and literature, and how these inform our interpretation of Cage's work, I argue for a new approach to Cage's work that draws on contemporary affect theory. Attending to the affective dynamics and affective engagements generated by Cage's work allows for an examination of the importance of pre-semiotic, pre-structural responses to his work and his performances. At the same time, this thesis demonstrates the importance of music and literature as frameworks for interpretation even and especially where Cage attempts to undermine these frameworks. The thesis, then, identifies the tension between pre-interpretative affective response and preconceived frameworks for understanding as part of a dynamic that drives the interplay between music and literature in Cage's work.