David Tudor 1926-1996

By Kyle Gann

September 3, 1996

Meticulous perfectionist and inscrutable recluse, David Tudor exercised more influence on the course of avant-garde music than any other performer. As Italian composer Sylvano Bussotti said of him, Tudor wasn't merely a pianist, but a musical instrument. John Cage, his closest associate in the '50s and '60s, tells incredible stories in his book Silence of Tudor's attention to detail, including about how Tudor separated out with tweezers and magnifying glass a box of spices that had become intermingled. That fanaticism made Tudor the perfect pianist for an era characterized by unprecedented notational freedom and ambiguity. Measuring out graphic notations with a millimeter ruler, observing the exact limits of massive tone clusters, he double-handedly made a new approach to the piano possible. Following his electric American premiere of Boulez's Second Sonata, he had dozens of pieces written for him by Cage, Feldman, Stockhausen, Christian Wolff, La Monte Young, and the other avant-gardists of the day.

Yet by 1970, Tudor's pianism was a legend of history, revivable only on rare recordings. He had moved into a new career (started in the late '50s) as one of the leading pioneers of live electronic music, coaxing twitters and chirrups out of homemade but complexly wired components. His magnum opus was a series of installations collected under the title Rainforest, whose jungles of suspended cast-off objects - lawn sprinklers, car windshields, and bicycle rims, all made to vibrate with transducers - brought the detritus of civilization to acoustic life. Tudor’s electronics, presented with a sense of mystery that made him shy away from technical explanation, chirped and whistled with the warmth of a swarm of insects or distant flock of birds. According to one of his closest protégés Linda Fisher, "his circuits themselves were the scores. He carried the homemade electronics aesthetic to a level of unrelenting purity."

Tudor died August 13, four years and a day after his friend Cage, following two years of successive strokes that gradually robbed him of speech, sight, and mobility. A memorial service will be held at 8:00 PM September 17 at Judson Memorial Church, 55 Washington Square South.

- Kyle Gann

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